Jenny, a Gen Z founder, raised $11 million to build Ulta, an AI-powered fashion app that acts as a personal stylist by analyzing users’ wardrobes, preferences, and occasions to generate personalized outfit recommendations visualized on avatars. Combining advanced AI models with deep fashion knowledge, Ulta simplifies wardrobe management and aims to democratize personal styling while planning to expand into social features and sustainable shopping partnerships.
The video features an interview with Jenny, the Gen Z founder of Ulta, an AI-powered fashion app described as a modern-day “Clueless” closet. Ulta acts as a personal AI stylist that helps users decide what to wear daily based on their closet, style preferences, calendar, and weather. Users can also request outfit recommendations for specific occasions, and the app generates outfits on a personalized avatar that resembles the user. Jenny explains that the idea originated from her own struggle with deciding what to wear each day and the complexity involved in managing a wardrobe, which inspired her to create an AI solution.
Jenny shares the technical challenges of building Ulta, emphasizing the complexity of fashion as a problem for AI due to the rich visual and stylistic nuances of clothing. She highlights how advancements in transformer models and diffusion models have enabled the creation of more sophisticated and personalized fashion AI. The app uses multiple AI models to analyze clothing attributes such as color, fabric, and style, and it learns from user feedback to improve outfit recommendations. The avatar feature, which allows users to see outfits visualized on a mini version of themselves, is particularly popular and was made possible by recent improvements in AI image generation.
From a user perspective, Ulta simplifies wardrobe management by allowing users to upload photos of their clothes or forward purchase receipts, which the AI processes to create a clean digital closet. The app removes backgrounds from images, tags clothing items with detailed attributes, and generates outfit suggestions that users can customize through natural language feedback. Ulta also offers features like packing lists and lookbooks, making it both a practical and enjoyable tool for fashion enthusiasts. Jenny notes that the app appeals to a wide range of users, from professionals needing work outfits to Gen Z users who enjoy styling avatars for social events.
Jenny discusses the company’s fundraising journey, having raised $11 million from investors including Menlo Ventures and prominent fashion industry families like LVMH. The pitch that attracted these investors combined deep fashion knowledge with strong technical expertise, aiming to democratize personal styling through AI. The business model currently relies on affiliate commissions from purchases made through the app, with plans to expand into premium features, branded content, and secondhand shopping partnerships to promote sustainability. Jenny also highlights how Gen Z’s unique shopping habits and AI-native mindset influence the app’s development and feature set.
Looking ahead, Jenny envisions Ulta evolving into a more social and interactive platform, pioneering multiplayer AI experiences where users can engage with AI and each other. She sees fashion as just the beginning of a broader self-expression journey that could extend into beauty and other lifestyle areas. Jenny emphasizes the empowering impact of AI on users’ confidence and self-expression, sharing heartfelt stories from the community. As a young female founder, she advises continuous learning and building a strong, intelligent team. She also reflects on the advantages of youth in dedicating time and energy to building a startup, while acknowledging the importance of passion in overcoming challenges like burnout.