fashion-tech
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Sandra Lifshits Is Teaching AI to Hunt for Vintage
After weekends in vintage markets and shifts inside New York shops, the product leader saw the real problem: secondhand shopping had plenty of inventory and precious little editing.
Ella Zhang Built the Back Room - Then Went Looking for the Next Frontier
From Tencent’s founding e-commerce team to a garage-born fashion platform, Zhang learned to prize the infrastructure nobody sees. Now she is carrying that operator’s instinct back into venture investing at YZi Labs.
Davide Mattucci
Davide Mattucci is the Chief Marketing Officer of BYLT Basics, the Irvine, California premium essentials label known for its structured tees and loyalty-driven direct-to-consumer model. He has spent more than 20 years across global apparel brands - prAna, Brixton, adidas, Under Armour and Fanatics - moving fluidly from design and product creation into brand marketing and digital commerce. At BYLT he is helping steer the company's shift from an online seller of product into a full lifestyle brand with physical stores, bringing a 360-degree view of how product, storytelling and marketplace strategy connect with real customers.
Taylor Capuano
Taylor Capuano is the co-founder and chief creative officer of CAKES body, a viral direct-to-consumer apparel brand she launched in 2022 with her twin sister, Casey Sarai. Starting with $5,000 each in personal savings and no marketing budget, the sisters bootstrapped the company from a side hustle into a business that reported roughly $95 million in net sales in its fiscal year ending June 2025. A December 2023 appearance on ABC's Shark Tank, where they landed a deal with Emma Grede, accelerated the brand's rise. Capuano leads creative and marketing, and has become a public voice for bootstrapped, digital-first growth and family-friendly workplace policies.
Michaela Wessels
Michaela Wessels is the CEO and co-founder of Style Arcade, a Sydney-born retail analytics platform that has become the intelligence layer behind fashion brands including The Iconic, Princess Polly, White Fox, Aje, Christopher Esber and Dion Lee. A former merchandise planner at Truworths, Lacoste and The Iconic, she built the product she had wanted while buried under Excel; the company raised an $8M Series A led by Acadian Software in late 2022 and has since expanded to New York and London.
Olga Dogadkina
Olga Dogadkina is the co-founder and CEO of Emperia, a London-based immersive commerce platform that builds virtual stores and 3D brand experiences for the world's biggest luxury and retail names, including Dior, Burberry, Bloomingdale's, Tommy Hilfiger, Harrods, Lacoste, Christie's and Dom Pérignon. Named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Retail & Ecommerce list in 2025, she started Emperia in 2018 after trying VR for the first time on a Microsoft fashion project and deciding it would change the way people shop.
Rohan Deuskar
Rohan Deuskar is the co-founder and CEO of Stylitics, a New York-based visual merchandising and outfitting platform that dresses catalogs for retailers like Macy's, Walmart, Kohl's, Puma and Revolve. Launched in 2011 out of Wharton, Stylitics started as a consumer closet app, pivoted to B2B AI-powered outfit bundling, and raised roughly $105 million in total funding, with an $80 million Series C from PSG in 2022.
Dorian Dargan
Dorian Dargan is the co-founder and CEO of Doji, an AI fashion app that turns selfies into a photorealistic digital likeness so people can try on real clothes from across the web and actually have fun doing it. An MIT-trained designer-engineer who built avatars at Meta on Oculus Quest and shaped visionOS at Apple, he teamed up with former DeepMind researcher Jim Winkens - the name Doji is literally Dorian plus Jim - and within days of the app's 2025 App Store debut raised a $14M seed round led by Thrive Capital with Alexis Ohanian's Seven Seven Six. He treats the creative process as something close to sacred, and is betting that the most personal way to shop online is to first fall a little in love with the image of yourself.
Peter Fitzpatrick
Peter Fitzpatrick is the founder and CEO of Swipecast, a New York based marketplace that lets brands, magazines and agencies book models, photographers, stylists, makeup artists and entire creative crews through a single app. A former Wall Street investor who spent roughly a decade at JPMorgan Chase and the hedge fund BlueMountain Capital, he switched lanes to run a top-ranked modeling agency, then built Swipecast in 2015 to fix the cash-flow delays, opacity and friction he watched models and creatives endure. Clients have ranged from Tommy Hilfiger, Ralph Lauren and Estee Lauder to Vogue, V Magazine and W Magazine.
Yidi Campbell
Yidi Campbell is the founder and CEO of Indyx, a San Francisco connected-wardrobe platform that lets people catalog, style, and resell the clothes they already own. A Georgetown business graduate, she moved from investment banking at Credit Suisse to corporate development at Gap Inc. and strategy at Athleta before launching Indyx in 2021 to fight fashion overconsumption from the closet outward.
Allison Lee
Allison Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Revive, a New York fashion-tech company that helps brands recover value from returned and unsellable inventory through AI-driven inspection, refurbishment, and resale. A Korean immigrant who arrived in the U.S. at 13 and studied psychology at UC Berkeley, she first built Hemster, a SaaS tailoring platform, in 2017. When the pandemic stalled in-store tailoring, she pivoted the underlying fit-data infrastructure into Revive, which she has grown 46x in under a year and which has processed roughly $23M in merchandise. She is a 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree.
Dongsoo Han
Dongsoo Han is the founder and CEO of z-emotion, a 3D garment simulation company building software that lets fashion brands design, fit, and render clothing entirely in 3D. A computer graphics engineer with 25+ years in simulation and gaming, he built the hair physics that became AMD's TressFX, the first playable real-time hair in a video game (Tomb Raider). He later realized a thread in 3D space moves much like a strand of hair, and turned that insight into z-emotion's products z-weave, z-fit, z-maya, and zeavric, used in projects with brands like Louis Vuitton and Nike.
Michael Wang
Michael Wang is the cofounder and CEO of Cider, a Gen Z fashion brand he started in September 2020 during the pandemic and grew into a billion-dollar, social-first company selling trend-driven womenswear to more than 100 countries. A UC Berkeley applied-math graduate and former KKR and IDG Capital investor, Wang built and ran market strategy for YCloset (often called the Rent the Runway of China) before founding Cider. He installs his own software inside factories, releases new styles daily on a near-zero-inventory model, and treats Instagram and TikTok as the storefront. He was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2018.
Michelle Bacharach
Michelle Bacharach is the co-founder and CEO of FindMine, a New York AI company that teaches machines to style and merchandise like a brand's best human stylist - then runs that expertise across millions of products for retailers like Lululemon, Gap, Adidas and Anine Bing. A UC Berkeley grad and NYU Stern MBA who detoured through professional acting before building software, she turned a frustrating hunt for an outfit to match a pair of green waxed leggings into a venture-backed 'Complete the Look' platform that brands say lifts shopper spend dramatically.
Cheryl Liu
Cheryl Liu is the founder and CEO of Raspberry AI, a New York generative-AI platform that turns fashion designers' sketches into retail-ready, photo-realistic images, technical drawings, and CAD files in minutes instead of months. A former KKR retail private-equity analyst who later built product and machine-learning teams at Amazon and DoorDash, she spotted the opening for fashion-specific image generation the moment DALL-E and Stable Diffusion arrived in late 2022. Raspberry AI now serves brands including Under Armour, J.Crew, Tapestry, and Li & Fung, raised a $24M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, and was named one of CB Insights' 2026 AI 100 as the only creative-AI application on the list.
Natasha Franck
Natasha Franck is the founder and CEO of EON, a New York company giving every garment a unique Digital ID so it can be traced, resold, repaired and authenticated across its entire life. She left a career in urban planning and smart cities to build the CircularID Protocol, an open standard now powering Digital Product Passports for brands like Coach's Coachtopia, Chloe and Mulberry, and feeding into EU regulation that will make these passports mandatory.
Sarah Miyazawa LaFleur
Sarah Miyazawa LaFleur is the founder and CEO of M.M.LaFleur, the New York workwear brand she named after her mother and built to take the guesswork out of getting dressed for professional women. A Harvard graduate who walked away from a private equity job after four months, she launched the company in 2013 with designer Miyako Nakamura and Narie Foster, popularized the curated Bento Box, and later coined the post-pandemic dress code she calls Power Casual.
Rati Levesque
Rati Sahi Levesque is the President and CEO of The RealReal, the publicly traded luxury resale marketplace she helped build from a single employee desk in 2011 into a $2 billion GMV business. A born-and-raised San Franciscan with a UC Santa Cruz economics degree and a former Russian Hill boutique behind her, she succeeded founder Julie Wainwright in October 2024 and steered the company to its first year of positive Adjusted EBITDA in every quarter.
Emily Gittins
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.
Purva Gupta
Purva Gupta is the co-founder and CEO of Lily AI, the Mountain View-based AI platform that bridges the gap between how retailers describe products and how consumers actually search for them. Founded in 2015 after her own frustrating experience shopping online as a newly arrived immigrant from India, Gupta built Lily AI into an enterprise-grade solution serving major retailers including Macy's, Bloomingdale's, J.Crew, and thredUP. The company has raised $62 million in total funding, achieved triple-digit year-over-year growth, and is recognized as a Deloitte Technology Fast 500 company. A Tory Burch Fellow, Ad Age Leading Women honoree, EY Entrepreneur of the Year finalist, and venture partner at Unshackled Ventures, Gupta has become a prominent voice in retail AI and immigrant entrepreneurship.
Sid Gupta
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
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.
Ilana Stern
Ilana Stern is a General Partner at Peterson Ventures, a seed-stage venture firm based in Salt Lake City, Utah. A Stanford GSB alumna and former founder, she built and sold Weddington Way - a direct-to-consumer bridal fashion platform - to Gap Inc. in 2016 before joining Peterson Ventures in 2019 as its first San Francisco-based partner. She invests primarily in early-stage consumer, enterprise, and healthcare technology companies, while also lecturing at Stanford GSB and writing a Substack newsletter called 'View from the Bottom.'
Anya Cheng
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
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
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
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.
Jess Lee
Jess Lee is a Partner at Sequoia Capital - the firm's first female investing partner in the US in its 44-year history. Before that, she was co-founder and CEO of Polyvore, the social fashion platform she helped grow to 20+ million monthly users before selling to Yahoo for ~$230 million in 2015. A Stanford CS grad who once paid tuition by selling manga art on eBay, Lee brings a rare blend of deep product instinct (forged at Google Maps), community-building obsession, and operator credibility to early-stage investing. She also co-founded All Raise, the nonprofit dedicated to getting more women into venture capital and founding roles.
Nadia Boujarwah
Nadia Boujarwah is a Cuban-Kuwaiti American entrepreneur, investor, and size-inclusivity advocate best known as the Co-Founder and former CEO of Dia&Co, the leading online marketplace for plus-size women's fashion (sizes 10-32). She grew the company to over $100M in annual revenue and raised $120M+ from Sequoia Capital and Union Square Ventures before a successful acquisition by FullBeauty Brands in April 2024. She is now a Founder Partner at Founder Collective, the seed-stage VC firm that was one of Dia&Co's earliest backers, where she invests in and mentors early-stage founders.