45. Pixoneye

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

As the strategic advisor to the minister of tourism for Israel, 2017 Young Gun Ofri Ben Porat found he could not afford to mix marketing messages to the two largest incoming groups: the LGBT community and the evangelical community.

Instead, it required a whole new way of understanding who these customers were.

After meeting Nadav Israel, then head of computer vision at Samsung, the two struck up on an idea. What if you could use artificial intelligence to analyse people’s photo galleries and help clients truly understand their customers’ behaviour and hyper personalise their experience?

Meet Pixoneye; Israel and Porat’s innovative technology which can be integrated into any mobile app, with a focus on financial services, social, travel, and research.

For tier one clients, it works on a proof-of-concept model, incorporating their specific needs. After a three-month period, the client signs a 12-month contract on a software-as-a-service model.

Alternatively, Pixoneye’s self-serve dashboard model offers 1,000 user profiles for free, moving onto a per user per year model and charging per 1,000 recommendations for using the personalisation tool.

With the introduction of general data protection regulation (GDPR) this week, Pixoneye has re-positioned and simplified its proposition around what can be done with first party data to contend with concerns about privacy and photo access. And this actually puts the start-up in a strong market position.

As potentially inaccurate and unreliable data from third-party data companies is abandoned, Pixoneye’s ability to access user data direct from source with their consent will be hugely valuable.

The future? Israel and Porat’s ambition is to have Pixoneye installed on one billion mobile devices around the world so it can intelligently predict and serve the intentions of every person on the planet.