How a couple of former Pinterest search experts caught Biz Stone’s attention

Comment
Lance Riedel and Nigel Daley both spent decades in search discovery, but it was while working at Pinterest, to launch Pinterest Shopping, that they began to understand how search engines can do personalized searches for online shopping.
Most people expect online shopping to involve typing in a keyword then expecting a search engine, like Google, to do its magic and return a ranked result.
But the big magic they learned at Pinterest was how to use large language models and image identification AI to tailor results not just to the keyword, but to a person’s previous actions, Riedel told TechCrunch. 
The more a person interacts with this type of search engine, the more it learns their preferences, the better the shopping results. 
They left Pinterest and started Vantage Discovery in 2023 to offer this search engine to brands that don’t have the kind of resources or expertise to do LLM and other forms of AI themselves. 
For example, a shopper with a history of interacting with BoHo garments will get a vastly different result from a shopper with a history of interacting with streetwear when searching for something like, “a dress for a fun night out.” 
But Vantage takes it a step further with image recognition. A shopper can also use its search engine to ask “show me more like this” to surface related products. The search engine can tap into the person’s Pinterest profile as well to generate personalized shopping recommendations based on the items pinned on their board.
“In the kernel of our engine is a custom vector database, where we combine both the semantic understanding of the user query and the semantic understanding of the users personal style to retrieve the most personalized and targeted results in milliseconds across millions of items,” Riedel said. 
Like most commerce-oriented search engines, the ranking of the results can be controlled by Vantage’s customer, which is the merchant or brand. “We can also re-rank results based on a custom model tuned to optimize our customers’ business metrics.”
The startup launched in early 2024, and is working with customers, including Cooklist, Koodos, West.co and Bookopolis. Daley declined to discuss exact revenue, but did say the company was earning revenue and is also “working with one of the largest retailers in the world.” 
Vantage Discovery caught the eye of Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, who is part of the company’s recent $16 million Series A round. And is now a board member. This follows $4 million in unannounced seed funding that the company raised last year from Stone and Evan Sharp, co-founder of Pinterest.
“One of his other investments needed an intelligence platform that supported RAG, search and novel discovery features,” Riedel said. RAG is retrieval augmented generation, a natural language processing technique combining retrieval and generative AI models. “Biz was so impressed he invested in our seed round.”
The funding round was led by Lobby Capital and also includes participation from LoveFrom’s Jony Ive, who was Apple’s former chief design officer as well as Sharp, The Hive, Future Positive, and Common Metal. In addition to Stone, Lobby Capital’s David Hornik, who has invested in companies like Gitlab, Bill.com and Evite, is joining the Vantage Discovery board.
Meanwhile, Riedel and Daley said they are also interested in getting more deeply into so-called “merchandise tooling” which is the way online stores or search engines rank results. They want to add an AI touch to it.
“This is a space that has been around for a long time with merchandisers putting their thumb on the search scale and influencing it in certain ways,” Riedel said. “That’s important and needed by retailers, but we think we can remove some of the grunt work.” 
Every weekday and Sunday, you can get the best of TechCrunch’s coverage.
Startups are the core of TechCrunch, so get our best coverage delivered weekly.
The latest Fintech news and analysis, delivered every Tuesday.
TechCrunch Mobility is your destination for transportation news and insight.
By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice.
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week, we’re looking at LoanSnap’s woes, Nubank’s and Monzo’s positive milestones, a plethora of fintech fundraises and more! To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest…
Databricks, the analytics and AI giant, has acquired data management company Tabular for an undisclosed sum. According to Tabular co-founder Ryan Blue, he and Tabular’s other two co-founders, Daniel Weeks…
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved…
The next few weeks could be pivotal for Worldcoin, the controversial eyeball-scanning crypto venture co-founded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, whose operations remain almost entirely shuttered in the European Union following…
It’s unusual for three major AI providers to all be down at the same time, which could signal a broader infrastructure issues or internet-scale problem.
OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT has been down for several users across the globe for the last few hours.
True Fit, the AI-powered size-and-fit personalization tool, has offered its size recommendation solution to thousands of retailers for nearly 20 years. Now, the company is venturing into the generative AI…
Audio streaming service TuneIn is teaming up with Discord to bring free live radio to the platform. This is TuneIn’s first collaboration with a social platform and one that is…
The early victors in the AI gold rush are selling the picks and shovels needed to develop and apply artificial intelligence. Just take a look at data-labeling startup Scale AI…
Try to imagine the number of parts that go into making a rocket engine. Now imagine requesting and comparing quotes for each of those parts, getting approvals to purchase the…
Raspberry Pi has released a $70 AI extension kit with a neural network inference accelerator that can be used for local inferencing, for the Raspberry Pi 5.
When Stacklet’s founders, Travis Stanfield and Kapil Thangavelu, came out of Capital One in 2020 to launch their startup, most companies weren’t all that concerned with constraining cloud costs. But…
Fivetran’s Managed Data Lake Service aims to remove the repetitive work of managing data lakes.
Lance Riedel and Nigel Daley both spent decades in search discovery, but it was while working at Pinterest that they began trying to understand how to use search engines to…
GetWhy helps businesses carry out market studies and extract insights from video-based interviews using AI.
AI-powered virtual physical therapy platform Sword Health has seen its valuation soar 50% to $3 billion.
Jeffrey Katzenberg and Sujay Jaswa, along with three general partners, manage $1.5 billion in assets today through their Build, Venture and Seed strategies.
The startup targets the middle ground between platforms that offer rigid templates, and those that facilitate a full-control approach.
The startup has been pursuing a ground-up redesign of a well-understood technology.
Sékr, a startup that offers a mobile app for outdoor enthusiasts and campers, is launching a new AI tool for planning road trips. The new tool, called Copilot, is available…
Microsoft’s education-focused flavor of its cloud productivity suite, Microsoft 365 Education, is facing investigation in the European Union. Privacy rights non-profit noyb has just lodged two complaints with Austria’s data…
Since the shock of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, solar energy has been having a moment in Europe. Electricity prices have been going up while the investment required to get…
Featured Article
It’s clear that this year will be a turning point for DEI.
The keynote will be focused on Apple’s software offerings and the developers that power them, including the latest versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, visionOS and watchOS.
Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. Unfortunately, Boeing’s Starliner launch was delayed yet again, this time due to issues with one of the three redundant computers used by United…
The court ruling said that Fearless Fund’s Strivers Grant likely violates the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which bans the use of race in contracts.
Instagram Threads is rolling out the ability for users to signal which sort of posts they wanted to see more or less of by swiping.
The Japanese billionaire who commissioned SpaceX for a private mission around the moon on a Starship rocket has abruptly canceled the project, citing ongoing uncertainties around when the launch vehicle…
Malicious actors are abusing generative AI music tools to create homophobic, racist, and propagandic songs — and publishing guides instructing others how to do so. According to ActiveFence, a service…
As WWDC 2024 nears, all sorts of rumors and leaks have emerged about what iOS 18 and its AI-powered apps and features have in store.
Powered by WordPress VIP

source
Sponsor:News technical sponsor
Sponsor:News AI sponsor
Sponsor: AI sponsor
Sponsor: AI sponsor