Have you ever spent hours on the internet searching for a specific item of clothing that you may have seen somewhere? Perhaps you provided an exceptionally detailed search query that showcased your eclectic knowledge of the subtle nuances between eggshell white and cream and still failed to locate your prized lens? Svetlana Kordumova North Macedonia understands your frustration only too well.
Indulging her passion for fashion and frustrated with her own online shopping, Svetlana embarked on a mission to change the game of e-commerce. Capitalizing on advances in artificial intelligence (AI), she launches her start-up Pixyl which provides online retailers with computer vision software, allowing them to generate highly accurate product details, create rich online catalogs and improve the visibility of their products.
After raising 1 million euros in seed funding from South Central Businesses and receive advisory services from the EBRD flagship program Star company program – supported by Luxembourg and the European Union – Svetlana is now ready to take Pixyle in new directions and establish itself as a leader in visual AI.
Reinventing the future of fashion
Svetlana Kordumova began her foray into the field of artificial intelligence at a critical time. The field of AI was moving from shallow to deep learning and had made significant advances in computer vision and visual processing.
Encouraged by her internship supervisor, who recognized her talent and passion, she began a PhD in computer vision and image recognition in Amsterdam, working on an exciting new technology that she believed could have potential in the real world.
After attending a startup bootcamp in Amsterdam, the idea of starting your own visual AI company began to take shape.
A self-proclaimed fashionista, she noticed how site searches provide inaccurate product recommendations to customers. Recognizing the challenges of collecting inconsistent and inaccurate data in the fashion industry, Svetlana assembled a team of experts and set out to create a comprehensive dataset of over a million meticulously crafted fashion images. labeled.
With this dataset, they trained their computer vision models to accurately process and recognize fashion items, generating rich, detailed labels. These tags could then be implemented by retailers to provide customers with specific information about their products and significantly improve the relevance of search results. As a result, retailers can create better, more intuitive and user-friendly online catalogs.
Getting started in entrepreneurship
In 2018, Pixyle launched a marketplace where users could search for sustainable versions of the fashion items they loved using images or text.
However, Svetlana recognized the potential for broader impact and began bringing her cutting-edge technology to other fashion markets and retailers. Since then, Pixyle has grown rapidly, helping leading e-commerce companies and exciting fashion startups increase efficiency, improve product discovery, and increase revenue.
With offices in Amsterdam and North Macedonia, Pixyle brings together a team of 22 people and supports brands and retailers around the world, including Tendam in SpainOtrium in the The Netherlandsand Miinto in Denmark.
Over the past four years, Svetlana’s team has built the most comprehensive fashion taxonomy to date, tagging over 250 million products. The result? Improved merchandising team efficiency by up to 75 percent and increased retailer conversion rates by an average of 10 percent.
The EBRD’s Star Venture team has supported Pixyle on consultancy projects across a range of critical business areas, including privacy, marketing, sales optimization and scaling international.
“At Pixyle AI, we believe that understanding customer intent is crucial to success in retail. That’s why we leverage AI to improve product discovery for fashion e-commerce. The EBRD’s advisory support helped us establish a strong sales and content marketing strategy and improve our professional accountability with clear data processing rules towards our clients,” added Svetlana.
Svetlana’s journey from talented mathematician to successful entrepreneur has been marked by hard work, dedication and a passion for solving real-world problems. Through Pixyle AI, it is revolutionizing the fashion industry and paving the way for other companies to harness the power of AI in new and exciting ways.
The bank’s Star Venture program in the Western Balkans has been operational since 2019 and now has a portfolio of 31 high-potential startups from the region. Thanks to funding from Luxembourg and the European Union, through the Western Balkans Business Development and Innovation FacilityThe program creates new opportunities for start-ups in the Western Balkans by giving them access to financing and know-how.