Bringing AI to the Fashion Industry: Our Investment in Daydream

At Index, we love fashion. Over the last decade, we’ve invested in and partnered with the founders of Anine Bing, Farfetch, END Clothing, ASOS, NET-A-PORTER, GOAT, and many others. But while this industry has seen progress with the shift from physical to online shopping, we believe AI is about to bring a whole new level of disruption.

Gone are the days of search-based discovery and inspiration, with online shoppers scratching their heads for the right keywords and clicking through pages of irrelevant results. Imagine instead a world where discovering brands online is as easy as walking into your favorite store. You see carefully curated tables and racks of new and familiar labels. You talk to a sales associate and get personalized recommendations just for you.

We believe AI has the power to make this dream a reality, and to make online shopping not just easier and more streamlined, but more inspiring, personalized, and enjoyable.

With 34% of shoppers buying something online at least once a week, there’s a huge opportunity for innovators to reimagine what it means to discover new brands and shop online.

Enter Daydream, a new AI-powered online shopping platform that allows users to describe what they’re looking for in natural language, delivering highly personalized results from a vast catalog of women’s and men’s fashion. Co-founded and led by industry veteran Julie Bornstein, the platform already has close to 2,000 multi-brand and mono-brand retailers signed up, including Net-A-Porter, Altuzarra, Jimmy Choo, Doen, Everlane, Alo Yoga, La DoubleJ, and others.

Julie is someone we’ve been following for years. As COO of Stitch Fix, she helped scale the company to $1 billion in under six years. Before that, she held leadership roles at multi-channel retailers like Sephora, Nordstrom, and Urban Outfitters. A former founder, she has a track record of scaling large organizations and thriving in startup environments.

She’s joined by a talented and tight-knit founding team that includes Matt Fisher, Dan Cary, Lisa Green, and Richard Kim. They bring diverse but complementary skill sets, including technical and AI expertise from past roles at Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, as well as vital connections from across the global retail and fashion industry.

We’re excited to invest in Daydream and support their vision of AI-powered search and discovery in fashion. To learn more about Daydream, visit https://daydream.ing.