Amsterdam-based Pixyle AI, a company that provides image recognition solutions for fashion retailers, announced on Thursday, December 8, that it has secured €1M in a Seed round of funding from South Central Ventures.
Pixyle AI says it will use the funds to accelerate its expansion, enhance the product offering to help fashion e-commerce deliver better search experiences by generating detailed and accurate product attributes, and move into new verticals.
Svetlana Kordumova, founder and CEO of Pixyle AI, says, “In search, understanding customers’ shopping intent is vital. We are laser-focused on this, using neural networks that train Pixyle’s AI algorithms to see and interpret images exactly how humans would. For example, in e-commerce, when site visitors are looking for a specific product to buy and type “short summer dress with flower print in purple and pink” in order for these kinds of dresses to be shown to the customers in the catalogue they need to be tagged with length “short,” occasion “summer,” with “floral” pattern, and “purple” and “pink” colours. It starts with building the right taxonomy. Having the right metadata associated with product images helps retailers capture everyday popular search queries as well as long-tail searches. We’re trying to make online shopping as frictionless as possible and hopefully a bit more fun and enjoyable by letting people easily find what they are looking for.”
Pixyle AI: What you need to know
Founded by Svetlana Kordumova, a Ph.D. in AI and Computer Vision from the University of Amsterdam in 2018, Pixyle AI provides image recognition solutions to fashion retailers to improve catalogue management efficiency, improve the online shopping experience, and boost e-commerce sales.
The Dutch company finds the location of fashion items in images, determines the category, and classifies attributes in a way that shoppers use, enhancing the product data and relevancy in search results. This results in better product discoverability for higher conversion rates.
Pixyle AI says that tags generated by its platform can be easily absorbed into a retailer’s existing e-commerce stack. To date, the company has worked with retailers globally, including Depop (UK), Otrium (Netherlands), and Miinto (Denmark).
The company claims to have tagged over 250M images, improving the relevance and accuracy of product attributes with 95 per cent accuracy, and increasing conversions by 10 per cent on average.
Svetlana Kordumova says, “Retail footfall has increased post-pandemic, but online shopping for clothes will continue to grow. We are also encouraged by the growth of the fast-growing fashion resale market, which presents a significant first-mover opportunity for Pixyle AI to help the circular economy take off. We have built algorithms specifically for user-generated images, allowing the AI to detect and recognise fashion items even in blurry, homemade selfies.”
Investor
South Central Ventures is a VC firm that has invested in over 40 early-stage tech companies, including Cognism, AdScanner, Agrivi, and Orgnostic.
Jan Kobler, Managing Partner at South Central Ventures, says, “E-commerce has gone from strength to strength in recent years with several innovations to help the channel become second nature for consumers. A pivotal part of engaging online shoppers is product search, being able to find what you want easily and quickly. However, search has been hugely underserved and remains an unmet need for retailers and shoppers. Pixyle AI is laser-focused on this opportunity and is already moving the dial with more sales for retailers. They have built a robust tech stack, which has been tried and tested in the market and is ready to scale. We are very much looking forward to working together with the founders and helping them grow their business in years to come.”
