Vantage Discovery raises $16M to bring AI-powered product discovery to commerce

Online shoppers know what they want and what they like – but that doesn’t mean they can easily find it. Brands and retailers miss out on millions in revenue when their customers are unable to discover their products in a seamless, organic way despite paying far too much in SEO to acquire those customers. The good news is AI can transform the online shopping experience in ways we never expected to ensure every consumer is understood and every dollar is captured.

Large Language Models (LLMs) give us the ability to take a highly specific customer query and surface up precisely what they’re looking for. Taking it one step further, image recognition makes it possible to find similarities in products and deliver related products to the consumer. 

As exciting as these advancements are, most ecommerce brands and retailers don’t have the AI resources to build these capabilities into their sites – nor would they even want to, given the time and complexity involved. 

In addition, most existing search platforms are spending their resources bolting on AI to their legacy APIs, diminishing the overall experience for everyone: users get an underwhelming and less relevant experience, developers get less flexible and more complex APIs, and companies see their costs increase by 2-4x as new search requests have to be sent to both legacy and AI endpoints to create hybrid search. 

For example, one of the retailers we’re working with came to us because they could not find a suitable partner to execute their AI vision. They were looking to increase their Average Order Value (AOV) and conversion by creating serendipitous discovery and personalization experiences. They evaluated all the major search vendors and because each one had implemented AI on top of their traditional keyword-based indices, they were relegated to legacy and deterministic discovery and personalization such as “if you like product A, you will like product B.”

Enter Vantage Discovery. We bring AI-powered search, discovery and personalization to ecommerce and retail businesses in a way that allows them to create distinctive customer experiences leveraging the data they already have at their disposal.

Vantage APIs are extremely fast, massively scalable, and incredibly easy to use. We take care of the messy bits: vector embedding, similarity search, filtering, retrieval-augmented generation, and all the operational work to make the deployment experience incredibly easy so our ecommerce brand and retail customers can go from sign up to production in just 15 minutes. 

Beyond basic keyword and semantic search, brands and retailers can bring the brick and mortar shopping experience online, where shoppers can search for and find something based on how they think and talk, like “what to get my mom for mothers day” or “a shirt for a fun night out.” 

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They can even take the shopping experience one step further by allowing customers to “shop the look” in a specific photo, receive personalized recommendations informed by past searches and similar products, and even connect to their Pinterest or Instagram account and shop items that are complementary to what they have pinned or posted. 

I built and launched Pinterest Shopping, a product that dramatically changed the nature of the platform and is today used by over 400 million Pinterest users, generating over $2B in revenue. Our goal is to bring the same cutting-edge AI innovation and personalization to all retail and ecommerce shops and enable them to increase the lifetime value (LTV) and reduce the cost of acquisition (CAC) of their users and deliver magical shopping experiences that are not possible with keyword and semantic search alone.

Since launching earlier this year, we are already working with a number of the largest global retailers (that we cannot name) and with several companies such as Cooklist, Koodos, West.co, and Bookopolis to improve their LTV and decrease their CAC through superior search and discovery experience. We are excited to expand our partnership with other forward thinking brands and retailers, especially those struggling with messy product catalogs, to improve their customer experience and boost sales. 

To support this vision, we’ve raised $16M in Series A funding led by Lobby Capital with participation from The Hive, Future Positive, Common Metal, as well as Jony Ive, Evan Sharp, and Biz Stone. This follows $4M in unannounced seed funding that we raised last year from the co-founders of Twitter and Pinterest. As part of the news, Biz Stone (co-founder of Twitter) and David Hornik (founding partner at Lobby Capital) are joining our board. 

We're a show - not tell company so if you’re interested in learning more about what we’re building or want to better understand how Vantage Discovery can work for your company, you can: 

• View our demo ecommerce store - here you can try our features including semantic search, Vantage Vibe™, Smart Shopper™
• Talk to an engineer to learn more about how we can help you
• Reach out at hello@vantagediscovery.com with any questions. We’d love to connect!