Katy Aucoin Curated For You is the story of a data consultant who watched large retailers chase clicks and decided online shopping should work more like a good small-town boutique. Aucoin is the co-founder and CEO of Curated For You, an Austin company that sells retailers a lifestyle dataset and AI merchandising tools so products show up for searches like “Coachella outfit,” “first date in Miami” or “game day.” The company announced an $8.3 million seed round in September 2025, led by Florida Funders. Here is how Aucoin got there, how the technology works and why fashion retailers are paying attention.
Katy Aucoin Curated For You: Who Is the Founder?
Katy Aucoin is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Curated For You, often shortened to CFY. Crunchbase’s profile lists her as co-founder and CEO since January 2022, based in Austin, Texas, with a background that includes founding an earlier company called dearduck. According to her biography on Total Retail, she holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting with a minor in internal audit from Louisiana State University.
The company’s mission statement is broad: to contextualize the world’s products for everyone, everywhere. Aucoin describes her expertise as contextualizing data and consumer psychology, and her goal as making digital discovery relevant to every person. Dealroom credits her and Mary Brendza as the founding team, and company directories list Brendza as co-founder and chief operating officer. That mix of data skills and consumer insight is the core of the Katy Aucoin Curated For You story.
The company is headquartered in Austin and describes itself on its website as “made with love in Austin, Texas.” Its roots in Texas are also visible in its examples, which lean on game days, Mardi Gras and Nashville bachelorette trips.
From EY Consultant to Founder
Aucoin’s career began in technology consulting, not retail. Her Total Retail biography says she started as an IT consultant at EY, where she built her technical foundation by leading cross-application security projects for Fortune 500 companies. She later became an independent IT consultant, advising companies on how to use data to improve customer experiences while staying compliant with security rules.
That background shaped how she thinks about the product. Security and compliance work teaches a founder to care about where data comes from and how it can be used, which matters in retail as privacy regulation tightens. It also gave her years of exposure to how large organizations actually manage data, rather than how pitch decks describe it.
Between consulting and Curated For You, Crunchbase shows she founded dearduck, a marketing software platform, from December 2018 to January 2022. Founding a first company gave her the experience of building product and selling to businesses. The consulting years are the technical foundation of Katy Aucoin Curated For You.
The Walmart Years and the Reactive Retail Problem
The idea took shape through client work. According to a Stage 2 Capital founder feature, Aucoin’s journey began while working with large retailers such as Walmart during a period of rising demand for personalization and increasing privacy regulation.
What she noticed was a pattern. She told Stage 2 that retailers were stuck in reactive habits, focused on clicks and individual purchases without understanding the intent behind them. Shoppers know the experience: you search for one product, and suddenly that one item follows you around the internet.
The problem is that behavior alone misses context. A click tells a retailer what someone looked at, not why. Trends can also come and go before a retailer reacts. That reactive pattern is the problem Katy Aucoin Curated For You set out to address, by moving from “what did they click” to “what is happening in their life.”
Two Years Studying Boutiques
Aucoin’s answer came from a different kind of store. In the Stage 2 feature, she describes spending two years studying local boutiques. Those shops had something e-commerce lacked: a deep understanding of their customers’ lives. A boutique owner knows your name, remembers your anniversary and suggests something for a trip.
She illustrates the idea with a shopper named Lucy who is heading to a University of Texas football game in Austin next weekend, with temperatures in the mid-90s. A truly personalized experience would proactively suggest attire, sun protection and game day essentials. The question Aucoin asks is “why does someone need to buy tomorrow,” and how a retailer can answer it in advance.
With that vision, she brought Mary Brendza on as co-founder. The two set out to build a scalable version of the boutique owner’s instinct, which became the platform. The boutique research is the creative seed of Katy Aucoin Curated For You.
The Problem: Retailers Miss Searches Customers Actually Make
The Curated For You website frames the problem with a shopper named Jess, who is searching for Coachella outfits, a first date in Miami or something to wear around town in Aspen. Without the company’s technology, the site shows a “no products match your search” message.
It states that retailers miss 60% of sales opportunities because their products do not show up in relevant search results, and that conversion rates increase 6x when lifestyle data is integrated into the shopping experience. Both are company claims on its homepage, and the site does not cite a study, so they are best read as marketing.
The underlying issue is real, though. Product catalogs are organized by visual attributes, such as color, fabric and cut. Shoppers search by occasion: a wedding, a road trip, game day. If a retailer’s data does not connect “sundress” with “Cabo,” the shopper may never find it. That mismatch between attributes and intent is what Katy Aucoin Curated For You was built to close.
Building Curated For You: The Purchase Intent Platform
According to the Stage 2 feature, the company’s Purchase Intent Platform has three parts.
A consumer insights engine. It detects real-time buying signals across social media and search, integrates external data sources for local events and weather, and runs proprietary surveys to learn why people buy in different places.
An AI merchandising tool. It automatically matches a retailer’s catalog to relevant topics and applies an AI editorial lens to create curated assortments. These assortments update as inventory changes, so the retailer does not have to maintain them by hand.
A marketing toolset. It helps retailers promote the new topics at scale, including localization, so location-based topics appear to the right people at the right time.
The website describes the same idea in plain language: product intelligence centered on consumer lifestyle instead of visual attributes alone. Traded’s report adds that the company uses agentic AI to blend retailer performance data with real-world signals such as trends, weather and events. The platform is the technical backbone of Katy Aucoin Curated For You.
Lifestyle Data: Places, Affinities and Trends
The core asset is a dataset. The company calls it lifestyle data, a new dataset that connects products to the reasons consumers buy. The homepage organizes it into three categories.
Places. Examples include Austin for SXSW, Nashville bachelorette trips and Tahoe ski vacations.
Affinities. Examples include LSU game days, Coachella and Wimbledon.
Trends. Examples include TikTok, Instagram, Netflix and hashtags.
The company says its product discovery is powered by more than 1,000 lifestyle concepts, that it can scale curation across more than 20,000 stories and that its data is trained by 1,000 consumers like a retailer’s customers, along with experts. Its About page says the technology starts by measuring consumer motivations using social-scientific measurement and theory, then uses machine vision and natural language processing to predict consumer perceptions at scale.
Real people are the foundation, which separates the approach from systems that rely only on scraped web data. The lifestyle dataset is the intellectual property behind Katy Aucoin Curated For You.
Early Results: Revolve and Nearly 2x Conversion
The clearest proof points came from fashion retail. In the Stage 2 feature, Aucoin said that Curated For You’s contextual landing pages convert at nearly twice the rate of standard product category landing pages, and that the platform helps retailers grow their share of wallet for customers’ social events.
She gave one concrete example: the company helped grow Revolve’s revenue in its lifestyle categories by 120% year over year in the third quarter of that year. These are founder-reported figures from a 2024 investor blog post, so they should be treated as company results, not independent measurements.
The product also expanded beyond its starting point. Stage 2 notes that the company started with women’s apparel and expanded into men’s and children’s categories, with plans to deepen personalization across more retail categories. The long-term goal is a one-to-one experience based on each consumer’s plans and preferences. These early results gave Katy Aucoin Curated For You the evidence to raise its seed round.
Inside the $8.3 Million Seed Round
On September 16, 2025, Curated For You announced an $8.3 million seed round, according to RetailBoss. Dealroom’s summary says the round was led by Florida Funders, with participation from Mudita Venture Partners, Stage 2 Capital, Acronym VC, Dynamism Capital and Dundee Venture Capital.
Traded reports that the funding will support operational growth and product development, and that the platform serves retailers including Revolve, Lulus and Steve Madden. Dealroom adds that the startup has recently collaborated with Microsoft to integrate AI-curated shopping into Copilot, although that collaboration is described only in a short summary, so confirm details before citing it.
The Venture Codex lists $10.7 million raised across two funding rounds, which implies earlier funding of about $2.4 million before the seed. For more on how rounds like this shape young companies, see our Funding News section and our story on Bookit N Go’s Series A, another startup using AI to personalize consumer experiences. The seed round gives Katy Aucoin Curated For You the capital to move from early pilots to broader adoption.
The Investors Backing Katy Aucoin
The investor group blends venture funds and operator networks. Florida Funders, which describes itself as a hybrid of a venture capital fund and an investor network, led the round. Stage 2 Capital is a go-to-market-focused venture firm whose Catalyst program supported the company in 2024, and Aucoin has credited it with helping refine her go-to-market strategy and define North Star metrics.
The About page shows a broader set of investor logos, including Techstars, Gurtin, Geekdom Fund, AixVent and Dynamism, along with Dundee. Those logos are displayed without descriptions, so the exact roles are worth confirming.
Aucoin’s advice to other founders speaks to how she used this network: seek help earlier than you think you need to, because you are not the first person to face a given challenge. That approach explains why specialist, operator-heavy investors fit the company. That mix of capital and go-to-market support strengthens Katy Aucoin Curated For You.
Building the Leadership Team
Beyond the two co-founders, the About page lists an executive team of five: Aucoin, Mary Brendza, Brad Klingenberg, Cian Menzel-Jones and Greg Novak, without titles. Their LinkedIn announcements fill in some of the roles. Klingenberg wrote that he had joined as chief technology officer, saying the company is solving one of retail’s hardest problems: modeling customer intent, not just product attributes. Menzel-Jones joined as vice president of data science.
The hiring suggests where the company is investing. A CTO and a head of data science point to a technology and data-science core. The company is also recruiting commercially: a recent post from Aucoin advertises a founding account executive role, remote in the United States, selling a product that she says is already driving meaningful results for top retailers.
Headcount figures vary by directory. Dealroom lists about 69 employees, while ZoomInfo gives a range of 51 to 200, so no single number is reliable. A senior technical and data team is a major reason Katy Aucoin Curated For You can credibly claim its AI models are tuned to retail.
The Retailers and Integrations
The company’s homepage shows a row of retailer logos. The image file names appear to reference Free People, Anthropologie, Steve Madden, Urban Outfitters, Nuuly, Lulus, Revolve, Poshmark, Ariat, Banana Republic, Gap, FWRD, Bealls, Goop, Old Navy and Revolve Beauty. Because the logos are images with no text labels, confirm the current customer list with the company before quoting it.
Traded and Dealroom specifically name Revolve, Lulus and Steve Madden as customers, which is consistent with the homepage. The site describes how the data is used: through APIs and plugins across retail stores, web, social and email, and organic search. It also offers a Catalog Insights report that analyzes a retailer’s product data.
The deployment model matters. Retailers can add the data to their existing site search and merchandising rather than replacing their platform, which lowers the barrier to trying it. The integrations show how Katy Aucoin Curated For You fits into retail systems that already exist.
Where Curated For You Stands in the Market
Product discovery and personalization is a crowded field. Large platforms sell site search, recommendations and merchandising tools, and many retailers build in-house systems. The most common approaches rely on past clicks, purchase history and visual attributes.
Curated For You’s differentiator is the lifestyle layer. It focuses on the occasion and the reason for purchase, instead of only the item, and it builds the dataset from consumer research plus real-time external signals. It also works as a layer that plugs into existing systems.
The risks are real. A company selling data and tooling to retailers faces long sales cycles and depends on a small number of large accounts. Retailers may build competing capabilities, and big search vendors may add lifestyle features. Results such as the 120% lift or the nearly 2x conversion come from early accounts and may not hold for every retailer or category. In a crowded field, Katy Aucoin Curated For You competes on context.
Leadership Style and What’s Next
Aucoin’s public comments show a founder who starts with a customer insight and works backward to a system. Her boutique research, her emphasis on understanding why someone buys and her own advice to seek help early point to a research-driven, collaborative style. She also stresses scalability, telling Stage 2 that her main focus is building a robust go-to-market strategy that can articulate where the company is today and where it is headed.
The visible next steps are clear: expand across more retail categories, deepen the one-to-one personalization the company describes as its long-term goal, grow the sales team and extend into AI shopping surfaces such as Microsoft Copilot. The test will be proving that the lifestyle approach lifts sales across many retailers and categories, not just in fashion. That discipline will define the next chapter of Katy Aucoin Curated For You.
This article is for information only. Performance figures are reported by the company and its investors and have not been independently verified. Check current details with the company before relying on them.
Lessons From the Katy Aucoin Curated For You Journey
The Katy Aucoin Curated For You journey offers five practical lessons for founders.
First, study the best human version of your product. Two years spent understanding boutiques gave Aucoin a model to scale.
Second, build a proprietary asset. A consumer-trained lifestyle dataset is harder to copy than a feature.
Third, answer the “why.” Intent, not just behavior, is what makes recommendations feel relevant.
Fourth, make adoption easy. APIs and plugins let retailers add the data without replacing their systems.
Fifth, use your investors’ strengths. Go-to-market-focused backers helped the company define metrics and scale its sales approach.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Katy Aucoin?
Katy Aucoin is the co-founder and CEO of Curated For You, an Austin company that uses lifestyle data and AI to help retailers match products to the reasons customers shop. She previously worked at EY and founded dearduck.
What is the Katy Aucoin Curated For You story?
It is the story of a data consultant who worked with large retailers, saw that they were reacting to clicks instead of understanding intent, studied local boutiques for two years and built a platform that scales that understanding to e-commerce, backed by an $8.3 million seed round.
What is Curated For You?
Curated For You is an Austin startup that sells retailers lifestyle data and AI merchandising tools so products appear for occasion-based searches such as weddings, game days and vacations.
Who founded Curated For You?
Katy Aucoin and Mary Brendza co-founded the company. Aucoin is CEO and Brendza is listed as chief operating officer.
How much funding has Curated For You raised?
The company announced an $8.3 million seed round in September 2025, led by Florida Funders. The Venture Codex lists $10.7 million raised across two rounds in total.
Who invests in Curated For You?
Investors include Florida Funders, Mudita Venture Partners, Stage 2 Capital, Acronym VC, Dynamism Capital and Dundee Venture Capital.
Which retailers use Curated For You?
Press coverage names Revolve, Lulus and Steve Madden, and the company’s homepage displays a wider set of retailer logos.
What is lifestyle data?
It is the company’s dataset connecting products to the reasons people buy, organized into places, affinities and trends, such as Nashville bachelorette trips, LSU game days and TikTok trends.
What results has the company reported?
In a 2024 investor feature, Aucoin said contextual landing pages convert at nearly twice the rate of standard category pages and that Revolve’s lifestyle category revenue grew 120% year over year in one quarter. These are company-reported figures.
Where is Curated For You based?
The company is based in Austin, Texas.
Conclusion
Katy Aucoin Curated For You shows how a consulting insight can become a data company. By noticing that retailers knew what customers clicked but not why they shopped, and by studying how small boutiques serve their customers, Aucoin built a platform that ties products to places, affinities and trends. With an $8.3 million seed, a growing technical team and early results at fashion retailers, the company is trying to make online discovery feel personal. The open question is whether the lifestyle approach holds across more retailers and categories at scale. If it does, Aucoin may help change how online stores decide what to show.
For more founder journeys in AI and software, see Shijia Liao’s Fish Audio, Runlayer’s Series A and Jen Phan’s Passionfroot on Denote Press, or browse all Founder Stories.
