Lance Riedel and Nigel Daly, who have both spent decades in search discovery, began to understand how search engines could create personalized search for online shopping when they worked at Pinterest and launched Pinterest Shopping.
When most people shop online, they type in keywords and expect search engines like Google to work their magic and return ranked results.
But the big magic they learned at Pinterest was how to flip the script using large-scale language models and image recognition AI to customize results to a person's past behavior, not just keywords, Riedel told TechCrunch.
The more times a user uses this type of search engine, the more the search engine learns about the user's preferences and the better the shopping results.
They left Pinterest and launched Vantage Discovery in 2023, offering the search engine to brands that don’t have the resources or expertise to conduct LLMs or other AI on their own.
For example, a shopper with experience dealing with BoHo style clothing searching for something like “dresses for a fun night out” will get very different results than a shopper with experience dealing with streetwear.
But Vantage goes a step further with image recognition: shoppers can also use the search engine to ask, “Show me more like this,” showing consumers related products. The search engine can also leverage a user's Pinterest profile to generate personalized shopping recommendations based on items pinned to their boards.
“At the core of our engine is a custom vector database. It combines both a semantic understanding of the user query with a semantic understanding of the user's personal style to get the most personalized, targeted results from millions of items within milliseconds,” Riedel said.
Image credit: Vantage DiscoveryImage credit: Vantage Discovery /
Like most commerce search engines, the ranking of results can be controlled by Vantage's customers – merchants or brands – “and they can even re-rank results based on custom models tuned to optimize their customers' business metrics.”
The startup was launched in early 2024 and works with clients including Cooklist, Kudos, WestCo and Bookpolis. Daly declined to discuss exact revenue figures, but said the company is profitable and “works with some of the largest retailers in the world.”
Vantage Discovery caught the eye of Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, who participated in the company's recent $16 million Series A round and now sits on the company's board of directors. This follows an undisclosed $4 million in seed funding the company raised last year from Stone and Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp.
“One of his other investments needed an intelligence platform to support RAG, search, and novelty discovery capabilities,” Riedel says. RAG stands for Search Augmentation Generation, a natural language processing technique that combines search and generative AI models. “Biz was so impressed that they invested in our seed round.”
The round was led by Robby Capital, with participation from LoveFrom's Jony Ive, former Apple chief design officer, Sharp, The Hive, Future Positive and Common Metal. In addition to Stone, Robby Capital's David Hornick, who has invested in companies including Gitlab, Bill.com and Ebyte, will also join Vantage Discovery's board.
Meanwhile, Riedel and Daly say they're also interested in going deeper into so-called “merchandising tools” — the way online stores and search engines rank results — which they'd like to add an AI element to.
“This is an area that's been around for years where merchandisers have had their finger on the search scale and have been able to impact it in a certain way,” Riedel said. “It's important and it's needed by retailers, but we think we can take some of the heavy lifting out of it.”