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 individual 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 appropriate product within the on-line house.

Many customers battle to seek out the appropriate merchandise with out spending hours on Instagram. To deal with 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.

“Your entire secondhand buying market is de facto fragmented. There are a whole lot of sources on the market, equivalent to Depop, Mercari, ThredUp, eBay, Craigslist, and extra. It’s arduous for customers to sift via all of them to try to get to the product you might be searching for. 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 straightforward. When Ruber tried to discover a particular jacket from a TV present (Carmy’s patchwork jacket from “The Bear”), he began occupied with constructing a product to assist him with that. He additionally wished to search for a co-founder working within the round financial system house. He famous that Chopra was an ideal match as a result of he was into trend 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 a variety of stuff from these locations, together with a piano, after I began to study the instrument. The core thought 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 possibly can sort your question and get matches from a number of sources, together with Poshmark, the RealReal, Grailed, Etsy, and eBay. As a result of Encore makes use of a big language mannequin tech, you possibly can sort 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 equivalent to “Outfit inspo for” and “Store from the Present.” While you faucet on them, you possibly can full the immediate via auto-populated options or your individual phrases. Primarily that is to indicate customers the completely different sorts of search phrases they’ll 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 loads. 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 who skies and searching for skier pants underneath $100 with no massive logos on them.”

The secondhand retail market is on an upward progress 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 per 30 days and is seeing 26% month-on-month progress for searches and 15% progress in clicks.

The startup at the moment depends on affiliate shares for income era. Nevertheless, the corporate can also be experimenting with a $3 per 30 days subscription offering limitless searches with superior fashions, discovering objects by importing photos, and providing assist by way of e-mail and chat.