Artificial technology company ViSenze has successfully raised US$10.5 million in Series B round. The company that develops breakthrough visual technology for e-commerce and digital businesses will use the funds to invest further in its proprietary image recognition technology, expand headcount and grow its international offices.
The funding was led by Rakuten Ventures, the venture capital arm of Internet giant Rakuten along with WI Harper Group – a leader in cross-border investment between United States and China, and Enspire Capital – a venture capital firm that focuses on early stage technology startups in United States and Asia.
Other participating investors include SPH Media Fund, the investment arm of media company – Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), FengHe Fund Management – an Asian alternative asset management firm founded by Alibaba ex-CTO John Wu, Raffles Venture Partners, Phillip Private Equity, and UOB Venture Management.
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ViSenze is currently running pilot projects with content owners and online retailers. Besides expanding the R&D team of machine learning and computer vision scientists, the new funding will enable the company to grow its offices in the United States and India, as well as to open up new offices in the United Kingdom and China.
ViSenze has achieved impressive market traction with their ground-breaking AI technology in the e-commerce space. With their innovation DNA, they are developing new solutions, bringing simplified shopping experiences on digital content platforms.
said Mr. Saemin Ahn, Managing Partner of Rakuten Ventures.
The solid vote of confidence from investors reflects the significant revenue growth of over 300% year on year that the company has achieved in the last 12 months. ViSenze’s clienteles include well-known players like ASOS, Myntra, Rakuten Ichiba, Interpark Corporation, Lazada Group, Zalora, Essilor and many more.
ViSenze’s API based solutions are exposed to over 250 million monthly active users today, helping them simplify their shopping experiences in a booming retail ecommerce world worth $1.671 trillion worldwide.
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Its solutions for ecommerce – such as visually similar product recommendations, out-of-stock alternatives, search by image, and automated product tagging – create an uplift in conversion rates. These solutions are built on cutting-edge AI technology combining deep learning and computer vision, and delivered over distributed architecture which is optimised for scale and performance.
In online shopping, we train our visual shopping AI to look deeply for visual attributes in products and match them to available products that shoppers are searching for. We have generated up to 70% uplift in conversion rates for our retail clients through continuous search quality improvements and innovations developed by our R&D team.
said Mr. Oliver Tan, Co-Founder and CEO of ViSenze.
The company is now preparing to introduce discovery-driven shopping solutions to visual content sites. These solutions specifically address the issue of broken links between visual content sites that inspire shopping interest, and the type of products being sought.
