Pixyle AI announces new funding round

Fashion-focused visual AI start-up Pixyle AI has secured €1 million in seed funding “to further expand geographic reach, enhance its product offering, and move into new verticals”.

Helping fashion e-commerce deliver better search experiences, the Netherlands-based company generates “detailed and accurate product attributes, enabling consumers to get to their desired items faster [while] connecting a retailer’s online audience with the products they are really looking to buy”.

It claims to alleviate “poor product discovery experience of consumers [which is] costing online sellers and e-commerce companies billions in lost sales as they fail to live up to user expectations”.

The company says it “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”.

Its visual AI finds the fashion items in images, determines the category of the item (ie dress, sneaker etc) and then digs deeper into the image to classify attributes such as colour, pattern etc “in language that shoppers use”.

“This 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”.

Svetlana Kordumova, founder and CEO, said: “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.”

Kordumova also said: “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.”

Its research claims that 94% of searches deliver irrelevant results and 72% of sites completely fall short of search expectations. As a result, the majority of shoppers abandon their search and they’re not coming back. It cites Google Cloud’s study that estimates the cost of bad search experiences in the US results in $300 billion in lost revenue each year.

Pixyle AI announces new funding round

See also