Lock screen platform Glance launches AI-powered shopping experience, gets fresh backing from Google

Lock screen platform Glance announced today that it is launching a new generative AI-based shopping experience. It will suggest different outfits on a user’s personalized avatar. The company is partnering with Google to use the company’s Gemini models and Vertex AI to deploy the experience.

Separately, the company also got fresh backing from Google — which was already an investor — according to people familiar with the matter. Glance and Google didn’t comment on the funding details.

Glance said that it is already experimenting with the new-gen AI-powered experience in the U.S. through a new app called Glance AI. The startup plans to roll out this experience to all users in the U.S. and India in the coming months.

Google is trying to have more companies use its Gemini and Cloud platforms for AI implementation in India. The company is also investing in startups in parallel. Most recently, it backed the webtoon platform Toonsutra.

Glance’s CEO, Naveen Tiwari, said that the app’s model understands fashion trends and personalizes suggestions for you.

“Think of this experience as looking through a fashion magazine with the latest apparel, where you are the model on each page,” Tiwari said.

Tiwari added that the company wants to build a discovery engine and a feed so that you can explore different items — and buy the ones you like the most.

Users who download the app will have to upload a selfie of themselves, select their gender, hair length, and ethnicity, and specify their body type during the onboarding process. Subsequently, the app will generate a model for you using AI. Glance will then show you different looks on your lock screen. You can tap on a button on the lock screen to see some suggestions from the web that match the AI-generated avatar’s apparel.

Glance fetches these results from the ecommerce sites it has partnered with. At launch, the company said it has 400 partners. The startup takes a cut if the customer completes a purchase thanks to affiliate links.

In the Glance AI app, users can scroll through multiple outfit suggestions and even put them on the lock screen. On the app, apart from apparel, you would also get suggestions about other items present in the scene, such as a guitar or a candle. But at the moment, you can’t purchase them. In the future, users will be able to tune their suggestions using an upvote/downvote-like mechanism along with using chat to find inspiration for a specific look.

Glance, which has over 300 million active users in markets like India, Japan, and Indonesia, primarily displays its content on Android-powered phones’ lock screens. While India is the largest user base for the company, it piloted its lock screen solution in the U.S. last year in partnership with Motorola. The company has started making inroads into showing this content on smart TVs as well.

Companies and startups are trying to solve personalization in the ecommerce world through AI-powered search and agents, starting with tech giants like Google and Amazon. Glance aims to be an app that inspires users to buy clothes.