There always seems to be another ceiling to break.
In the U.S., for example, only a fraction of venture capital has gone to solely female-founded startups. In fact, historical data points to a decline, with startups that only have female founders accounting for 0.8 percent as of 2026 as opposed to 1.8 percent in 2008, PitchBook data showed. The number goes significantly higher—as high as over 50 percent this year—if there were also male founders in the team.
It’s against this backdrop that the New York Fashion Tech Lab (NYFTL) featured its largest group of female-led tech startups to-date since it began more than a decade ago. This year the startups are pushing the envelope in business-to-business retail technology by applying AI across a wide range of applications from fraud detection in product returns to agents in charge of quality control.
NYFTL is using a revised format this year. Instead of the traditional single-cohort model, it’s debuting “The Collective” with 11 tech startups which include Maeve AI, a co-pilot that turns disconnected data into actionable insights, TruRating, which provides consumer intelligence at the moment of purchase, and SeeMe Index, an identity measurement platform.
“I think it’s a great turnout,” Jackie Trebilcock, managing director at the tech lab, told Sourcing Journal during the event. “We’re doing this for the first time during New York Fashion Week,” she said, noting that the lab typically hosts this NYFTL in June until it decided to launch “The Collective” at a time when the rest of the industry celebrates the best of fashion.
“We invited retailers, investors, and press to come and see what they do as a platform for exposure,” she added. “They’re all solving different sort of problems for the industry.”
For example, Rediem, a community and loyalty platform, is addressing the growing impersonality of commerce as new technologies, while efficient, pull brands further away from establishing emotional connections with the customers that make their success possible in the first place.
The startup, which is making its foray into the fashion world, adds an interactive layer to a brand’s online presence, which essentially allows it to issue “challenges” for its customers to do in exchange of loyalty points. For example, a sportswear brand can invite users to post workout videos, which is then shared with the rest of that brand’s community.
On average, Rediem increases a customer’s lifetime value (LTV) by an average of 75 percent, according to Sarah Ganzenmuller, Rediem co-founder and CEO. “The brands that are coming to us are kind of recognizing how important brand and community has become, especially with how shopping has shifted in the last five years,” she told Sourcing Journal at the sideline of the event.
“People are buying through marketplaces like Amazon or TikTok Shop. In the future, they can be buying through AI agents. So as brands become further and further away from the end customer, we help them have an own channel that they can communicate their values continuously, engage, and create that emotional connection that we ultimately know drives LTV,” she added.
NYFTL is the kind of exposure that can plant the seeds for fruitful partnerships. The lab gave the public a glimpse of innovative technologies, including, for example, Wyllo, a risk scoring platform for returns; Veristyle, which applies a retail intelligence layer to unlock AI-native search and discovery; Aiuta, which transforms how brands create content and shoppers experience fashion visually; and Spur, which uses AI-browsing agents to automate quality control for brands’ online content.
This year’s tech lab also featured Hawcx, a passwordless authentication system for both humans and agents; Siren, which captures post-purchase data to close the visibility gap for brands and retailers; and Atronous, a product data management and upstream intelligence engine for global commerce.