Former Apple engineer Alex Ruber and former Twitter and Asana engineer Parth Chopra met for the first time through Y Combinator's founder match platform, later meeting in person at a thrift store for shopping. They later took another thrift store shopping trip while discussing how they could solve the right problem in the online space.

Many consumers browse through hours of Instagram to find the right item. To that end, the pair is building a search engine called Encore, which lets users search through secondhand items from across different sources. The startup is presently a part of Y Combinator's first-ever fall batch.

It's really fragmented across the whole secondhand shopping market. There are hundreds of resources: Depop, Mercari, ThredUp, eBay, Craigslist, you name it. Sifting through them to try and find what you are looking for for a customer is tough. So we wanted to remove that friction for users," Ruber said on a call with TechCrunch.

He included the fact that Ruber and Chopra were both an immigrant and that they always spent time and money at thrift stores.

However, thrifting is not that easy. Ruber was trying to search for a particular jacket from a TV show that is Carmy's patchwork jacket from "The Bear", he then started thinking about building a product that will help him do that. He also wanted to look for a co-founder with an interest in the circular economy space. He felt that Chopra was a great fit since he was into fashion and thrifting.

"For me, there was also personal interest because my mom used to take me to flea markets every Sunday. I bought a lot of stuff from those places, including a piano, when I started to learn the instrument. The core idea behind both flea markets and Encore is about finding a hidden gem," the former Apple engineer noted.

Encore's AI-powered search
On Encore, you type your query, and all the matches across these resources come up: Poshmark, the RealReal, Grailed, Etsy, and eBay. Because Encore is powered by a large language model tech, you can type a query like, "Show me a dress that Emily wore in 'Emily in Paris' Season 3 Episode 4.".

Apart from these, the search engine will also include partial prompts such as "Outfit inspo for" and "Shop from the Show." It will allow you to complete a prompt by tapping on auto-populated suggestions or words. This is, first of all, intended to introduce users to what kinds of search terms they can make, not to show a blank page when the users do not yet know what the search engine can offer.

Ruber noted that sentence length can be very variable, and sometimes the difference can be immense. And some users just "key in a simple sentence: 'Show me jeans,'" while others write longer sentences such as "I am a 6'2" person who skis and looking for skier pants under $100 with no big logos on them.".

The second-hand retail market is on an upward growth curve and is tipped to reach $73 billion in the U.S. and $350 billion globally by 2028. Online resale, according to a report by online thrift store ThredUp, will account for half of the second-hand market by 2025.
Encore processes more than 50,000 searches monthly and is experiencing a month-on-month 26% growth for searches and 15% for clicks.

The startup generates revenue through affiliate shares, though it also experiments with a $3 subscription providing unlimited searches, advanced models, finding of items with upload of images, and email as well as chat support.