Encore is an AI-powered search engine for your thrifting needs
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 person
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 person at a thrift store for shopping. They later went on a thrift store shopping trip where they talked about solving problems with finding the right product in the online space.
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Many consumers struggle to find the right item without spending hours on Instagram. To address this, the duo is building the search engine Encore, which lets users search for secondhand items from different sources. The startup is currently part of Y Combinator’s first-ever fall batch.
“The entire secondhand shopping market is really fragmented. There are hundreds of resources out there, such as Depop, Mercari, ThredUp, eBay, Craigslist, and more. It’s hard for consumers to sift through them all to try and get to the product you are looking for. So we wanted to remove that friction for users,” Ruber said on a call with TechCrunch.
Both Ruber and Chopra are immigrants, he said, and they’ve been used to spending time and money at thrift stores.
But thrifting isn’t easy. When Ruber tried to find a specific jacket from a TV show (Carmy’s patchwork jacket from “The Bear”), he started thinking about building a product to help him with that. He also wanted to look for a co-founder working in the circular economy space. He noted that Chopra was a great match because he was into fashion and thrifting.
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