Inside Ria Chakrabarti’s journey from AI research to launching Veristyle, the personal styling platform turning heads with 100,000 users worldwide
By AB Wire
In an industry often dominated by glossy magazines, seasonal runways, and high-profile influencers, Ria Chakrabarti is building something fundamentally different: a deeply personal, data-driven approach to fashion styling — powered by cutting-edge AI.
Veristyle, the startup she founded in 2023, is not another trend-chasing fashion app. Instead, it aims to democratize expert styling, specifically, the kind that takes into account individual physical traits, proportions, and personal features.
And it’s catching on fast. “We got over 10,000 users in our first month,” Chakrabarti told The American Bazaar in a recent interview. “And less than a year later, we were at over 60,000. Now, we’re hovering around 100,000 users globally.”
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But the journey didn’t begin in a fashion house or startup accelerator. It started with a personal experiment.
After graduating from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland with a degree in computer science and management, Chakrabarti continued working with her university supervisor on advanced computer vision research. The work got published and opened her eyes to new possibilities. “It was really cutting-edge, really interesting stuff around segmentation techniques in computer vision,” she recalls.
The idea to apply that research to fashion came from a personal place. “I just thought I could try applying it to these personal styling methods that genuinely changed my life —gave me a lot of confidence and felt really empowering.” Inspired by her own experiences and the active communities she found on Reddit and Facebook focused on styling based on physical traits, Chakrabarti built a tool. At first, it was just for herself and her friends. But it quickly evolved.
Veristyle’s technology analyzes a user’s physical attributes and pairs them with styling principles to make personalized clothing recommendations. The platform mimics what an expert stylist might suggest — but delivers it instantly, at scale.
Though she’s a solo founder, Chakrabarti is quick to emphasize the strength of her team. “I brought together an incredible team pretty much as soon as I was ready to take the app to market,” she says. That team includes veterans from iconic fashion brands like Burberry, Net-a-Porter, Fendi, Nike, and they’ve played a major role in Veristyle’s rapid growth.
“They just understand the algorithm so well,” she says, referring to social media and digital marketing strategies. That savvy helped Veristyle attract a sizable following — now more than 20,000 across platforms — and convert it into a loyal user base.
Today, Veristyle is a team of five: Chakrabarti, her CTO (the only man on the team), and three other women, all from diverse fashion and tech backgrounds.
Before launching Veristyle, Chakrabarti worked as a software engineer at the London Stock Exchange Group. “I was doing Veristyle at the same time,” she says. In 2024, she finally left her full-time job to focus on Veristyle entirely.
The move paid off. While the initial plan was to build an app to refine their models and attract a few thousand users to validate a B2B strategy, the product exploded organically. “We got featured in Vogue,” Chakrabarti says. “And that’s been instrumental for us.” That exposure brought unexpected inbound interest — from major billion-dollar fashion companies. “We have about eight billion-dollar companies alone in our pipeline,” she adds. “I can’t mention names in a publication, but they approached us.”
That surge of interest prompted a strategic pivot.
“We realized really quickly that these billion-dollar companies had their own billion-dollar problems that we could help solve,” Chakrabarti explains. But those problems, like personalization at enterprise scale, are complex.
Direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands, she says, operate at a scale where Veristyle’s personalization engine can have a measurable and immediate impact. “It’s just much easier to solve personalization issues at that sort of scale.”
The team is currently working with three DTC brands and planning to launch a community platform to further refine their offering. “We’re hoping to bring that live by the end of the year,” Chakrabarti says.
Though Veristyle saw early traction with users and grew its own marketplace — now hosting over 50 brands — the company is effectively raising capital to pivot toward an entirely new business model.
“We initially raised from angels and also got quite a bit of grant funding through TiE and Nvidia,” she says. “Now we’ve opened our first institutional round.”
This funding round is geared toward building out the B2B product and scaling pilots with interested brands. “It’s almost like we’re raising for an entirely new business direction.”
Chakrabarti’s worldview has shaped Veristyle in subtle but profound ways. Born and raised in the Washington, D.C., area, she attended Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, long ranked as one of the best high schools in the country. But for college, she decided to step out of the U.S. and explore something different.
“I really wanted to be around a more diverse peer group than most American universities offered,” she says. That decision led her to the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, a school known both for its academic rigor and its eclectic student body. “It was 40% international, people from all kinds of backgrounds. From princesses to people from poor towns in Scotland,” she says, laughing. “It was the best decision of my life. I have a friend in every country now.”
That global mindset has translated into Veristyle’s user base. Though the company is registered in the U.S., it initially operated out of London and still maintains a worldwide reach.
As Veristyle positions itself for growth, Chakrabarti remains focused on staying close to what started it all: the idea that style should be empowering, not intimidating. “Personal styling changed how I saw myself,” she says. “I want to give that feeling to as many people as possible.”
In an industry long criticized for its exclusionary beauty standards, Veristyle’s approach feels refreshingly inclusive. It’s not about chasing runway trends—it’s about understanding real people.
With its unique combination of AI smarts, fashion expertise, and an empathetic founder at the helm, Veristyle is making personal styling less of a luxury and more of a daily tool. And for a generation that values authenticity and personalization, that might just be the future of fashion.
(This story has been updated.)
