Female-founded Queenly is using their ML-driven search engine and computer vision technology to reimagine the $15B formalwear industry
SAN FRANCISCO – Queenly, the leading marketplace and search engine for the formalwear industry, announced today that it raised $6.3 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, bringing their total funding to date to $7.1 million.
By leveraging a proprietary ML-driven search engine and computer vision technology, Queenly is tackling the large, underserved formalwear market–a market that has survived decades, even the recent pandemic, with little to no disruption from Silicon Valley. The formalwear market in North America is currently a $15B industry, with substantial additional value being created and exchanged offline. In the US, “prom season” alone gives way to a $4B industry every year.
By combining a personalized, resale marketplace experience with small-business sales and data analytic tools, Queenly provides the industry its first comprehensive search engine for the formalwear industry. Cofounders Trisha Bantigue and Kathy Zhou have combined their national & international pageant experiences and professional domain expertise to build Queenly.
Queenly categorizes dresses through their computer vision and machine learning system, built in-house by Zhou, who also engineered and launched the company’s iOS, Android, and website. The company has proven its resilience after the pandemic by growing to over 125,000 users, 60,000+ unique dresses listed on their platform, and a total inventory value of $15 million.
The recent funding from the leading venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) will help the company grow their team to keep up with industry demand and efficiently scale out their operations and engineering features. Connie Chan, general partner at Andreeseen Horowitz, led the round for the firm.
To date, Queenly has raised $7.1 million in funding with investors that include Y Combinator, The House Fund, Interlace Ventures, Dragon Capital, NextView Ventures, MyAsiaVC and Shakti Venture Capital. Queenly also has A-list angel investors such as the former CTO of Uber, Thuan Pham, CPO of Uber, Manik Gupta, CEO of Lambda School, Austen Allred, CEO & cofounder of Mercari, Ryo Ishizuka, CEO of FitBit, James Park, CMO & cofounder of ScentBird, Rachel ten Brink, and the cofounders of Caviar, Jason Wang, Shawn Tsao, and Andy Zhang.
About Queenly
Founded in 2019, Queenly is the leading marketplace and search engine for the formalwear industry. For more information visit https://queenly.com/.
SOURCE Queenly
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