Female-founded tech startup Queenly raises $6.3 for its formalwear marketplace

The formalwear market in North America is currently a $15 billion industry, with the substantial additional value being created and exchanged offline. In the US, “prom season” alone gives way to a $4B industry every year. The formalwear market has survived decades, even the recent pandemic, with little to no disruption from Silicon Valley. Until now.

Enter Queenly, a female-founded tech startup that leverages a proprietary machine learning (ML)-driven search engine and computer vision technology to power a dedicated marketplace and search engine for the formalwear industry.

Since launching less than 2 years ago. Queenly is tackling the highly underserved prom, pageant, quinceañera, and wedding industry (and more). They cater to this massive community of dress enthusiasts for this high-priced & low-usage inventory, similar to how GOAT and StockX have built a platform for the sneaker and streetwear community.

To keep up with industry demand and efficiently scale out its operations, Queenly announced it has raised $6.3M funding, bringing the company’s total funding to date to $7.1 million. Connie Chan, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, led the round for the firm.

Founded in 2019 by Kathy Zhou and Trisha Bantigue, the San Francisco-based 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.

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. To date, Queenly has raised $7.1 million in funding with investors that include Y Combinator, and other A-list angel investors.

Quuenly Founders