Startups have been racing to crack social shopping.
Lindsay Perper, a New York-based startup founder who spent seven years working at Ralph Lauren, is entering the fray with Rodeo.
Perper founded Rodeo in 2022 and launched its mobile social shopping app in 2024. The app’s vertical feed feels familiar to any TikTok user, and that’s by design.
Perper told Business Insider she wants Rodeo to become the “destination for the next-gen to shop the way they scroll.”
On Rodeo, users scroll through photos and videos, each with products and shopping links layered over the content. Rodeo users can also sync their Instagram and TikTok accounts to auto-post content to the app.
Perper said the app uses software like AWS Rekognition and Google’s Vision AI to identify shoppable items in users’ content. (If the AI is wrong, Rodeo also lets users manually enter information for products.)
Identifying products is the primary application of AI right now on the app, but Perper said personalization — a buzzword for many commerce startups right now — will come later in the road map.
Perper compares Rodeo more to Spotify than any other commerce platform. Rodeo wants to apply machine learning to shopping in the way Spotify’s Discovery Weekly playlist and other tools help identify the vibe of music or artists you like.
With the rise of TikTok Shop, social commerce startups have had newfound attention from users and investors. Live shopping app Whatnot announced a $265 million Series E funding round in January and said it had crossed $3 billion in livestream sales for 2024. ShopMy, an affiliate marketing startup, announced a $77.5 million Series B in January. And last month, creator shopping app LTK overhauled its mobile app to include more discovery and social features.
A few weeks ago, Perper began an intensive startup accelerator program hosted by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The program, Talent x Opportunity Initiative (TxO), is run by A16z partner Kofi Ampadu and mentors founders who are “building cultural breakthroughs,” according to A16z’s website. The TxO fund writes checks of $175,000 for founders in the program (this most recent cohort includes five startups).
Since launching, Perper told BI that Rodeo has raised $950,000 from family and friends. She also said Rodeo is targeting to raise another $2.5 million coming out of the accelerator, which will allow the startup to expand its team, build out more AI tools, and ink creator partnerships to fuel user growth.
Read the 11-page pitch deck Perper used to get into A16z’s TxO accelerator program.
Note: Some slides have been edited and details have been redacted so that the deck could be shared publicly.
Rodeo pitches itself as ‘the mall of the digital age’ in its deck.
Here’s what the slide says:
The Mall of the Digital Age
A centralized destination streamlining discovery through checkout for the next generation shopper
The deck starts out by describing the landscape of online shopping.
Here’s what the slide says:
The way we shop online is evolving, but the platforms we use have not.
Tiktok wasn’t built for shopping. Amazon wasn’t built for discovery.
& Gen Z doesn’t search, they scroll.
90% of gen z discover products on social media
78% of mobile shoppers never complete checkout
Rodeo says the online shopping industry is ‘broken’ and outlines a problem it wants to solve.
Here’s what the slide says:
The $1.2 trillion online shopping industry is broken
Shoppers struggle to discover & purchase products they actually want leading to:
It compares itself to Spotify, instead of other commerce apps.
Here’s what the slide says:
Rodeo: The Spotify of Shopping
Rodeo aggregates the entire shopping journey from discovery to check out and personalizes it to the user, as the destination shoppers turn to with high purchase intent, looking for peer-recommendations and .
Mobile First Experience
Then, the deck dives into Rodeo’s product.
Here’s what the slide says:
Rodeo Drive for the Digital Age
Rodeo makes shopping seamless, authentic, and discovery based, all powered by user generated content
One Platform, Seamless Discovery
Effortless Shopping Meets Social
AI-Powered Curation
Creator-Led Commerce
It also includes imagery to show how the app works.
Here’s what the slide says:
Style, Meet Algorithm
Recency-Weighted Scoring
Engagement Optimization
Smart Resurfacing
It then breaks down how the app will fuel connection, spurring growth.
Here’s what the slide says:
More Than An App: Community-Driven Connection
By fostering an inclusive supportive community, we see higher retention rates and an emotional attachment that keeps users coming back, creating an organic cycle of expansion.
Rodeo also breaks down key growth metrics, which have been redacted.
Here’s what the slide says:
Attention + Intention= Successful Commerce
Rodeo’s commerce-centric approach differentiates us from social platforms. Our experiential destination provides more than just commerce-enablement to shoppers, attracting high-value shoppers.
It also outlines the ‘why now?’ for a new app in social shopping.
Here’s what the slide says:
The Perfect Convergence: Tech, Culture, and Behavior Aligning for Industry Disruption
Behavioural shift
Technological advances
Cultural shift
The deck then introduces Rodeo’s founder and team.
Here’s what the slide says:
We
We know commerce.
We know creators.
We’re building the future.
The deck ends with a QR code.
The post Read the pitch deck the ‘Spotify of shopping’ used to score a spot in an Andreessen Horowitz startup accelerator appeared first on Business Insider.
