Better product discovery on webshops with the AI-based solution of Pixyle AI

By Elcke Vels

Who doesn’t love online shopping? Yet the ease of use of many online stores could be better, as sites are failing shoppers by giving them inconsistent, incomplete and inaccurate data linked to products. As a result, shoppers won’t always find what they are looking for. Pixyle AI wants to change that by providing webshops with a visual AI system that analyzes pictures of clothing. In this installment of Start-up of the day, founder Svetlana Kordumova talks about how that works and about how her company is doing.

How did you get the idea to start a company?

“The idea of the company started around 2015 when I was a PhD student at the University of Amsterdam. My research was focused on artificial intelligence. But besides that, I was a great fan of online shopping as well. Sometimes my shopping experience wasn’t that great. It wasn’t always easy to find what I was looking for on a webshop. So I thought: Why not combine my skills regarding neural networks to improve the online shopping experience? I joined a bootcamp, the Rockstart AI accelerator in 2018, which offered me a great energetic environment compared to the lonely PhD life. That’s when I started Pixyle AI.”

How does your visual AI work?

“We help marketplaces improve their search function by enriching their data. We do this, amongst others, by means of automatic tagging. A product of an online webshop might have up to 20.000 attributes that can be tagged by our AI model. Let’s say a customer is looking for floral dresses with a tight fit. Those attributes aren’t written in the product description. But our AI looks at the visual image and is therefore able to provide additional tags. In this way, we improve product discovery on a website. We have proven that we can boost sell rates of an online webshop up to 18 percent.”

What phase is the company in right now?

“Currently, we have over 20 clients from all over the world, ranging from Japan to the UK. One of our clients from the Netherlands is the webshop Otrium. We have proven to be valuable for them as we have increased their efficiency and boosted their sales by automatically enriching their product data. Recently, we raised a million euro during a seed funding round from South Central Ventures. With the money we will enhance our product offering, move into new verticals such as homeware and furniture, and expand our geographic reach.” 

What was your biggest champagne moment?

“Last year, we participated in a worldwide tender. Here we got our first enterprise client, for which we developed an AI-powered image tagging system that can generate tags from user generated images. We won the tender, as we proved we had the best technology to boost the revenue of our client. For nine months, we worked really hard with the team to achieve this. So this was a great moment for us. It all happened during covid, so we hopped into a video call and we all cheered together on camera.”

Meet the second batch of startups from Europe’s first AI accelerator in Den Bosch

Rockstart has selected the startups for its 2nd AI accelerator program located in Den Bosch, the Netherlands.

What challenges are you currently facing?

“One challenge is to keep up the ‘start-up spirit’ as we are growing. We are with 30 people now. In the beginning, I myself have always found ways to motivate others. But now the enthusiasm needs to be projected on the management team and they in turn will project it to others in the team. To keep up the spirit, we organize workshops and we put a great focus on our culture.”

Where do you hope to be ten years from now?

“By that time, I expect to be a worldwide leader and our AI is being applied at all different kinds of webshops, varying from clothing to furniture. By default, the leading marketplaces are using Pixyle by then. I’m convinced we have reached several of our goals: Having a great product, great support and a great team to make it all possible.”