Sowmiya Chocka Narayanan

Co-Founder Lily AI

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Sowmiya Chocka Narayanan is a co-founder of Lily AI, a retail product-intelligence company built on a deceptively unglamorous insight: that most ecommerce search and recommendation fails not because the ranking model is weak but because the underlying product data is impoverished. A retailer’s catalogue describes a dress the way a merchandiser writes a purchase order, while a shopper searches for it the way a person describes what they want to wear. Lily AI uses computer vision and natural-language processing to re-attribute product catalogues in the customer’s vocabulary, and sells that enriched data back into onsite search, paid search and social advertising. As the technical co-founder alongside CEO Purva Gupta, Chocka Narayanan served as Chief Technology Officer and built the engineering, data-science and machine-learning organisation behind that platform. She and Gupta were named to Inc. magazine’s 2024 Female Founders list. Her own path into the problem ran through a decade of engineering at Texas Instruments, Yahoo, Pocket Gems and Box, a sequence that moved steadily from silicon toward consumer-facing software.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Lily AI with Purva Gupta and served as its Chief Technology Officer, leading engineering, data science and machine learning.
• Named, with Gupta, to Inc. magazine’s seventh annual Female Founders list in April 2024.
• Built the platform behind Lily AI’s product-attribution work for retailers including Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, J.Crew and ThredUp.
• Wrote for TechCrunch in November 2019 on the AI stack reshaping retail personalisation, bylined as Lily AI’s co-founder and CTO.
• Spoke at Inc. Founders House in Austin in 2025 on future-proofing businesses for the AI revolution.
• Engineered at Texas Instruments, Yahoo, Pocket Gems and Box before founding Lily AI.
• Mentored engineering leaders on the Plato platform for roughly four years.

Professional Journey

Chocka Narayanan trained as an engineer in India, taking a bachelor’s degree in information technology at PSG College of Technology, and then emigrated to the United States for a master’s in electrical and computer engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. Her early career sat close to the hardware: a software engineering role at Texas Instruments, followed by a move into consumer web engineering at Yahoo.

From there she moved through two very different startup environments. At Pocket Gems she worked on mobile engineering during the period when mobile free-to-play games were among the most demanding consumer applications being built, and at Box she worked on the enterprise content-management platform as it scaled. That combination — consumer-scale mobile front ends and enterprise-grade infrastructure — is an unusual pairing, and it maps directly onto what Lily AI later had to do: ingest and process retailer catalogues at enterprise scale while serving results into consumer-facing experiences where latency and relevance are judged in milliseconds.

She co-founded Lily AI with Purva Gupta and took the CTO role. Gupta’s founding story is the commercial one, grounded in an observation about how women shop; Chocka Narayanan’s contribution was to make that observation computable. The engineering problem is attribution at catalogue scale: taking a product image and a thin merchandiser-written description and deriving the hundreds of customer-vocabulary attributes — occasion, fit, fabric hand, aesthetic — that a shopper might actually search on. Doing that reliably across millions of SKUs, and keeping it current as catalogues turn over each season, is what the platform is. She wrote about the shape of that stack publicly for TechCrunch in 2019.

The company’s commercial position has since broadened from onsite search into paid channels, where the same enriched attributes improve product feeds for Google and Meta advertising. Lily AI publicly claims nine-figure revenue lift for large retail customers, and counts Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, J.Crew and ThredUp among them. In April 2024 both co-founders were named to Inc.’s Female Founders list, and she continued to represent the company publicly into 2025, appearing at Inc. Founders House in Austin.

The most recent evidence placing her in the CTO role dates to early 2025. Lily AI’s current public materials name only Purva Gupta among its leadership, and no source outside professional-network listings confirms the CTO title today. Her co-founder status is not in question; her present operating role is not established, and is recorded here as unconfirmed rather than assumed.

Education

The University of Texas at Austin

Master of Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering

PSG College of Technology

Bachelor of Technology, Information Technology