A new app called The Mall launched in 2026 with the goal of consolidating online shopping into a single personalized feed, allowing users to track sales, restocks, and new drops across thousands of retailers in one place.
The app was founded in October 2025 by Ellie Konsker and Shreya Halder, who connected through a female founders circle in Los Angeles. Konsker, whose background includes roles at Tom Ford and Carla Otto, identified the problem while running a sustainable fashion marketplace. Halder studied computer science at Stanford. The two co-founded The Mall together, with Halder serving as CEO and Konsker as COO.
Rather than partnering with brands or using official APIs, The Mall scrapes retail websites to pull in full product catalogs and monitor pricing changes. Users build a virtual mall by selecting favorite brands at signup; the app then sends push notifications for sales, restocks, and drops. Users can also add any brand by submitting its Instagram or TikTok handle, and The Mall will locate and scrape the corresponding e-commerce site. The current database covers more than 10,000 brands. On the backend, the app uses large language models and custom models to label and index products, enabling search. When a user is ready to purchase, the brand’s checkout page opens within the app — there is no affiliate model.
The app is free for consumers. The Mall plans to generate revenue through a B2B data tool for brands, expected to launch later in the summer of 2026, offering anonymized and aggregated analytics on shopper behavior and seasonal assortment trends. The founders also described a longer-term advertising model involving sponsored placements and brand subscriptions within the feed.
The Mall completed early beta testing with 4,500 users and is currently available on an invite-only basis through the App Store. A broad public launch is expected by the end of summer 2026.
Source: TechCrunch