• Macedonian startup Pixyle AI secures €1M seed to help fashion e-commerce deliver better search experiences.
• The seed round is led by South Central Ventures.
• Pixyle AI’s solution generates detailed and accurate product attributes, enabling consumers to get to their desired items faster.
Visual AI startup for e-commerce, Pixyle AI has a mission to connect retailer’s online audience with the products they are really looking to buy.
Poor product discovery experience of consumers is costing online sellers and e-commerce companies billions in lost sales as they fail to live up to user expectations. Pixyle AI’s solution is meant to help them address this issue.
Research shows that 94% of searches deliver irrelevant results and 72% of sites completely fall short of search expectations, and as a result, the majority of shoppers abandon their search and they’re not coming back.
Founded in 2018 by Svetlana Kordumova, a PhD in AI and Computer vision from the University of Amsterdam, the Macedonian startup helps fashion retailers with image recognition solutions, enabling them to deliver a better online shopping experience, boost e-commerce sales, and improve efficiency in catalogue management with smart product data entry.
The visual AI finds the location of fashion items in images, determines the category of the item i.e dress, sneaker etc and then Pixyle AI digs deeper into the image to classify attributes i.e. color, pattern etc in language that shoppers use.
“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” colors. 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,” Kordumova said in a statement.
The AI solution also enhances the product data and improves the relevancy in search results for product discoverability, leading to higher conversion rates. The tags generated by Pixyle AI can be easily absorbed into a retailer’s existing e-commerce stack, making their search and discovery platform run seamlessly and faster, the company said.
Hiring talent across the region and expanding to new verticals
According to Jan Kobler from South Central Ventures, Pixyle AI’s solution has been already tested in the market, and the company is now ready to scale.
“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 until now. 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,” Kobler said in a statement.
The startup, which has offices in the Netherlands and North Macedonia, will now use the fresh funds to hire talent across the Western Balkans region.
“We’ll use the funds to hire talented people in the Western Balkans who want to join us on our journey to become the leading product data enrichment platform for e-commerce. We will expand our offering with new, exciting AI products and offer suites that will help fashion brands & retailers operate more efficiently, improve site search, and increase conversions,” Kordumova tells The Recursive.
Additionally, Pixyle AI is also going to focus on releasing a new product that uses object character recognition (OCR) technology that allows their clients to recognize brands, material composition, size, and country of origin “made in” from a label inside a fashion item.
“Besides tagging, we’ll also provide SEO optimized auto-generated product descriptions. As for new verticals, we are planning to move into homeware and furniture by the end of 2023, and two more verticals by the end of 2024 – beauty and electronics.” Kordumova concluded.
