Why We Invested in eComID
Online fashion has a returns problem, and the returns problem is a context problem.
Between 25 and 40% of everything ordered online in fashion goes back, against 5 to 10% in physical stores. Roughly 70% of those returns happen because the size or fit was wrong. Shoppers are responding rationally to a system that gives them nothing better to go on: they guess, they bracket (35 to 40% of online shoppers deliberately order multiple sizes with the intention of returning most of them), and they send back what doesn’t work. Brands absorb the direct cost, somewhere between USD 21 and 46 per returned item once logistics, inspection and restocking are counted. The environment absorbs the rest.
The industry has spent a decade treating the symptom rather than the cause.
Returns management software, reverse logistics, resale channels: all of it operates after the wrong purchase has already been made, and returns have kept climbing throughout. The cause sits further upstream. Commerce is not really limited by technology any more, it is limited by shopper context. Every brand holds a fragment of the picture, locked in its own silo, so nobody actually knows the shopper: not their measurements, not the fit they prefer, not what already hangs in their wardrobe. The result is a system that compensates for bad purchases instead of preventing them, and that bakes overproduction, waste and emissions into its structure.
eComID fixes the mismatch before the purchase is made.
The Stockholm-based company is building the shopper identity and context layer for fashion e-commerce: a single integration that lets a brand recognise a shopper, understand their size, fit and preferences, and personalise the experience from the first click. The Size Finder recommends the right size for each individual; the Nudge module shows shoppers the financial and environmental cost of a likely return at the moment of decision; and the Digital Shopper Passport lets a consenting shopper carry their profile across participating brands without those brands ever sharing data with one another. The results point in one direction: shoppers who use the Size Finder return size-related purchases around 30% less often, and convert at roughly twice the rate of those who don’t.
We think of eComID as horizontal infrastructure, in the way Plaid became infrastructure for fintech or Stripe for payments.
An identity and context layer becomes more valuable, and harder to displace, with every brand and every shopper that joins. And the timing matters. As commerce shifts towards AI-native and agentic interfaces, shopping will increasingly happen outside brand-owned channels, and whoever holds validated shopper context will sit at the centre of it. We would much rather that layer be built in Europe, privacy-first and shopper-consented, by a company whose commercial incentives point towards fewer wasted purchases rather than more.
Oscar Rundqvist saw the problem from the inside.
Oscar led global digital customer experience at H&M, where the insight behind eComID became unavoidable to him, and he has been building companies since he was fifteen. The team he has assembled is the part of this story that convinced us most. Every team member joined through referral, every one owns part of the company, and the founding group, spanning AI, engineering, operations, finance and design, is drawn from exactly the part of the industry it is trying to fix.
The traction backs the thesis.
eComID has grown very rapidly since launching and works with more than 60 fashion brands, has yet to lose a single one, and its platform now reaches 20 million shoppers every month. Some of the most sustainability-credible brands in Europe, from Houdini to Asket to Nudie Jeans, have chosen the platform precisely because high return rates are antithetical to what they stand for.
Our Investment Thesis at Systemiq Capital
eComID sits squarely in our Applied AI thesis.
Software transformed how people shop, but it did far less to change what commerce physically does: the garments produced, warehoused, shipped, returned and too often destroyed. Our Applied AI thesis backs founders using AI to transform the physical industries software never reached, and one of the themes we are explicit about is cutting waste across supply chains and e-commerce. eComID attacks that waste at its root, and it does so by generating data and visibility that did not exist before: a structured, shopper-consented picture of size, fit and preference that no single brand could assemble alone. AI cannot personalise without context, and as intelligence commoditises, the durable value accrues to whoever holds that context. The last pattern we look for holds here too. The companies that win in the physical world do not ship a tool; they build the layer an industry runs on. An identity and context layer for commerce is exactly that.
We led eComID’s $17m seed round, alongside Regeneration.VC, Course Corrected, Stadium and returning investor CapitalT, with angels including Henrik Nordvall, former chief executive of Matalan, and Maria Raga, former chief executive of Depop.
We are backing Oscar and the team’s vision to make shopping finally work as it should, for shoppers, for brands and for the system as a whole.
We could not be more excited to partner with them as they build the identity layer for commerce.