Introducing Empora
As a Founder, technology investor, CEO, Chairman and board member, I’ve seen a number of portfolio companies go through long, below-the-radar, rebuilds of their core product engines. It’s always a nerve-racking process as you invest for a long time without seeing the fruits ; you fear for what might emerge from all the market research and long nights of coding, the team growth in size, become more major and certain over time.
Great then, to see what the Pixsta Team (the Visual Search Engine for eCommerce company) have produced with our first branded launch EMPORA www.empora.com <http://www.empora.com> , a fashion service that allows is users to shop by style, shapes and colour from a very large pool of about 1000 brands and 100,000’s of products.
It’s a big leap forward for Pixsta, from academic origins, our cloud display’s so many copied by other meto startups) to creating a user experience that meets its audience’s requirements. Most importantly, Pixsta seem to have solved key scaling challenges in the back-end that free them up for upcoming growth. The engine at Pixsta is most likely the highest throughput engine for visual analytics on pictures, which has been developed. I personal call this process “structuring of unstructured image data”. We have seen such developments in text, but as I predicted 3 years ago, by creating the company able to do it with images we would enable a new form of online monetization. In my mind the essentials of Pixsta is a Cloud Computing solution solving one problem: “Answering questions asked in the form of pictures in return with pictures”.
Myself and the team at Pixsta went through a heavy consultation period with our user base, finding out what people really wanted from Visual Search technology when looking to buy clothes online <http://www.empora.com/> . The KPIs I’m seeing now seem to justify those long nights and two years of constant efforts.
It’s exciting to see Pixsta emerge as one of the most disruptive start-ups in eCommerce we have seen since a while. Even more exciting is that the business has taken much less capital then expected to develop such outstanding platforms, which will be essential for our future growth.
We recently have seen a pickup of writing by the industry press, starting with Drapers <http://www.drapersonline.com/news/other-sectors/multi-channel/empora-shopping-portal-launches-online/5003210.article>, StyleBlogs and lots of Twitter remarks how pleased users are to have such an offering available.
Alexander Straub
Founder, Strategy Director and Chairman
As a Founder, technology investor, CEO, Chairman and board member, I’ve seen a number of portfolio companies go through long, below-the-radar, rebuilds of their core product engines. It’s always a nerve-racking process as you invest for a long time without seeing the fruits ; you fear for what might emerge from all the market research and long nights of coding, the team growth in size, become more major and certain over time.
Great then, to see what the Pixsta Team (the Visual Search Engine for eCommerce company) have produced with our first branded launch EMPORA www.empora.com <http://www.empora.com> , a fashion service that allows is users to shop by style, shapes and colour from a very large pool of about 1000 brands and 100,000’s of products.
It’s a big leap forward for Pixsta, from academic origins, our cloud display’s so many copied by other meto startups) to creating a user experience that meets its audience’s requirements. Most importantly, Pixsta seem to have solved key scaling challenges in the back-end that free them up for upcoming growth. The engine at Pixsta is most likely the highest throughput engine for visual analytics on pictures, which has been developed. I personal call this process “structuring of unstructured image data”. We have seen such developments in text, but as I predicted 3 years ago, by creating the company able to do it with images we would enable a new form of online monetization. In my mind the essentials of Pixsta is a Cloud Computing solution solving one problem: “Answering questions asked in the form of pictures in return with pictures”.
Myself and the team at Pixsta went through a heavy consultation period with our user base, finding out what people really wanted from Visual Search technology when looking to buy clothes online <http://www.empora.com/> . The KPIs I’m seeing now seem to justify those long nights and two years of constant efforts.
It’s exciting to see Pixsta emerge as one of the most disruptive start-ups in eCommerce we have seen since a while. Even more exciting is that the business has taken much less capital then expected to develop such outstanding platforms, which will be essential for our future growth.
We recently have seen a pickup of writing by the industry press, starting with Drapers <http://www.drapersonline.com/news/other-sectors/multi-channel/empora-shopping-portal-launches-online/5003210.article>, StyleBlogs and lots of Twitter remarks how pleased users are to have such an offering available.
Alexander Straub
Founder, Strategy Director and Chairman
