There are plenty of tools for companies to track and evaluate what people are writing about their brand and products. This Boston company is making technology to measure what makes an effective image for a company’s target customers.
This morning, Vizit, an image analytics software company, announced its $10 Million Series A round led by Infinity Ventures and Brand Foundry Ventures.
Vizit has created what it calls “an audience lens.” The company analyzes the online interactions consumers have with commercial imagery. It uses those interactions and AI to build artificial consumer audiences to test visuals for companies.
Jehan Hamedi, a 2022 Boston Business Journal 40 Under 40 honoree, launched Vizit in 2020 after working in AI and consumer opinion for more than a decade. He saw an opening in the market for a company that could analyze large-scale consumer opinions on brand visuals.
“Everything that people see has an impact on their behavior and their preferences. And as a brand, an image is actually, as a result, your most powerful asset. Yet it is drastically under-measured,” Hamedi told BostInno.
Traditionally, companies would send out surveys or gather consumers for a focus group to learn their points of view on brand imagery, Hamedi said.
“The problem with that is those things are very time consuming, extremely expensive and they don’t scale up to the trillion plus commercial images that exist online. So, we had to come up with a better way,” Hamedi said.
Hamedi said their customers use this technology primarily in the creative development process to understand whether imagery will be successful for their target audiences before going to market. This ranges from carousels of ecommerce images to digital marketing on social media to real-life products.
“Think of it like a focus group in an algorithm that is learning from billions of data points that we collect online about images, image interaction, image relevance. And that information helps to teach the computers to actually develop opinions,” Hamedi said.
One of Vizit’s earliest customers was Harley-Davidson. Hamedi said the motorcycle manufacturer uses Vizit’s platform in its design process to see how customers would react to different bike styles, from colors to the exhaust pipe location.
To analyze an image and determine how consumers would react to it, Hamedi said Vizit’s technology looks at over 15,000 unique elements, including color, composition, layout and faces, and codifies that into data.
“When our AI looks at an image, it’s converting that image into math. And when you sort of describe images in numbers, you can run really powerful analytics using that data,” Hamedi said.
In the two years since its launch, Vizit has grown to about 30 employees. Hamedi said around 75% of those are in Greater Boston. The team is remote, but Hamedi said they plan to look into an office space next year. Vizit has also secured 12 patents on its technology.
Vizit previously raised seed and family and friend rounds, Hamedi said. He declined to share the amount raised.
Hamedi said the company decided to raise more capital to manage the growing number of inbound requests. The Series A round will also enable Vizit to bring new capabilities and insights to its platform, Hamedi said, and build out its go-to-market team to drive international expansion.
Hamedi said he witnessed more companies go online during the pandemic and a growth in ecommerce. He doesn’t expect that trend to reverse course, and he thinks companies are going to be looking for new types of analytics to fuel their growth online. Companies can already analyze pricing, social media performance and search results, Hamedi said. The next step is visuals.
“That is the one piece of the whole puzzle that there’s no data, no analytics and no enabling technology around it,” Hamedi said. “That’s what Vizit is solving. That’s why we believe imagery and image tech is really the next big frontier in digital commerce.”
