Retrofit

Executive Summary

Retrofit is a YC W25 pre-seed startup building an AI-curated vintage fashion marketplace — a real problem in a real, fast-growing market, but very early innings. The market thesis is solid: US secondhand apparel hit $56B in 2025 and is growing at 14% YoY, with vintage and curated resale as the breakout sub-segment. The team is a credible Stanford MBA + Google engineer duo, but founding experience is thin and the company's single disclosed traction metric — a 4.8/5 rating from 1,000+ reviews — is entirely unverifiable from any third-party source. The biggest risk isn't the market; it's that Thrilling has been building the same model for five years with $8.5M raised, Retrofit has only $500K and a multi-month runway, and AI curation is rapidly becoming table stakes across every major incumbent.