‘ViSenze’ – Artificial Intelligence startup raises $20M in Series C
by megan jones in News on 21st February 2019ViSenze – Artificial Intelligence startup develops advanced image recognition and visual search solutions to support businesses in the field of mCommerce, online advertising, and eCommerce was cofounder by Li Guangda, Chua Tat-Seng, Roger Yuen, and Oliver Tan in 2012 mainly operating in Asia-Pacific, ASEAN nations and South East regions. ViSenze recommends visually similar things to online shoppers, Either on eCommerce platform while they browse or Search by picture uploading or on Content publishers platforms – Video networks and Social media. ViSenze is a spin-off of a prominent research center NExT, jointly established by the Tsinghua University of China and the National University of Singapore. The company also powers Visual Commerce at scale for publishers and retailers. The intelligent image identification and recognition solutions of ViSenze shorten the path to action which consumers search & discover on the visual web. Currently, ViSenze has extended its operations to the US, India, UK, Singapore, and China.
Funding – Series ‘C’
Recently, in the series ‘C’ funding round led by Sonae IM and Gobi Ventures along with the participation from few other investors like Rakuten Capital, Enspire Capital, WI Harper, and UOB Venture ViSenze has raised $20M. These funds will be utilized to develop the company’s software by inculcating into partnerships with the makers of smartphones like LG, Huawei, and Samsung. As of today, with operations running around Asia, the US and Europe ViSenze claim its Annual Revenue growth rate of 200 percent.
Why use Visual Search?
Even though the technology has evolved so much that everything is accessible to the end person, but still the exact and accurate information is a big pause. for e.g., if an individual wants to know where the dress is from wore by a celebrity, He/she goes by mere guesswork with a keyword search. Instead of that if there is an option for visual search just by posting the picture, within seconds the user can get accurate information and all the details.
Challenge
To make progress and explore this scenario, ViSenze came up with the Dress Challenge to convert the searching skill of consumers from Keyword search to Visual Search technology. But in this case, a challenge prevails that the visitors have to find a similar digital replica of that physical thing in an online platform that the item was bought from. And also who can find it in the fastest possible time.
AI Solutions
- Search by Image – Here customers find the products by using a screenshot or an image.
- Visual commerce platform – This platform enables personalized results by identifying visually related and similar products
- Automated product tagging – This image recognition is used to automatically figure out the relevant Product Tags at scale.
- Visually similar product recommendation – It provides intelligent recommendations based on the search history of the shoppers.
- Personal shopping concierge – By identifying and suggesting, ViSenze enables users to build a personal shopping platform with the display of similar
- products from multiple online platforms in a matter of seconds.
How it works
At first, the shopper clicks or selects an image then the API designed by ViSenze analyzes the content of images such as image quality, size, fashion attributes etc., then, with the information obtained from the image, API identifies visually similar/related products from several online stores. Finally, deliver the shoppable products to users that are similar to the original image.
Conclusion
Today, Big retailers around the world like ASOS, Rakuten and many others use ViSenze API to convert the images into the opportunity for immediate Product search which in turn helps the organization to improve the conversion rates. Apart from retailers, media companies are also using Visenze to convert any video or image into an opportunity.