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.
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.
“For me, there was also personal interest because my mom used to take me to flea markets every Sunday. I bought a lot of stuff from those places, including a piano, when I started to learn the instrument. The core idea behind both flea markets and Encore is about finding a hidden gem,” the former Apple engineer noted.
Encore’s AI-powered search
On Encore, you can type your query and get matches from multiple resources, including Poshmark, the RealReal, Grailed, Etsy, and eBay. Because Encore uses a large language model tech, you can type a query like “Show me a dress that Emily wore in ‘Emily in Paris’ Season 3 Episode 4.”
The search engine also shows partial prompts such as “Outfit inspo for” and “Shop from the Show.” When you tap on them, you can complete the prompt through auto-populated suggestions or your own words. Mainly this is to show users the different kinds of search terms they can use and avoid a blank page when users don’t yet understand the search engine’s capabilities.
Ruber noted that sentence length can vary, sometimes by a lot. Some people just key in a simple sentence like “Show me jeans” while others write a detailed description like “I am a 6’2″ person who skies and looking for skier pants under $100 with no big logos on them.”
The secondhand retail market is on an upward growth curve, with analysts projecting it to reach $73 billion in the U.S. and $350 billion globally by 2028. A report by online thrift store ThredUp notes that online secondhand resale would account for half of the secondhand market in 2025.
Encore processes over 50,000 searches per month and is seeing 26% month-on-month growth for searches and 15% growth in clicks.
The startup currently relies on affiliate shares for revenue generation. However, the company is also experimenting with a $3 per month subscription providing unlimited searches with advanced models, finding items by uploading images, and offering support via email and chat.