Denver-based Soona has been helping companies capture engaging photos and videos of their products since its founding in 2018. Now, the company is launching its first analytics platform, one that’s backed by artificial intelligence.
Soona CEO and co-founder Liz Giorgi said this is the most ambitious product the company has worked on.
The new analytics platform, called Soona Score, tells clients how their images are performing online. Soona Score uses AI to analyze the visual components of an e-commerce site and ranks each image on a scale of one to 100 based on the quality of the photo, overall visual mix and other metrics.
Thanks to Soona’s data set, users can also compare their visuals to best-selling visuals in a given product category.
“This is really a different way of approaching AI, as opposed to using AI to do things like generate net new images,” Giorgi told Colorado Inno. “We’re using AI to truly understand the value of those images and what specific aspects of visuals are inspiring consumers to [make a] purchase.”
Soona Score, which integrates with Amazon and Shopify, also provides users with steps to take to improve their visual performance.
“There’s so much data about the text and about the pages and content that we interact with online, but there’s virtually no data about visual performance,” Giorgi said. “Visual performance to us is this total green space where there is nobody who’s really approached this same analytical rigor to the visuals that power the internet that have been brought to the other parts of our consumption online. And so we thought this was a huge opportunity.”
Giorgi said this new product is part of Soona’s move to a subscription business model in 2024. The subscription will include access to Soona tools like analytics and insights, AI features and team collaboration.
The plan was to launch Soona Score by the end of the year. Instead, the company is launching a private beta version ahead of schedule in late October thanks in part to an influx of new employees.
Soona acquired social media content company Trend in late June, bringing on additional engineering and product talent. This was Soona’s first acquisition.
With four studios in Denver, Los Angeles, Austin and Minneapolis, Soona now has 140 full-time and part-time employees. Giorgi said 20 employees worked on Soona Score.
Soona’s last funding round came as a $35 million Series B round in January 2022. During that time, the company was approaching the coveted $1 billion unicorn valuation.
