Stefano Zeppieri

Stefano Zeppieri is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Computer Science at Sapienza University of Rome. His advisor is Prof. Emanuele Panizzi.

Over the last few years, he has been directly involved in several high-profile projects relating to AI technology applied to retail. In 2015, while in high school, together with a friend, they decided to see if they could identify recurrent trends or data points to help them make informed decisions about when and what limited edition sneakers to purchase for investment purposes. He eventually created a scoring system to compare items objectively and assess the likelihood that they would increase in price in the following months.

His tool was highly successful in directing their business decisions. In 2016 they launched HypeAnalyzer to the general public in a version that did not display the outcomes of his systematic “technical analysis”. Its primary purpose, from their point of view, was to gather further information on limited edition products by tracking clicks, page views, and shares.

In 2018, at the age of 20, frustrated by the need for more understanding of the Italian public on the sneakers resale market, with three other friends, he decided to launch the first limited edition sneakers store in Italy. dropout® opened in 2018 and was an instant success. People come in from all over the country to see its sneaker gems in real life. Opened with no external funding nor strategy advisors, in October 2021, they launched their first funding round, raising 750K€ via equity crowdfunding in 6 days, with the participation of 2 VC funds and 130 retail investors. Today dropout is located in the center of Milan and is quickly expanding through its clear approach based on objective decisions made through the help of data. dropout’s pricing and marketing are AI-driven and dictated by HypeAnalyzer algorithms. Outputs of the analysis tool include buying rates and dynamic pricing points for sneakers, which are affected by metrics such as volatility and demand that are calculated objectively.

Despite the name of his startup, Stefano has a Master’s degree with maximum grades cum laude in Computer Science from Sapienza University of Rome, at which he also successfully concluded the excellence path. His research focuses on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). His Ph.D. research project is focused on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to generate parking data in a privacy-oriented manner. In the summer of 2022, he participated in the Billion User Cloud Application (BUCA) summer school, which is Google’s summer school about building billion-users-grade applications.

Contacts

• E-Mail: zeppieri@di.uniroma1.it