We all know how much Silicon Valley has changed technology forever with its multiple success stories over the years. You're still seeing major tech startups emerge there, and we still have Silicon Valley graduates at Founder Institute.
One of our recent top companies is Lily, a Graduate of the Silicon Valley Founder Institute. It's an app helping to personalize the way women shop for fashion. This app took technology a step forward thanks to the app's ability to recognize buyer emotions.
Not long ago, the company managed to raise $2 million in funding from NEA and other investors to help further develop their unique technology.
Co-founded by Purva Gupta from India, Lily now has a golden path ahead to become a leader in changing how women do fashion shopping.
How Does Lily Work?
When you visit the Lily website, you see a warm welcome to "Meet Lily", giving you a hint this isn't any ordinary app. It gives you a direct look at how the app creates a more personalized way to find clothes fitting your personal style.
The goal is to help you find clothes from favorite stores while discovering things to make you look the best. Basically, it compiles all your favorite clothing stores in one place so you can find them in seconds.
One of the standout features is being able to give you free and instant virtual styling like you've never seen before. Plus, they have an instant checkout process for multiple stores. Return policies are also kept the same to avoid having to adhere to different rules in multiple stores.
It's in the technology, though, where Lily really shines, bringing machine learning to a new plateau.
Recognizing a Woman's Buying Decisions
Forbes notes co-founder Sowmiya Chocka Narayanan interviewed women for two years to help understand their shopping habits before developing the app's algorithms. All this information finally integrated into something nobody else had attempted.
Purva Gupta describes their technology as a "Perception and Empathy" engine, giving a further unique spin on how their app works. As Forbes notes:
This decodes a woman's emotional and perceptive needs to accentuate and de-emphasize certain parts of the body. It uses machine learning to match emotions, preferences, and perceptions about her body to clothes from her favorite stores - in real time from both online and offline stores.
Background on Purva Gupta
Purva has become better known this year thanks to her doing various interviews describing what Lily does. She's also been profiled on sites like Wired, describing her origins in India and how she went through six separate visas to help achieve her entrepreneurial vision.
Her knowledge on understanding emotional connections with customers came from working at Saatchi & Saatchi in India. Eventually, this led her to NYC, intending to build a startup. She also interviewed women in the city about how they felt buying fashions offline or online.
Ultimately, Purva found out women shop based strictly on personal feelings. Starting Lily helped understand a woman's shopping point of view better than anything else in the app industry.
The Future of Lily
The investment money Lily received recently is far from the only good thing happening to the company. They also won the SXSW Accelerator Pitch Event earlier this year, giving them another push forward. Venture Beat noted at the time that Lily is one of the greatest shopping apps out there today.
As Purva notes herself in the above VB interview:
Lily is built by women, for empowering women to be the best version of themselves.
With this much smart customer targeting, you can expect Lily to soar in popularity during 2018. We'll likely see a rise in similar apps where technology possibly knows us more than we know ourselves.
