Product search featuring recommendations from creators you trust.
Lumona is a product search engine that brings you high-quality recommendations from the creators you trust. Instead of you wading through pages of clickbait Google results or adding "reddit” to your search, we serve you the products you would otherwise spend hours researching for. As the internet and search have evolved, it has become increasingly obvious that searching the whole internet is now a bug, not a feature. In today’s era of constant information overload, finding the best products to meet your needs amid a sea of SEO-spam and sneaky advertising has never been harder. Imagine trying to find an effective skincare routine, currently you have to comb through countless YouTube videos and Reddit threads to understand the steps of what an ideal routine looks like for you before even deciding which products you want. Lumona simplifies those steps into one search, showing the best products for you, as recommended by the content creators you watch and the communities you visit every day, in one place. We have been working together since meeting during our sophomore year at MIT, recently winning first place at the HackMIT hackathon this past September. As part of MIT’s student-run Web Lab class, we taught over 300 students modern web development. Growing up in the age of social media, we’ve always been influenced by content creators in the products we buy, and have spent endless hours learning how to research and shop for the products we need amid an internet drowning in noise. We are committed to fixing product search—so that you never have to add “reddit” to the end of your searches ever again.
Active Founders
Dylan Walker
Dylan is the co-founder and CEO of Lumona. He is from Ventura, CA and studied computer science and engineering at MIT. He gained insights into how systems and APIs at scale work with experience at Google and Stripe. Not having exposure to traditional avenues of applying to elite colleges, he relied on Reddit and Google to learn about how to maximize his chances of being admitted. Since then, he's been focused on enabling everyone to pursue their goals and equalize the playing field.
Qiong Zhou Huang
Qiong is the Co-Founder and CTO of Lumona. He previously studied Computer Science at MIT, where he conducted Machine Learning research at the McGovern Institute of Brain and Cognitive Science. He was also co-president of MIT web.lab, a group that teaches web development to hundreds of MIT students over the winter semester. Qiong has extensive experience building products that prioritize user experience, working at startups in diverse areas including computer vision, remote work, and edtech.
Philena Liu
Philena is the Co-founder and CFO of Lumona. She studied CS with a minor in Math at MIT, where she was one of the lecturers in a student-run web-development class (web.lab) and the Tournament Co-Director of one of the most prestigious math tournaments in the world (HMMT). She had also worked on NLP and ML research projects before exploring LLM-assisted search with Lumona.
Company Launches
TLDR - Our Ask (Try it!)
Lumona simplifies your product research by serving Reddit and YouTube reviews directly alongside products.
🔎 Search on Lumona for skincare products at lumona.ai
Join our Discord to chat with us or reach out to us via email (founders@lumona.ai), through the feedback button (top-left), Twitter, or YouTube.
🏋️ Who We Are
I’m Dylan (center), co-founder and CEO of Lumona, a product search engine that brings you high-quality recommendations from the creators you trust. Instead of wading through pages of clickbait Google results or adding ‘reddit’ to your search, we deliver you products you’d otherwise spend hours researching for by compiling Reddit and YouTube reviews about the product.
I’m working on Lumona alongside two fellow MIT Class of 2024s, Philena Liu (left), our CPO, and Qiong Zhou Huang (right), our CTO. We have been working together since meeting during our sophomore year at MIT, recently winning HackMIT this past September. As part of MIT’s student-run Web Lab class, we taught over 300 students modern web development. As Gen-Zers ourselves, we’ve grown up being influenced by the content creators we watch every day and buying products online. We’ve spent hours combing over r/SkincareAddiction posts and watching YouTube videos to get to the skincare routines we have right now, and that’s where we want to help.
❌ The Problem and ✅ Solution
Product research takes time. As a teenager, I had acne that was painful and affected my self-esteem, and to solve this problem I was willing to spend hours looking for the right product because if I was wrong I would break out for weeks and make it worse. Before Lumona, I would’ve had to do this:
- Research on Reddit, YouTube, and Google for what makes a good face wash for the skin type I have (combination)
- Search Amazon for “face wash for combination skin”
- Look into each of the individual Amazon products
- Cross-reference each product with reviews about it on Reddit and YouTube
- Reddit: Google Search “{product name} reddit”
- YouTube: Search on popular skincare influencer’s channels for the product
- Decide which product I want to buy
Let’s look at that same process with Lumona:
-
Search on Lumona for “face wash for combination skin”
-
Research each product on Lumona, with the Reddit reviews and YouTube videos about the product already being associated with it
-
Decide which product I want to buy
By serving Reddit and YouTube reviews directly alongside the product, Lumona simplifies the product research process into one tab and search while giving you more confidence when you’re buying a product. Right now, we currently support skincare, and are excited to see what you think!
🙏 Asks
Search on Lumona for your skincare products here.
We’d love to hear your feedback! Join our Discord to chat with us or reach out to us via email (founders@lumona.ai), through the feedback button (top-left), Twitter, or YouTube.