Persi is a fashion-tech company redefining how people shop online. At its heart is founder and CEO Olivia Parkes, whose journey from brand marketing strategist to tech entrepreneur was driven by a single insight: personalisation in fashion e-commerce is broken. Persi’s technology helps retailers understand shoppers as individuals, not data points. The platform builds a digital wardrobe for each user, integrating seamlessly with retail partners to recommend complete looks based on what a customer already owns, loves, and needs.
Olivia joined the Techscaler Catalyst programme, delivered by CodeBase, to transform Persi from an ambitious concept into an investable, scalable company. Through structured mentorship, founder-led sessions, and practical investor readiness support, she gained the clarity, confidence, and community to refine Persi’s proposition and secure significant early-stage investment.
This is a story of human-centred innovation, of how a founder turned lived experience and creative insight into a scalable technology that’s making shopping more personal, more convenient, and more conscious.
Olivia Parkes spent more than a decade building global fashion and cosmetics brands before founding Persi. Her first startup faced tough realities: a co-founder split, funding challenges, and the painful process of closing one business to start another. But those lessons became the blueprint for Persi.
Drawing on her background in brand strategy and retail marketing, Olivia identified a gap in how fashion e-commerce treated customers: online personalisation had become mechanical, driven by biased algorithms and sales agendas rather than individual taste. Shoppers didn’t feel seen. Persi began as a simple question: why can’t online shopping reflect what’s already in your wardrobe?
That question evolved into a B2B2C technology that gives retailers the ability to recommend smarter, more relevant products, reducing returns and increasing satisfaction. With AI-powered insight and stylist-level nuance, Persi puts personal expression back at the centre of fashion commerce.
Before joining Techscaler, Persi faced the challenges familiar to many early-stage founders: a powerful idea without the right structure or support. Olivia had validated demand through a manual MVP, styling customers herself late into the night to prove the model worked.
But fundraising felt distant, and translating vision into technical execution required trusted expertise and a clear roadmap. She knew Persi had commercial potential. She just needed the environment, network, and accountability to make it real. Techscaler offered the platform to evolve from concept to company and from resilience to readiness.
Olivia joined Techscaler seeking clarity on how to build a scalable, investable product. What she found was a structure that balanced accountability with encouragement. The cohort format created momentum, pushing her to test assumptions, refine her go-to-market plan, and stress-test investor materials in real time.
The mentorship of Techscaler mentor Julie Grieve became pivotal, offering both challenge and compassion through moments of doubt and strategic transition. Olivia credits those sessions with shifting her mindset from survival to structured growth, giving her the confidence to rebuild Persi after an earlier venture closed and to design the business with stronger foundations.
Through Techscaler’s founder-led workshops, one-to-one mentorship, and access to expert advisors, Olivia gained a playbook for turning creative vision into commercial traction.
The programme helped her refine Persi’s pitch, financial model, and technical development plan, critical pieces for securing investor confidence. The peer community offered validation, empathy, and accountability: other founders who understood the emotional and practical challenges of building in tech.
Sessions with mentors like Julie Grieve reframed obstacles as opportunities, focusing Olivia on what could be achieved next rather than what had gone wrong before.
The experience shaped Persi’s direction and recalibrated Olivia’s ambition, showing her that Scotland’s ecosystem could fuel globally competitive companies.
Since completing Techscaler Catalyst, Persi has entered a phase of tangible traction and founder-led growth. In May 2025, Olivia raised £660k in pre-seed funding, led by Haatch VC and ESM Investments, with participation from eight female angel investors.
Olivia’s raise wasn’t powered by investor introductions or expensive pitch events. She used LinkedIn strategically, posting transparent updates, sharing her challenges, and building genuine connections. When she announced she’d ringfenced £50k for female angels, she filled her pipeline within a day, held ten investor calls in 24 hours, and secured £176k in pledges for a £50k target. Ultimately, £440k of her £660k round came directly from her LinkedIn network, proof that authentic storytelling can drive real investment traction.
With funding secured, Persi launched a six-month pilot programme with retail partners and deepened its AI research partnership with the University of Stirling. Persi’s mission remains clear: to make online shopping more personal.
For Olivia Parkes, Techscaler Catalyst was an accelerator as well as a catalyst for belief. The programme combined mentorship, structure, and community in a way that matched the realities of early-stage building. It gave her the tools to fundraise with confidence, the network to stay accountable, and the clarity to scale Persi with purpose.
Her story shows what happens when creative founders gain access to structured, founder-first support and why Scotland’s tech ecosystem continues to spark companies that think globally from day one. Connect with Olivia Parkes and follow Persi on LinkedIn.
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