E-commerce tech and retail veteran Julie Bornstein and co-founders Matt Fisher, Dan Cary, Lisa Green, and Richard Kim announced today they raised a $50 million seed round co-led by Forerunner Ventures and Index Ventures with participation from GV (Google Ventures) and True Ventures to launch Daydream. This new AI-powered platform will change the way people shop online.
Launching in beta this fall, Daydream will be introducing its first shopping category, a highly personalized shopping experience powered by a superhuman search engine that offers a better way to find and discover women’s and men’s fashion. And Daydream will also have the largest high-quality branded fashion catalog found anywhere.
Daydream is creating an entirely new platform from the ground up, utilizing the latest developments in generative AI, machine learning, and computer vision to change the end-to-end shopping journey and experience starting from search and discovery.
As co-founder and CEO of Daydream, Bornstein has recruited a talented founding team with former leaders from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Nordstrom and Farfetch, who have spent decades at the intersection of online shopping, technology and artificial intelligence. And this combination of shopping and technology expertise led by Bornstein (who herself has spent over 25 years transforming the e-commerce experience) makes this team uniquely qualified to pioneer a new conversational commerce experience.
Existing shopping and e-commerce sites are trying to retrofit their experience to integrate AI into their legacy systems, but Daydream will be one of the first businesses that was conceived and built to take advantage of the latest advancements in AI and apply them directly to a new and improved consumer experience that is both intuitive and highly personalized. And Daydream was created to remove many of the pain points of online shopping and help consumers find what they need and love from all of their favorite brands in one place.
Before launching Daydream, Bornstein held leadership roles at startups such as Stitch Fix, where she served as the Chief Operating Officer and Board Member, helping to scale the company to $1 billion in under six years. And She built and led e-commerce at multi-channel retailers, including Sephora as the Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Digital Officer, Nordstrom and Urban Outfitters. Most recently, Bornstein was also the co-founder and CEO of THE YES, an AI-powered shopping platform startup for women’s fashion that was acquired by Pinterest in 2022 for its sophisticated technology and extensive brand partnerships roster, two years after launching.
The company’s seasoned executive team also includes:
1.) Dan Cary as Chief Product Officer, formerly at Google’s AI Research Group
2.) Matt Fisher as CTO, who led Data and Applied Science at Microsoft and oversaw measurement and marketing science at Amazon for Prime Video
3.) Lisa Green as Chief Commercial Officer, who spent her career at the intersection of fashion and technology, leading partnerships and business development for Google, THE YES, and Condé Nast
4.) Richard Kim as Chief Strategy Officer, most recently Head of Shopping Strategy and Operations at Pinterest; Chief Growth Officer at THE YES and VP of Strategy at TMON, who has spent his career in scaling dual-sided marketplaces
In the pre-launch phase, Daydream already has nearly 2,000 brands in its catalog through partnerships with multi-brand and mono-brand retailers.
KEY QUOTES:
“I have always been particularly obsessed with search and personalization and could not be more excited for the massive gains in AI over the past year. We can finally build an intelligent online shopping platform that will make it easy and fun for consumers to find products they love among the best selection of brands and retailers in the world.”
- Julie Bornstein
“For decades, search has been the prevailing entry point to the internet, but it’s increasingly fraught and ineffective when people are looking for personalized, specific answers that meet their unique needs. With AI, we believe we can do so much better than the chaotic, cluttered experience that search has become. We believe that search will transition to service, with the search giants dominating the space losing market share to new entrants providing personalized, AI-driven services that work in collaboration with consumers to meet their end goals and delight with a fundamentally new level of value. Daydream is leading this shift in commerce, with the opportunity to reimagine the way we shop and discover things we’ll love.”
- Kirsten Green, Founder and Managing Partner at Forerunner
“Fashion has been an anchor investment sector for us, at Index, for decades. We’ve been very bullish about the potential of applied AI to disrupt this sector, so when Julie and Daydream came along, we worked on convincing them to partner with us. The depth of experience across the founder team, combined with a rare understanding of the relevant technology, gives them a strong foundation to transform this enormous industry.”
- Danny Rimer, Partner at Index Ventures
“Eighty-eight percent of shoppers are more likely to visit sites that personalize their experience. Daydream takes a new AI-driven approach to create a better shopping experience online with highly-curated product recommendations. We believe the winners in this new technology chapter will be those who deeply understand consumer AI and search trends, and the Daydream team has unparalleled domain expertise in this area. We’re thrilled to partner with Julie Bornstein and the team as they build a category-defining AI platform that changes how people shop online.”
- Frédérique Dame, General Partner at GV
