Latest news with #ForerunnerVentures
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Exclusive: Forerunner leads $30 million round in collectibles marketplace Courtyard
I admit it, I have a soft spot for sports cards. Over the past year, an embarrassingly steady stream of small eBay packages have been arriving on my family's doorstep in New Jersey thanks to my 12-year-old's newfound love for basketball cards. As I think has become plainly apparent to my wife by now, I'm complicit in encouraging this passion—with more than a tinge of nostalgia driving my mind and heart back to my own baseball card obsession in the late '80s and early '90s. And I'm not alone. Trading cards like Pokémon and sports cards have exploded in popularity in recent years, fueled in part by nostalgic yearning during the early days of the pandemic and new digital gamification elements of the hobby that have turned collecting for some into an FOMO-induced, impulse-buying sport. Now, one of the fastest-growing startups in the space—New York City-based Courtyard—has raised a $30 million Series A to double down on growth. Forerunner Ventures is leading the round, joined by the company's existing investors NEA and Y Combinator. Founded in 2021 by Nicolas le Jeune, who previously worked at YouTube, and Paulin Andurand, a former Apple software engineer, Courtyard markets itself through its website as selling 'mystery packs' of cards and comic books via a digital vending machine. What that means in practice is that customers agree to pay either $25, $50, or even $100 for an unknown Pokemon or sports card—or $200 in the case of a comic book—and then an algorithm randomly assigns them a card or comic from the startup's massive inventory of collectibles stored in the company's secure vault. Before purchasing, customers can view the probability that they will 'pull,' in industry speak, a card of certain value. If you're disappointed by the card you receive, you have a few options. Courtyard will immediately purchase the card back for 90% of its fair market value. Customers can also choose to list the item for sale on Courtyard's marketplace, which doesn't charge any fees to sellers. That ability to quickly sell out of a purchase you aren't interested in, or disappointed by, is at the heart of Forerunner's attraction to the startup. 'Courtyard stands out as the first collectibles marketplace that's actually designed to be liquid,' Forerunner partner Nicole Johnson wrote in an email to Fortune. 'That might sound like a small thing, but it's a big unlock: it lowers the barrier to entry [for consumers] in a category that's historically been tough to navigate.' If the card's a keeper, customers can keep it secured for free in Courtyard's storage facility, and have it shipped to them. (Many customers don't realize, and don't really need to, that they are in reality purchasing an NFT, or digital token, that represents a specific physical card—or piece of merchandise.) The mystery packs have been a hit. In January of 2024, Courtyard was selling about $50,000 of merchandise a month. Today—just a year and a half later—le Jeune says the company is selling $50 million a month. And that's with the comic book category just recently launching and with all sales happening via a website; the startup is expected to release its first mobile app in the coming days. The startup makes money when it buys cards back from customers for 90% of its value and resells it to customers in a new mystery pack. The same card is sold an average of eight times a month on the platform, the company said. Courtyard also relies on a large network of collectibles dealers who source merchandise for the startup, helping make the startup the largest buyer of trading cards in the world right now, according to le Jeune. But clones are popping up and the CEO said he is willing to go into the red to step on the gas and expand the startup's lead, through a mix of hiring, paid marketing, and product category expansion. 'We want to make sure we double down on the growth and capture the market as fast as possible,' the CEO said. When I tried out the service recently, I purchased a $25 mystery basketball card. It turned out to be a rookie card for Jalen Green, a young NBA player drafted as the 2nd pick in the 2021 NBA draft by the Houston Rockets. Green was recently traded by the Houston Rockets to the Phoenix Suns and has not lived up to his initial promise. Courtyard offered me $9 for a card valued in the broader basketball card market at $10. I didn't accept, and have chosen to store the card with Courtyard for now, hoping that Green might play better this year and the value of the card might increase, making it worth it to keep or to add to my son's collection. For a first experience, though, it was a bit disappointing even if I knew logically that pulling a card of greater value was not at all guaranteed. I asked le Jeune about the risk that a first-time buyer experience like mine might dissuade a customer from sticking around and making another purchase. 'We could fake it and make you feel at the beginning like you get a good card every single time,' he said, 'but we would not be okay with that.' As the company gets bigger, he added, Courtyard will be able to offer more value to its customers for each transaction. 'We grew so fast but it's still the early days,' le Jeune said, 'and there's so much room to make it a much better experience.' See you tomorrow, Jason Del ReyX: @delreyEmail: a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here. Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today's newsletter. Subscribe here. This story was originally featured on Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Vogue
25-06-2025
- Business
- Vogue
Is Daydream's AI Platform the Answer to Fashion's Discovery Problem?
Become a Vogue Business Member to receive unlimited access to Member-only reporting and insights, our Beauty and TikTok Trend Trackers, Member-only newsletters and exclusive event invitations. The Daydream team has a refrain that's guided the AI shopping platform's user experience since it began building: 'Say more.' Looking for a red dress? Say more. Is it for a wedding? A work conference? Where will you wear it, and what time of year? Do you like a low-cut or a high neck? Cocktail length or gown? Be as specific as possible, and as you circle in on what you're really looking for, Daydream's artificial intelligence-powered, chat-based shopping agent will generate relevant results. This 'say more' style of shopping is what Daydream believes will change the way we find what we want to buy. Julie Bornstein, Daydream CEO and founder, has been in the business of search for 25 years, including those spent at Nordstrom in its early e-commerce days, then Stitch Fix, Sephora and her first startup, The Yes, which was sold to Pinterest in 2022 before being subsequently shut down by the social platform. The Yes was a sort of predecessor to Daydream, Bornstein concedes, but large language modelling and AI technology has come so far since she launched that company in 2020 that the user experiences are completely different, she says. Last year, Bornstein raised $50 million to build Daydream, co-led by investors Forerunner Ventures and Index Ventures, with a founding team including chief brands officer Lisa Yamner Green, chief product officer Dan Cary and chief strategy officer Richard Kim. Today, Daydream is going live with a beta version at that Bornstein says is ready to start providing product recommendations using its generative AI shopping tool. An app will come later this summer. Users answer a set of questions to create their 'style passport', such as what brands they like and what sizes they wear, among other shopping proclivities. Then, they can start chatting. Daydream's AI interface will be familiar to anyone who's experimented with ChatGPT, but its overall feel is more e-commerce retailer-meets-Tumblr feed. As you tell the AI what you're looking for, Daydream will pull matching results from its 8,500 brands (some listed directly, others through retailers) and more than two million products, across womenswear, menswear and accessories, with launch partners including Net-a-Porter, Alo Yoga, Loveshackfancy, Markarian, Khaite, Emilia Wickstead, Mytheresa, Cult Mia, Mejuri, Uniqlo and Dôen.
Fast Company
25-06-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
This new AI just might make online shopping fun again
Let's face it. Shopping for clothes online is a drag. The online shopping experience hasn't changed much since Amazon started selling books online three decades ago. If you're searching for a new blazer or dress, you'll type keywords into Google or a retailer's search bar, then scan through rows of inventory. Often, the first results you'll see will be posts sponsored by brands, rather than results tailored to your needs. But even though shopping for fashion on the internet is laborious and clunky, it is now the status quo: Some 48% of all fashion retail sales worldwide happen on e-commerce, equivalent to $883.1 billion in revenue. Retail veteran Julie Bornstein, who helped build e-commerce platforms for Sephora and Stitch Fix, wants to transform the way you shop online. Today, she launches a new platform called Daydream, an AI-powered chat-based shopping agent devoted specifically to fashion. Daydream's founding team brings together executives who previously worked at Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Farfetch, and other tech firms. It raised $50 million in seed funding from Forerunner Ventures, Index Ventures, Tre Ventures, and Google Ventures. To use Daydream, you take a short quiz to ensure that the agent tailors results to your taste and sizing. Then, you can engage with the AI agent like you might with a human stylist, asking questions and providing specifics about what you're looking for: 'I need a new dress for a holiday in Barcelona,' or 'Can you find me heels for a board meeting that are comfortable enough so I can walk to work?' The platform will deliver results from an inventory of 2 million immediately available products from 8,000 brands, including Balenciaga, Nike, Khaite, Mytheresa, Uniqlo, and Dôen. These brands pay Daydream a commission when a customer buys a product, which allows the platform to remain free to users. Like all AI models, Daydream is designed to keep learning as more users engage with it, both by understanding broad trends across the population as well as how to tailor products to an individual's shopping habits. In some ways, the most exciting possibilities are just around the corner. 'We're already thinking about what we can do with this technology,' says Bornstein. 'Imagine an agent that already knows every single item in your closet and can suggest items that can pair with what you already own.' Taking the Pain Out of Online Shopping Bornstein has spent her career trying to perfect the art of e-commerce. In the early 2000s, she helped retailers like Nordstrom and Urban Outfitters build their nascent online websites. She led Sephora's digital efforts before serving as COO of Stitch Fix, an online styling service that famously used a Netflix-like algorithm to identify the outfits its consumers might want. In 2018, she decided to strike out on her own. She launched an app called The Yes that was designed to foster inspiration and discovery—something she felt was missing on most e-commerce sites that rely on consumers to search for and articulate what they want. The Yes created a social-media-like feed, where you could connect with friends and be served interesting products you might not have found on your own. Four years later, Pinterest acquired it for an undisclosed sum. Over the past few years, however, generative AI has loomed over the tech world. In 2023, Bornstein began working on Daydream, considering how AI could transform the shopping experience. 'It was clear to me that when ChatGPT launched, it would open up a whole new set of possibilities,' she says. Current AI agents like ChatGPT aren't tailored to shopping for clothing, though. If you ask the platform to help you look for a dress for a romantic dinner in Montreal in mid-July, it will scour the internet for options, but it has no way of identifying quality. Within a given price point, it will pull from no-name labels on Amazon and random brands known for making knockoffs. When it comes to taste and styling, ChatGPT has no sense of curation. It pulls from every blog, retail website, and influencer. 'ChatGPT is like a jack-of-all-trades, and it can respond to questions about clothing,' says Kirsten Green, founder of Forerunner Ventures, one of Daydream's investors. 'But at some point, you need some expertise to ensure that an AI is giving you really helpful results, whether it relates to fashion or biotech.' Bornstein wanted to create an AI that had a more sophisticated sense of what consumers are looking for in terms of fashion and styling. For one thing, Daydream partners with 8,000 brands and has analyzed upwards of 2 million products. Further, Daydream's developers have brought nuance to the search process, helping the AI distinguish between high-end brands like Balenciaga and Chloé, versus mass-market brands like Uniqlo. Also, with the help of developers, Daydream analyzes details like silhouette, fabric, and drape in a way that is more specific than general AI platforms. It incorporates information about sizing and fit based on reviews and data about the brand, so recommendations can be fully customized to the user. 'We have been looking at images of clothing to identify both its objective and subjective attributes,' Bornstein says. 'You need to be able to synthesize all of this information and make sure it is standardized.' Green notes that none of this is easy. 'This is the power of leveraging training models, understanding the details of product categories that have a lot of minute descriptors, understanding how to read images,' she says. The result is an AI agent that approximates a human stylist. Bornstein promises that Daydream will better understand the nuances of customers' questions, offering more expertise around trends and personal taste. This means that two people might ask the same question and receive different results. It will pull from well-known brands, tailoring results to your budget. As you click on items you like, the AI will refine options. You can also pick one item, such as a blue dress, and say that you like the silhouette but would prefer it in red. It's also possible to upload an image of a dress you like and find similar options. Bornstein points out that some consumers like being able to have lots of choices, whereas others find that prospect overwhelming. Daydream's AI can adapt to either approach. 'Some people will just want the five best options for a particular dress or blazer,' she says. 'Daydream can do this too.' The Future of Fashion For Bornstein, launching Daydream is just the first step in her vision of transforming online clothes shopping. For one thing, AI will allow an unprecedented level of customization, tailoring results to each user's individual tastes, budget, and body shape. In the near future, Bornstein imagines a technology that already knows everything that's in your closet. Imagine Cher's closet from Clueless, which came with a computer that identified each piece of clothing and could coordinate looks. This isn't so far away, Bornstein says. 'We're already thinking about how we could identify what is already in your closet, by looking at your credit card statements or your shopping history with a retailer,' she says. 'Or you could imagine an AI tool that would quickly scan your closet with a camera and identify every item.' A technology like this could serve as a useful tool for helping people get dressed in the morning by suggesting what to wear given their plans for the day and the weather. It could also integrate into a broader shopping platform, like Daydream, allowing the AI to get a sense of a user's aesthetic and size before recommending items that fit into their existing wardrobe. 'Sometimes there's a pair of shorts you might have that you would get so much more use out of if you just had the right top,' Bornstein notes as an example. 'This would allow us to suggest items that someone really needs and doesn't just double up on something else they already have.' It's clear that a transformation is around the corner, as people increasingly incorporate AI into their lives. Green says she's heard from many retailers whose search box is becoming useless because customers are treating it like an AI agent and asking it natural language questions, rather than typing in keywords. 'Really great startups sometimes struggle because customers aren't ready for the technology,' she says. 'This isn't the case here. I think we're all ready for something better than a search bar.' The extended deadline for Fast Company's Next Big Things in Tech Awards is this Friday, June 27, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.
TechCrunch
12-06-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Automattic acquires relationship manager Clay to add an identity layer to online tools
After acquiring universal messaging apps Beeper and owner Automattic has added another communication-focused startup to its lineup: relationship-management app Clay. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Clay had so far raised over $9 million in venture capital from investors like General Catalyst and Forerunner Ventures. The tool will continue to be supported and will later be integrated with other Automattic products, like Beeper. Clay's software, launched in 2021, is something of a smarter address book or personal CRM, letting users organize the people they know and keep up with their latest updates by pulling in data from services like LinkedIn, Facebook, WhatsApp and X, as well as address books and calendars. Image Credits:Clay You can use the app to keep up with things you want to know about people, like job changes, relocations, updated bios, recent social posts, and more. Clay also lets you add notes to address book entries, so you can note how and when you met, or the names of their kids, for instance. A timeline for each entry shows when notes were added, the last time you reached out, and other times you engaged. The app later built in AI, adding an AI helper called Nexus that lets you ask questions about your network, like who you know at a particular company, or who you should connect with when visiting New York. Beyond that, the AI bot is meant to integrate with your daily workflow. As part of the acquisition, which closed last week, Clay's small team, including its co-founders Zachary Hamed and Matthew Achariam, is joining Automattic. 'Our mission […] is to help with relationships and increase conscientiousness,' Achariam said. 'That's always been our North Star, and all the features […] reinforce that by bringing these different aspects of relationship management into one platform and one tool.' Image Credits:Clay Automattic said it made sense to buy Clay because of its ability to be integrated into the company's broader ecosystem, which today includes the universal chat app Beeper (a merger of the and Beeper acquisitions). Clay's founders, meanwhile, have a sense of a shared mission with Automattic, and appreciate that they'll get to continue to develop their app. (Often, smart address book startups are eaten up by their acquirer and then sadly wound down.) 'We are very excited about the longevity aspect of this,' said Hamed. 'We believe that this should be something that exists beyond, like, any one company,' he added. For Clay, the long-term plan at Automattic includes integrating with Beeper, and ultimately becoming an identity layer for a variety of different tools. Those plans are not finalized, however, nor could Automattic commit to a time frame for that progress. It also wouldn't share if Clay's pricing is due to change in the future. Currently, the service is a freemium offering, with its paid plans starting at $10 per month, or $40 per seat, per month for teams. Clay's founders said they believe their values are similar to Automattic's, which is why the deal made sense. 'One of their main ethos is this idea of open source, and the idea that that's one of the most powerful forces of our lifetimes. And we tend to agree,' said Achariam. Clay's team is also interested in integrating with other open technologies going forward, like ActivityPub, used by Mastodon, and AT Protocol, used by Bluesky. Clay didn't share any numbers about its userbase, but it did say that its app manages over 150 million relationships. The app is available on macOS, Windows, iOS, and web.
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Monarch secures $75m to expand financial wellness platform
Monarch, a personal finance application, has garnered $75m in a Series B funding round, aiming to speed up its goal of taking financial wellness to the masses. The investment round was jointly led by FPV Ventures and Forerunner Ventures, with participation from existing investors Menlo Ventures, Accel, SignalFire, and Clocktower Ventures. The company plans to use the latest funding to expand its team and platform. In a blog post, Monarch Money Co-founder and CEO Val Agostino said: 'We started Monarch six years ago with a clear but ambitious mission to solve this problem for all households, not just the wealthy. We strongly believe that everyone – no matter where they're starting – can improve their financial situation with the right information, tools, and guidance. 'We are just getting started and have big plans for evolving the Monarch platform on the journey toward unlocking financial wellness for all households.' Monarch's platform offers a comprehensive view of personal finances by connecting with a wide array of financial institutions. This enables users to monitor their financial status through intuitive graphs that display net worth, cash flow, and budget progress over time. Monarch also aids users in tracking their progress against financial goals. The platform also fosters collaboration among partners, spouses, or financial professionals, ensuring that all parties involved can stay informed and work together on financial planning. Moreover, the offering provides personalised financial advice through an advisor feature. In a LinkedIn post, FPV Ventures co-founder and managing partner Wesley Chan said: 'Our investment in Monarch is the first investment out of our new $525M fund to back the next generation of mission-driven founders. It is also the largest initial check FPV has written into any company.' "Monarch secures $75m to expand financial wellness platform" was originally created and published by Retail Banker International, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
