COMPANY

Name: Riviter

Legal Name: Riviter, Inc.

Location: Chicago, Illinois, United States

Founded: 2015

Founder(s):  Andi Hadisutjipto, Dana Robinson, Emily Ruff, Kris Woodbeck, Rachel Chen

Website: https://www.riviter.com/

Social Media: 46 followers on Twitter, 91 followers on Linkedin

INDUSTRY – Global Artificial Intelligence Market

Size: $21.46Bn in 2018 (Source: Markets and Markets)

Future: $190.61Bn by 2025

Introduction

Riviter proves that a picture is indeed worth a thousand words. This B2B image recognition company helps brands predict future trends and even read shopper’s minds by reviewing the visuals that they interact with on social media.

Riviter’s website widget analyzes millions of digital pictures and videos to help online and mobile players in the fashion industry take more data-based business decisions.

A powerful visual search engine, Riviter provides a gateway to understanding potential consumer preferences. Thanks to these actionable buyer insights, brands are empowered to formulate future-focused sales, R&D, sourcing, merchandising, and marketing strategies.

On the other hand, such image recognition technologies also provide end-consumers with an ultra-personalized shopping experience.

The Product

Using the same technology that powers Facebook’s photo tags and Google Photo’s organization tools; Riviter scans visuals on social media to improve the relevance of shopper searches on e-commerce portals. Instead of forcing irrelevant ads on customers, based on clicks and cookies, the Riveter plug-in helps retailers snag more sales through insight-led shopping recommendations.

Each scan identifies products, people, and trends; specific to the retailer’s target audience or industry. Thus, Riveter is said to capture 80% of the posts that text-based social listening tools miss. Also, the startup claims that its precise visual search algorithm is the “most accurate and fastest on the market”.

This technology ensures that retailers need not worry about lost sales from stockouts and irrelevant product suggestions. Without having to employ heavy-duty IT or private consumer data, Riviter helps increase revenue by suggesting the exact products that the potential customer is looking for.

Origin and Founding Team

Andi Hadisutjipto recounted to Chicago Business about how idea of Riviter came to her when she was working in e-commerce. At that time, she noticed that retailers still had to rely on keywords and manual tagging of products to figure out what customers want.

“Shopping for clothing is obviously a very visual decision, and yet a lot of the tools out there are built around language,” she said.

Also, conversations with an Austin-based blogger friend made Hadisutjipto realize that shoppers tend to know what they want but have trouble finding the exact same thing in stores. Soon after, she joined Booth’s class of ‘16 with the intent of solving this pain point using the latest Computer Vision technologies.

While attending college, she founded Riviter – an AI-powered B2C brand or a “Shazam for clothing”. It allowed shoppers to snap a picture of a dress or pair of jeans they liked and instantly find it online. Just like the music discovery platform.

Following several iterations to the business model, by 2016, Riviter blossomed into a visual social listening tool that retailers could use to understand what shoppers really want.

Performance and Trends

According to Pitchbook, in July 2015, Riviter raised $25,000 from the Plug and Play StartUp Camp accelerator. Then, in March 2016, it won $4,000 off of the SXSW MBA Pitch Competition. Just three months later, the startup secured $45,000+ from the New Venture Challenge, Origin Ventures, OCA Ventures and Pritzker Group Venture Capital.

Also, Crunchbase reported that, in October 2017, the startup secured an undisclosed sum of money from Founders Factory and L’Oreal.