Ex-Apple engineer Alex Ruber and ex-Twitter and Asana engineer Part Chopra first met on Y Combinator's founder-matching platform, then met in person to shop at a thrift store. Later, they shopped at thrift stores and discussed how to solve the problem of finding suitable items online. Many consumers work hard to find the right things without spending hours on Instagram. To solve this problem, both groups form the search engine Encore, which allows users to look for other hand projects from different sources. The startup is currently part of Y Combinator’s first fall batch.

“The whole recycling market is really fragmented. There are hundreds of resources like Depop, Mercari, Thredup, eBay, Craigslist, etc. Consumers find it difficult to search all these things to try to enter the products they want.

Both Ruber and Chopra are immigrants, he said, and they’ve been used to spending time and money at thrift stores.But thrifting isn’t easy. When Rube was trying to find a specific jacket from the TV show (Cami's Patchwork Jacket from the Bears), he started thinking about developing a product that would help him achieve that goal. He is also looking for a co-founder working in the circular economy space. He noted that Chopra was a perfect fit because of his passion for fashion and frugality.

“I also have a personal interest because my mom takes me to the flea market every Sunday. I bought many things from those places, including a piano when I started learning the instrument. Flea Markets and Encore are all about finding the hidden gem,” noted the former Apple engineer. Encore’s AI search

On Encore, you can type a query and get matches from multiple sources, including Poshmark, RealReal, Grailed, Etsy, and eBay. Because Encore uses large language model technology, you can enter a query like "Show me the dress Emily wore in Emily in Paris Season 3 Episode 4."

Search engines also show some tips, such as "Outfit inspo for" and "Shop from the Show." When you click on them, you can complete the prompts with autocomplete suggestions or your own words. Mainly, this is to show users the different kinds of search expressions they can use and avoid an empty page when users do not yet understand the search engine options.

Ruber noted that the sentence length may vary, sometimes with a lot. Some people just type in a simple sentence like "Show me the jeans" while others write a detailed description like "I'm 6'2" who skis and looking for ski pants under $100, no big logos.

The second-hand retail market is on an upward growth curve, with analysts predicting it to reach $73 billion by 2028 and $350 billion globally. A report by online thrift store ThredUp suggests that online second-hand resale accounts for half of the second-hand market. The year 2025. Encore handles over 50,000 searches per month and is experiencing a 26% increase in searches and a 15% increase in clicks.

The startup currently relies on related stocks to generate profits. However, the company is also experimenting with a $3 per month subscription that offers unlimited premium model searches, product discovery by uploading images, and email and chat support.