Anna Franziska Michel

Anna Franziska Michel is a tech ambassador and founder of yoona.ai. She is known for being one of the prominent voices advocating technology in the fashion industry and connecting digitalization with sustainability and better work life balance. Anna was selected as one of the top female Business Influencers in Technology by Strive Magazine and she was awarded with the Digital Female Leader Award in the Innovation category.

She started as a fashion designer and through learning to code she came to deep technology and using neural networks for the design field. Her goal as founder of yoona.ai is to revolutionize the fashion industry. As one of the few startups, yoona.ai was among the 1% applicants in which Techstars Accelerator invested. Anna believes that you can’t just optimize processes with technology, you also need to change the mindset.

Anna Franziska Michel states in her LinkedIn Profile:

• From Designer to Transformation Expert
My wake-up call came after struggling in the fashion industry for over ten years: During this time, I realized that my work as a designer was very inefficient and that designs often overlook the consumer. This leads to an oversupply that ends up in the garbage – which is neither economically good for companies, nor healthy for the environment. The waste of time, money and resources annoyed me beyond measure. I wanted to find a different – a “greener” – solution, and after extensive research into the impact of neural networks on the fashion industry, I came up with the idea of our B2B SaaS venture yoona.ai.

• Designing the future of fashion
Today, yoona.ai is the new global market leader for the digitalization of design processes. We help companies save up to 80% of time in their design and collection development phase. They can design closer to trends and customers, therefore reducing costs and avoiding throwaway products or overproduction. The latest technologies, such as neural networks and augmented reality, have been integrated into this design software. Users can create their design, convert it into 3D images and project it with augmented reality. yoona.ai finally manages to combine the economic and sustainability goals of the fashion industry.