72. Pixoneye

Founders: Ofri Ben Porat and Nadav Israel
Founded: January 2015 (launched December 2016)
Website: www.pixoneye.com

When we judge entries for the Startups 100, one of the key criteria we look for – alongside an innovative proposition – is an incredible founder/founding team and you’d struggle to find more incredible start-up founders than Pixoneye’s Ofri Ben Porat and Nadav Israel.

Israel was former head of computer vision at Samsung and wrote the facial recognition technology that lies on every Samsung Galaxy phone in the world while Ben Porat acted as senior marketing advisor to the minister of tourism in Israel.

Together, the pair have created pioneering technology start-up Pixoneye – the only company in the world with the capabilities to analyse the untapped resource of an app user’s mobile photo gallery.

Based in London with a presence in Tel Aviv, Pixoneye analyses these mobile photo galleries to create a customer profile by teaching the customer’s smart phone to condense its photo gallery into a feature vector. This can then be shared with brands to improve their ad-targeting.

For instance, using Pixoneye brands can begin to start targeting customers based on patterns that start occuring in their photo galleries such as going on holiday or moving into a new home.

While the founders acknowledge that achieving commercialisation has, and will be, a challenge – “the concept is so new and on the border of what is currently socially accepted in terms of privacy that companies have to decide between the great added value reward vs the perceived reputational ‘risk’ “- interest in Pixoneye is growing.

Currently, the 18-strong business has Israel’s largest publisher Ynet on board and Ben Porat and Israel tell us they have “multiple others lined up” including an international bank, a marketplace app and a “very well known” e-commerce platform.

When it comes to ultimate ambition, the duo have BIG plans: “We want to challenge the duopoly of Facebook and Google.”