Moda AI

Tired of our favorite online shopping sites having terrible search, we founded Moda AI to transform the e-commerce search experience using some of the latest developments in multi-modal large language models. Backed by Index Ventures, Signia Ventures (now Kyber Knight Capital), and Unusual Ventures, we built an e-commerce enterprise search product that excelled at long-tail search, matching queries to products based on intent and contextual meaning rather than relying on substring and keyword matching.

Shortly after ChatGPT was released, we pivoted to building ShopGPT - the first ever conversational product discovery experience. We released our demo of ShopGPT in February 2023, letting users “chat” with our product catalog of over 10M products. It let users ask vague questions like “Can you find me a cocktail attire dress for a wedding in Santa Barbara?”, then continue to hone their search with follow-up questions.

We initially got an a lot of interest from mid-sized to large online retailers with this tool, entering into late stage conversations with a few well-known retailers, which ultimately fell through. For a number of reasons, we eventually decided to pivot the company to Momentum.

On the technical side, I built the entire system with my co-founder and our founding engineer. Some of the highlights were:

• A web crawler that crawled thousands of e-commerce sites on a regular interval, building a catalog of over 50 million products.
• Our search indexing, retrieval, and L2 re-ranking system (using FAISS).
• ShopGPT's RAG system (before that was a term) that facilitated the chat experience.