Styl AI

Bootstrapped from our dorm room at Duke and 3 days before graduating, we sold to an AI research run by Sebastian Thrun (founder of Google X, Waymo, and Udacity)

[Dhruv Bindra ⏳ @bindra_dhruv]

My lawyers FINALLY gave me permission to spill the beans...

9 months ago we announced that our dorm room startup @styl_app was acquired by an AI research lab run by our "childhood hero". Today, we're proud to reveal that this was none other than @SebastianThrun: the founder of Google X, Waymo, and Udacity.

We founded Styl with the vision that swiping is a great UX primitive to collect data. From February to December 2024, our ~150k users swiped 30M+ times on a dataset of <100k items. This is likely the most dense shopping data in the world, and I'm so excited for Sebastian to disrupt yet another industry.

On a personal front, I've moved back home. The dream is to build a generational Consumer AI company for the world from India, and I'm hacking away with @shruthibadri. We want to build the most high-density talent team the nation has ever seen; if you know engineers or designers we should chat with, please send them our way :)

[Dhruv Bindra ⏳ @bindra_dhruv]

We sold @styl_app :)

As I look back on the last 2 years, I can’t believe how blessed we’ve been.

Even though Rahul and I never ended up building a male version (so we could never use the product ourselves), the love and support we’ve received from our community of users always pushed us to work through sleepless nights. 

Even though we’d been rejected through 4 cycles of accelerator applications, we frugally hustled. Whether it was surviving on canned tuna sandwiches, manually placing orders so users could have a seamless checkout experience or recording the most embarrassing videos to hack our way into virality— the scrappiness made it all the more special.

Even though we’re just 2 kids who grew up playing Tennis together in India and somehow landed up at Duke together, we’ve had this crazy journey with a lifetime's worth of stories and the support of incredible people without whom this would have never happened. Dev, Lokesh, Aditya, Maya, Rayan: thank you for believing in us even when nothing seemed to be working.

It is such an honor to be acquired by a figure in Silicon Valley we’ve always looked up to and the generation-defining companies he’s built. I wish I could share more, but it’ll have to wait till we come out of stealth.

I graduate this semester and Rahul is taking time off Duke. We’re headed to SF to continue working at the intersection of e-commerce and AI and are hopeful this product will truly be paradigm-shifting. Something we’ve dreamed of giving our users all along. Something the world has never seen before.