Purva Gupta

Co-Founder & CEO Lily AI

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Purva Gupta is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Lily AI, a retail artificial intelligence company she started in 2015. It addresses a mismatch that costs retailers a great deal of money and that nobody in the industry disputes: the words retailers use to describe products are not the words shoppers use to find them. A merchandiser’s catalogue says “midi dress, viscose, navy”; a shopper searches for “work dress that doesn’t wrinkle.” Lily AI uses generative AI to rewrite raw product data into consumer-relevant attributes, so that search, recommendation, and advertising systems can actually connect the two. Gupta was raised in Rajasthan, studied at two of India’s most selective institutions, and worked with the Khosla Impact Fund before founding the company.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Lily AI in 2015 and leads it as CEO, building a product content optimization platform for retailers and brands.
• Named a Bay Area finalist for EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2024 and to Ad Age’s Leading Women 2024.
• Tory Burch Fellow and a member of Inc.’s Female Founders 250.
• Recognized among AiR’s Top AI Leaders, with Lily AI named to the Deloitte Technology Fast 500.
• Led the company through funding rounds including a $25 million Series B and a $20 million Series B-1.
• Serves as a Venture Partner at Unshackled Ventures, which backs immigrant founders.

Professional Journey

Gupta was born into an Indian business family and raised in Rajasthan. She studied economics at Shri Ram College of Commerce at the University of Delhi, among the most selective commerce schools in India, graduating in 2009, and took an internship at Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide. In 2013 she began an MBA at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, and worked with the Khosla Impact Fund, the impact investing arm associated with Vinod Khosla — an early exposure to how venture investors assess businesses that she would later be on the other side of.

She co-founded Lily AI in 2015. The company’s founding observation came from the gap between how retailers catalogue their products and how customers actually look for them. Retail product data is written by merchandisers and manufacturers for internal purposes, describing fabric composition, colourway codes, and style numbers. Shoppers search using occasion, fit, feeling, and problem — a dress for a wedding, jeans that work for a tall frame, something comfortable for a long flight. Search and recommendation engines sit between those two vocabularies and fail at the translation, which means products that would have sold are never surfaced.

Lily AI’s platform generates consumer-relevant attributes from raw product data, enriching catalogue information so that a retailer’s own site search, recommendation systems, and paid advertising all operate on language that matches customer intent. The application expanded with the arrival of generative AI, which made large-scale product content optimization tractable in a way earlier approaches were not, and the company positioned itself as the layer that bridges consumers, merchants, marketers, and machines.

Gupta has raised a $25 million Series B and a $20 million Series B-1 among other rounds, and has accumulated substantial recognition: a Bay Area finalist position for EY Entrepreneur Of The Year in 2024, Ad Age’s Leading Women 2024, a Tory Burch Fellowship, inclusion in Inc.’s Female Founders 250 and AiR’s Top AI Leaders, and a Deloitte Technology Fast 500 listing for the company. She serves as a Venture Partner at Unshackled Ventures, which invests in immigrant founders, and speaks internationally on retail and AI including at the World Retail Congress.

Education

Indian School of Business

MBA, Finance

Shri Ram College of Commerce, University of Delhi

Bachelor’s degree, Economics (graduated 2009)