M.M.LaFleur is a New York-based direct-to-consumer womenswear brand that coined the term 'Power Casual' and built its business around solving a single problem: getting ambitious women dressed for work without wasting their time. Founded in 2013 by Sarah LaFleur, designer Miyako Nakamura, and Narie Foster, the company pairs thoughtfully engineered professional clothing with a free personal-styling service called Bento that curates a box of pieces around each customer. After a near-collapse during the pandemic, the company was rescued by a syndicate of women investors and refocused on the wardrobe needs of a hybrid working world.
Archive is the technology platform behind brand-owned resale. It builds and operates customized secondhand storefronts for fashion and lifestyle brands - including The North Face, New Balance, Oscar de la Renta and Dr. Martens - so they can keep products in circulation, capture a new revenue stream, and meet customers who increasingly refuse to buy new.
Lily AI is a Mountain View-based retail AI company that translates the language of the customer into the language of the catalog. Its platform uses computer vision, NLP and large language models to enrich product data with thousands of consumer-centric attributes - powering site search, recommendations, SEO/SEM and demand forecasting for retailers like Macy's, Bloomingdale's, Gap and thredUP.
Emily Gittins is the Co-founder and CEO of Archive, a B2B SaaS platform that powers branded resale programs for 50+ global fashion companies including The North Face, New Balance, and Oscar de la Renta. A Cambridge mathematics graduate turned Stanford MBA, Gittins built Archive after stints at BCG, Google X, and the Global Fashion Agenda, channeling her technical background and sustainability conviction into a company that has raised $76.9M - including a $30M Series B in February 2025 - and been named one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies of 2024.
Sid Gupta is the Co-Founder and CEO of Quince, a San Francisco-based manufacturer-to-consumer (M2C) brand that sells luxury-quality cashmere, silk, and home goods at a fraction of traditional retail prices. Founded in 2018 alongside his wife Zunu Mittal and CTO Sourabh Mahajan, Quince reached a $10.1 billion valuation in March 2026 after raising a $500M Series E led by Iconiq Capital. Before Quince, Gupta built Lolli & Pops, a specialty candy retail chain, from 11 struggling locations to nearly 100 stores across 28 states. A University of Chicago economics graduate and Stanford MBA, he has spent his career dissecting pricing inefficiencies in consumer retail - and building businesses to exploit them.
Wendy Yu is the CEO of Cuyana, the San Francisco-based sustainable fashion brand built on the philosophy of 'fewer, better things.' A data-and-analytics-trained operator with a BS from MIT and an MBA from the University of Michigan, she worked her way through gaming, consulting, and digital marketing before joining Cuyana as Chief Digital Officer in 2018. When founder Karla Gallardo stepped down in 2025 after 14 years, Yu stepped into the CEO role - bringing her decade-plus of growth marketing and digital operations experience to the helm of a brand that has generated nearly half a billion dollars in lifetime DTC sales.
Daydream is a conversational, AI-powered fashion shopping platform founded by Julie Bornstein. It lets people search for clothing with natural language and images across roughly two million products from 8,000+ brands, then sends them to the retailer to check out.
Anya Cheng is the Founder & CEO of Taelor, an AI-powered men's clothing rental and styling subscription service that raised $5M+ and ranked #1 in U.S. menswear rentals by GQ. A Taiwanese-American first-generation immigrant who spent 15+ years at Target, McDonald's, eBay, and Meta (where she helped launch Facebook Shopping), she pivoted to entrepreneurship to solve a problem she saw everywhere: busy professional men who needed to look sharp but hated shopping. Taelor combines AI trend forecasting with human stylists to deliver curated wardrobes to subscribers, tackling fashion's 30% waste problem along the way. Cheng also teaches at Northwestern's Medill School and mentors at 500 Startups.
Sherwin Xia is the co-founder and CEO of Trendsi, a San Francisco-based e-commerce supply chain infrastructure company that raised $30M total including a $25M Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Before Trendsi, he was one of the first employees at Lime and an analyst at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). A Stanford postgraduate, Xia co-founded Trendsi in late 2020 after spotting an opportunity to bring Asian S2B2C supply chain models to Western markets, targeting a demographic of small boutique sellers and stay-at-home moms building online fashion businesses. Trendsi's platform automates inventory forecasting, dropshipping, and custom branding for thousands of independent sellers.
Kenneth Chan is a serial internet entrepreneur and the Founder and CEO of Tobi, a women's fast-fashion e-commerce brand based in South San Francisco. Chan built Tobi from the ground up as a vertically integrated fashion-tech company capable of taking a garment from sketch to delivery in under eight weeks. With roots in the dot-com era — having co-founded Everyone.net (a top-50 website with 25M+ users) and scaled Connexus/Netblue to a $100M internet marketing firm — Chan brought Silicon Valley engineering discipline to the traditionally analog fashion industry. Tobi serves customers across 100+ countries with trendy women's apparel, leveraging proprietary e-commerce infrastructure and data-driven trend forecasting. Chan was named an Apparel Magazine 2019 Top Innovator for his work reimagining mobile commerce at Tobi.
Julie Bornstein is the founder and CEO of Daydream, an AI-powered shopping search engine that raised $50M in seed funding in 2024 and publicly launched in 2025. A serial entrepreneur and e-commerce pioneer, she grew Nordstrom.com from $10M to $350M in sales, transformed Sephora's digital business and launched Beauty Insider, scaled Stitch Fix to $1B as COO, and sold her AI fashion startup The Yes to Pinterest in 2022. With a Harvard BA and HBS MBA, Bornstein has spent 25+ years at the intersection of retail, technology, and artificial intelligence.