Purple Dot, an e-commerce firm based in the United States, has raised $4 million in seed funding headed by Unusual Ventures. TechCrunch first broke the storey. The waitlist and pre-order platform, based in the United Kingdom, allows fashion designers to only make the exact volume of goods purchased, reducing waste. Connect Ventures, Moxxie Ventures, and the family office of Indeed co-founder Paul Forster are among the other investors in Purple Dot.

Madeline Parra and John Talbott started the company in 2019. According to the company, they are the only platform of its kind that allows businesses to sell inventory earlier in order to increase sales.

In a statement, Parra said that by selling early, brands open up a whole new opportunity to capture revenue. The traditional attitude and technologies imply that you must have inventory in the warehouse in order to sell it. However, because selling and shipping can be asynchronous, you can always be selling using Purple Dot. For their brand partners, this is the "A-ha" moment. You need a focused approach that gets the customer experience and internal tooling correct to get a sell-earlier strategy right.

Rachel Starr of Unusual Ventures said that Purple Dot is more than an e-commerce enabler. They are reinventing how supply chains are managed and how businesses sell, and they believe that pre-orders and waitlists will shape the future of online buying.

Fashion tech, according to CBInsights, is one of the fastest-growing divisions of the fashion industry. Platforms like Purple Dot are attractive to investors since sustainability is becoming a need in the fashion sector.