Former Apple engineer Alex Ruber and former Twitter and Asana engineer Parth Chopra first met on Y Combinator’s founding Match platform, then met and shopped in person at a thrift store. They later went on a thrift store shopping trip and talked about how to solve the problem of finding the right products in the online space.
Many consumers have a hard time finding the right product without spending hours on Instagram. To solve this problem, the pair are building Encore, a search engine that allows users to search. Information on used items from various sources. The startup is currently part of Y Combinator’s first fall batch.
“The whole second-hand shopping market is really fragmented. There are hundreds of resources like Depop, Mercari, ThredUp, eBay, Craigslist, and more. It’s difficult for consumers to sift through all the products to find the one they want. So we wanted to remove that friction for our users,” Ruber said in a call with TechCrunch.
Ruber and Chopra are both immigrants and used to spending time and money at thrift stores, he said.
But saving isn’t easy. When Ruber was trying to find a specific jacket from a TV show (Carmy’s patchwork jacket from ‘The Bear’), he started thinking about creating a product that could help. He also wanted to find a co-founder working in the circular economy. He noted that Chopra was a great match because she was interested in fashion and thrifting.
“I was also personally interested. Every Sunday, my mom took me to the flea market. When I started learning musical instruments, I bought many things there, including a piano. “The core idea of Flea Market and Encore is to find hidden gems,” said the former Apple engineer.
Encore’s AI-powered search
In Encore, you can enter a query and get matches from multiple resources, including Poshmark, RealReal, Grailed, Etsy, and eBay. Because Encore uses large-scale language model technology, you can type queries like “Show me the dress Emily wore in Season 3 Episode 4 of ‘Emily in Paris.’”
Search engines will also display partial prompts such as “Outfit inspo for” and “Shop from the Show.” When you tap on an item, you can complete the prompt with auto-populated suggestions or your own words. This is mainly to show users the different types of search terms they can use and to prevent users from seeing blank pages when they don’t yet understand the functionality of the search engine.
Ruber pointed out that sentence length can sometimes vary a lot. Some people type simple sentences like “Show me your jeans,” while others give detailed descriptions like “I’m 6’2” tall and looking for skier pants for under $100 without big logos. Write .
The second-hand retail market is on the rise, with analysts predicting it will reach $73 billion in the U.S. and $350 billion globally by 2028. Online second-hand resale will account for half of the second-hand market, according to a report from online thrift retailer ThredUp. 2025.
Encore processes over 50,000 searches per month and is seeing a 26% monthly increase in searches and a 15% increase in clicks.
The startup currently relies on stakes in affiliates to generate revenue. But the company is also experimenting with a $3-a-month subscription with its advanced model, which offers unlimited searches, uploading images to find items, and support via email and chat.
