Codes of Culture | Issue 110
The business of the New York Knicks.
Welcome back to Codes of Culture. I’m Ashumi Sanghvi.
New Space Capital’s AGM event in Luxembourg has made me dive deep into all things space. SpaceX’s upcoming IPO will make Elon Musk the first-ever trillionaire and, more importantly, a lot of investors and employees multi-millionaires, flooding the market with capital and excitement to start many more new ventures across a whopping $360 billion new space economy.
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📖In this issue:
Sephora is the first one to move beauty into Google’s AI layer.
The business of the New York Knicks.
The Mall is building a universal feed for fashion.
Vêtir raised $5.5 million to bring AI styling into luxury.
Pfizer and Eli Lilly are betting on AI drug discovery.
1. BEAUTY, RETAIL AND THE AI INTERFACE
Sephora is the first one to move beauty into Google’s AI layer.
What’s happening: Sephora has become the first prestige beauty retailer to enable end-to-end shopping within Google through Agentic Checkout: product discovery, ingredient queries, basket-building, and purchase without leaving the platform. The integration connects to Sephora’s existing AI infrastructure, including AI Beauty Chat, Smart Skin Scan, and a skin diagnostic tool, completing more than 180,000 scans per month. Sephora has 80 million active Beauty Insider members globally. Future phases will bring loyalty personalisation into the AI experience.
TLDR:
Sephora is the first prestige beauty retailer inside Google’s Agentic Checkout. The transaction layer is already in place.
Its 80 million Beauty Insider members give Sephora a substantial first-party data asset to extend into the AI interface.
More than 20% of consumers who use Sephora’s AI Beauty Chat make a purchase the same day. The commercial signal supports the platform push.
AI-native discovery inside LLMs depends on multimodal optimisation: text, imagery, and video tuned for how AI surfaces products.
Sephora’s positioning is clear. The AI platform extends the advisor relationship and carries that service model into a new channel.
Why it matters: This sets a benchmark for beauty commerce inside AI platforms. The strategic edge sits in data architecture, content quality, and platform integration. Sephora enters this shift with a loyalty base large enough to shape personalisation at scale, and with enough behavioural data to make the interface more useful over time. As discovery moves into AI environments, the brands that surface well will be the ones with depth behind the product page.
2. SPORT, CULTURE AND COMMERCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE
The business of the New York Knicks.
What’s happening: The Knicks swept the Cleveland Cavaliers on 25 May to reach the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999, creating a cultural moment with measurable commercial force. Timothée Chalamet’s courtside appearances have generated $52.9 million in media impact value this season, according to Launchmetrics; Kylie Jenner’s attendance since late April has generated $33 million. The Knicks franchise was valued at $9.75 billion in October 2025, up 30% year on year. Playoff revenue in 2025 reached $115 million, and this Finals run could drive gross revenue to $180 million. Kith, the team’s creative director since 2022, has released a Finals capsule; Saie Beauty is an official in-arena partner; and Abu Dhabi tourism holds the jersey patch.
TLDR:
Chalamet, Jenner, Stiller, Swift, and Kelce have turned courtside attendance into measurable media value, running far ahead of a typical sponsorship readout.
Saie Beauty entered the arena space and is now seeing a direct lift in retail sales through visibility at MSG.
Kith’s Knicks x Nike Air Max 95 collab dropped this week via draw entry at $220, with a six-month delivery window. Demand is already locked in.
Pinterest searches for “courtside outfits” and “Knicks game outfit women” are rising sharply, pointing to a growing fashion and female fan economy around the team.
Abu Dhabi’s jersey patch places a state-backed tourism brand inside one of the most globally broadcast cultural sports moments of the season.
Why it matters: The Knicks are showing how a franchise can operate as a layered commercial platform across fashion, beauty, tourism, and media. The partner stack at MSG extends far beyond sponsorship inventory. What matters is adjacency to the moment, and the brands that entered with a point of view are now benefiting from cultural momentum that feels organic on camera and scalable off it. This is what a sports asset looks like when it starts behaving like a luxury and lifestyle ecosystem.
3. COMMERCE INFRASTRUCTURE AND DISCOVERY
The Mall is building a universal feed for fashion.
What’s happening: The Mall, founded in October 2025 by Sreya Halder and Ellie Konsker, has launched on an invite-only referral basis with a database of more than 10,000 brands and 4,500 beta testers. The app scrapes retail websites to pull full catalogues and track pricing, sales, restocks, and drops in real time, then uses LLMs and custom models to label inventory and make it searchable across the full database. Users build a personal brand feed and receive push notifications about changes. Any brand can be added by sharing its Instagram or TikTok handle. A B2B data tool for brands launches this summer.
TLDR:
The Mall aggregates catalogue data from more than 10,000 brands through scraping, bypassing the need for API access or formal partnerships.
LLMs label and categorise products across the full database, creating search and comparison at the inventory level.
The B2B product coming this summer gives brands aggregated data on clicks and assortment. The consumer app is building the audience layer first.
Discovery is social as well as searchable: personal brand feeds create network effects around taste and recommendation.
The founding thesis is a universal shopping feed, turning fragmented brand browsing into a single searchable system.
Why it matters: The Mall makes visible where digital commerce is heading. Discovery, comparison, and recommendation are moving further away from the brand’s owned environment and into third-party interfaces that aggregate supply. The commercial model sits in the data layer, while the consumer product builds habit and reach. For brands, this raises the importance of how inventory is structured, labelled, surfaced, and compared across external systems. The interface is shifting, and the next advantage will come from being legible inside it.
4. LUXURY TECH AND CLIENTELING
Vêtir raised $5.5 million to bring AI styling into luxury.
What’s happening: Vêtir, the AI-powered luxury wardrobe platform founded by Kate Davidson Hudson, closed a $5.5 million Series A at a $150 million valuation, reporting 200% month-on-month organic user growth over the past year, 9x year-on-year revenue growth, and average order values above $2,500. The platform combines a digital wardrobe for consumers, a stylist dashboard for professionals managing at least $1 million in annual client spend, and an enterprise product for brands. Its lead enterprise tool, Style This Piece, connects to a brand’s catalogue and builds complete looks around a single item, with a conversational AI stylist allowing the client to refine in real time.
TLDR:
Style This Piece turns a single product page into a full-look selling moment, expanding the basket through styling logic.
Vêtir trained its model on five years of data from what it describes as the top 1% luxury consumers. That behavioural layer is the company’s core asset.
The stylist access threshold is $1 million in annual client spending. The product is built around existing VIC relationships.
Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s are moving in the same direction with AI shopping assistants. The architecture is spreading across tiers of retail.
Brunello Cucinelli’s AI-driven site is already adapting the journey around shopper intent. Early adoption is beginning to define the baseline.
Why it matters: Luxury clienteling is becoming a software layer as well as a human one. The relevance here lies in how product, styling, and relationship management are starting to merge into a single interface. One useful detail in the same briefing is Launchmetrics’ finding that AI-generated answers around Watches and Wonders leaned most heavily on traditional media, news sources, and niche editorial. That makes authority, consistency, and editorial presence more commercially relevant inside AI discovery. The brands that have built those inputs are likely to surface with more clarity when a high-intent customer asks what to buy.
5. FRONTIER CAPITAL AND BIOTECH
Pfizer and Eli Lilly are betting on AI drug discovery.
What’s happening: Chai Discovery, the San Francisco AI biotech founded in 2024, has signed deals with both Eli Lilly and Pfizer to design novel therapeutics using its antibody AI model, and is now in talks to raise $400 million at a $3.4 billion valuation, after reaching a $1.3 billion valuation at its Series B in December. The company’s Chai 2 model designs antibodies from scratch, targeting proteins previously considered undruggable. When Chai released the model last June, nearly 20 pharma companies reached out within days. General Catalyst, OpenAI, and Thrive Capital are among its backers.
TLDR:
Chai has now signed with both Eli Lilly and Pfizer. Two of pharma’s largest buyers have moved early on the same platform.
Chai 2 designs de novo antibodies, generating new molecules instead of modifying existing ones. The commercial interest sits around targets that have historically been difficult to address.
Chai was valued at $1.3 billion in December and is now in talks at $3.4 billion. The valuation step-up follows visible commercial validation.
Eli Lilly’s Chai deal sits alongside its $1 billion NVIDIA co-innovation lab and its $2.75 billion collaboration with Insilico Medicine. The pattern points to a coordinated AI discovery stack.
General Catalyst’s view is explicit: biopharma partners working with Chai in 2026 could have first-in-class molecules in clinical trials by the end of 2027.
Why it matters: Chai reads as an infrastructure signal. The pattern across Lilly’s AI spend, the Isomorphic Labs deals, and now the dual Lilly and Pfizer commitment to Chai points to a market that is buying into the discovery layer early. Value is beginning to concentrate around platforms that become embedded in biologics development, accumulate proprietary data, and sit upstream of the clinical pipeline. Chai’s position with two of the largest pharma buyers suggests it is moving quickly into that role.