Although both Lance Riedel and Nigel Daley spent decades in search discovery, it was while working at Pinterest, launching Pinterest Shopping, that they started to see how search engines may do customised searches for online shopping.
Most people believe that internet shopping is inputting a query and then expecting a search engine, like Google, to work its magic and provide a ranked result.
But the major alchemy they discovered at Pinterest was how to leverage huge language models and picture recognition artificial intelligence to customise results not only to the term but to a person’s past activities, Riedel told Eltrys. 
When a person interacts with this kind of search engine, their shopping results improve; it learns their preferences.
They quit Pinterest and founded Vantage Discovery in 2023 to provide a search engine to companies without the means or knowledge necessary to do LLM and other types of artificial intelligence themselves.
When looking for something like “a dress for a fun night out,” a shopper with a history of engaging with BoHo clothing will obtain a much different outcome than a shopper with a history of interacting with streetwear.
However, Vantage improves this feature by utilising picture recognition. Using its search engine, a consumer can also query “show me more like this” to find similar goods. Based on the things posted on their board, the search engine can also access their Pinterest profile and provide customised buying suggestions.
“In the engine’s kernel is a custom vector database, where we combine both the semantic understanding of the user query and the semantic understanding of the user’s personal style to retrieve the most personalised and targeted results in milliseconds across millions of items,” Riedel added.
Vantage’s client, the retailer or brand, may determine the results’ ranking, much like other commerce-oriented search engines. “We can also re-rank results depending on a custom model tuned to maximise our customers’ business metrics.”
The company opened in early 2024 and now serves Cooklist, Koodos, West.co, and Bookopolis, among other clients. Daley said the company was making money and was also “working with one of the largest retailers in the world,” but she refused to go into specific numbers.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, who is now a board member and part of the company’s recent $16 million Series A financing, turned an eye to Vantage Discovery. This follows the secret seed money the startup acquired from Pinterest co-founders Stone and Evan Sharp last year, totaling $4 million.
“One of his other investments needed an intelligence platform that supported RAG, search, and innovative discovery features,” Riedel added. Retrieve-augmented generation is a natural language processing method that combines generative artificial intelligence models and retrieval. “Biz was so impressed, he made investments in our seed fund.”
Lobby Capital led the fundraising round, while Sharp, The Hive, Future Positive, Common Metal, and Jony Ive, former chief design officer for Apple, also participated. Along with Stone, David Hornik of Lobby Capital—who has made investments in Gitlab, Bill.com, and Evite—is joining the Vantage Discovery board.
Riedel and Daley, meanwhile, expressed interest in delving more into “merchandise tooling,” the method by which internet retailers or search engines evaluate results. They want it to have an artificial intelligence accent.
Riedel said, “This is a sector that has been around for a long time, with merchandisers placing their thumbs on the search scale and affecting it in various ways.” Stores demand this, which is crucial, but we believe we can alleviate some of the burden.
