Encore is an AI-powered search engine on your thrifting wants | TechCrunch

Former Apple engineer Alex Ruber and former Twitter and Asana engineer Parth Chopra first met on Y Combinator’s founder match platform, then met in particular person at a thrift retailer for buying. They later went on a thrift retailer buying journey the place they talked about fixing issues with discovering the precise product within the on-line house.

Many shoppers battle to seek out the precise merchandise with out spending hours on Instagram. To handle this, the duo is constructing the search engine Encore, which lets customers search for secondhand objects from completely different sources. The startup is at the moment a part of Y Combinator’s first-ever fall batch.

“The complete secondhand buying market is actually fragmented. There are tons of of assets on the market, corresponding to Depop, Mercari, ThredUp, eBay, Craigslist, and extra. It’s onerous for shoppers to sift by means of all of them to attempt to get to the product you might be in search of. So we wished to take away that friction for customers,” Ruber mentioned on a name with TechCrunch.

Each Ruber and Chopra are immigrants, he mentioned, and so they’ve been used to spending money and time at thrift shops.

However thrifting isn’t simple. When Ruber tried to discover a particular jacket from a TV present (Carmy’s patchwork jacket from “The Bear”), he began enthusiastic about constructing a product to assist him with that. He additionally wished to search for a co-founder working within the round economic system house. He famous that Chopra was an excellent match as a result of he was into style and thrifting.

“For me, there was additionally private curiosity as a result of my mother used to take me to flea markets each Sunday. I purchased numerous stuff from these locations, together with a piano, after I began to study the instrument. The core concept behind each flea markets and Encore is about discovering a hidden gem,” the previous Apple engineer famous.

Encore’s AI-powered search

On Encore, you’ll be able to kind your question and get matches from a number of assets, together with Poshmark, the RealReal, Grailed, Etsy, and eBay. As a result of Encore makes use of a big language mannequin tech, you’ll be able to kind a question like “Present me a gown that Emily wore in ‘Emily in Paris’ Season 3 Episode 4.”

The search engine additionally exhibits partial prompts corresponding to “Outfit inspo for” and “Store from the Present.” Whenever you faucet on them, you’ll be able to full the immediate by means of auto-populated ideas or your individual phrases. Primarily that is to indicate customers the completely different sorts of search phrases they will use and keep away from a clean web page when customers don’t but perceive the search engine’s capabilities.

Ruber famous that sentence size can fluctuate, generally by so much. Some folks simply key in a easy sentence like “Present me denims” whereas others write an in depth description like “I’m a 6’2″ one that skies and in search of skier pants below $100 with no huge logos on them.”

The secondhand retail market is on an upward development curve, with analysts projecting it to achieve $73 billion within the U.S. and $350 billion globally by 2028. A report by online thrift store ThredUp notes that on-line secondhand resale would account for half of the secondhand market in 2025.

Encore processes over 50,000 searches monthly and is seeing 26% month-on-month development for searches and 15% development in clicks.

The startup at the moment depends on affiliate shares for income technology. Nevertheless, the corporate can be experimenting with a $3 monthly subscription offering limitless searches with superior fashions, discovering objects by importing pictures, and providing help by way of e mail and chat.