Lily AI

Four years back, Purva Gupta, Co-founder & CEO, experienced New York City and fashion in a way she’d never experienced before in India. She became conscious of how broken the shopping experience was. It was unintelligent for sure, but it also lacked empathy. Just because she couldn't find anything in the store, she left the store thinking that there might be something wrong with her body or preferences.

The Lily team launched the emotionally intelligent AI powered experience though a consumer app at SXSW, where they also won as the best startup in social & culture category. Within a few months they saw a strong validation of the hypothesis and inbounds from largest brands & retailers for an enterprise solution. Thats when they decided to expand their vision to not just aim to become a standard in retail, but to help the industry upgrade itself to truly understand every consumer they serve.

Emotions explain the ‘why’ behind consumer buying decisions, unlocking wallet share. Retail has saturated behavioral and demographic data (i.e., what, where, when) but those that understand the emotional data (why) stand to win in a customer-first market. Starting with apparel, Lily AI decodes consumers’ emotions and self-perceptions (extracted from consumer clickstream using emotional intelligence technology) and identifies thousands of product features (extracted using industry-leading deep learning and image recognition technology) to match individual consumers with the right products instantly. The outcome is a significant increase in e-commerce conversion rate, CTR and keep rate. Simply put, we’re trying to understand psychographic data about every consumer to re-create their mental model, so that shopping experiences can be truly delightful & relevant to each consumer. Today, Lily AI is working with the largest brands & retailers. They recently raised $12.5 million in series A funding from Canaan Partners, NEA and Fernbrook Capital.