Vizit is an award-winning AI-native company that provides the leading content effectiveness platform to the world’s most iconic brands, retailers, and creators, enabling teams to achieve content excellence at scale online. The company’s proprietary ‘Audience Lenses’ give brands the ability to evaluate visual content and new concepts “through the eyes” of their target audiences in real time, ensuring the images used to represent their products are effective at capturing their desired audience’s attention, and appealing enough to trigger conversion. Vizit has been recognized as a Business Insider Top 15 Technology Startup, a Leading 100 Startup, a CB Insights Retail Technology 100 winner, and a Greenbook Insight Innovation finalist.
I’m an AI entrepreneur, inventor, and social scientist originally from the land of cheese and beer (Wisconsin). I moved to the east coast to attend college in Boston where I met my wife and now reside. I’m half Persian and come from a family of entrepreneurs. Thinking back to how I got here… I have really had two major epiphanies in my life.
The first came about a decade ago when I joined an AI company that spun out of Harvard and worked with the Googles, Disneys, and Netflix’s of the world. It was there that I realized one simple truth - that the most powerful and influential companies in the world have the most data on consumers. They harness this data to predict consumer behaviors and build products, campaigns and experiences people will desire and buy.
My next big epiphany built on the first and ultimately led to Vizit - people don’t read anymore. We recognize. Humans are a visual species. Visual content drives commerce; People buy based on what we see, and we remember, and share, what visually appeals to us. I studied that phenomenon to see if I could unearth a new type of data and new battleground that the biggest companies in the world hadn’t yet grasped about their products and their customers. That pursuit led our team to a revolutionary breakthrough in AI. A breakthrough that has created a disruptive innovation which has in turn created a new multi-billion dollar industry that’s changing the way products are built, marketed and sold all around the world.
We’re very fortunate to work with the most iconic brands in the world like Mars, L’Oreal, Ghirardelli, Colgate, and many more. Customers use Vizit as their system of record to manage the entire visual content lifecycle and drive continuous performance optimization. We help them sell more products and we create multiple new operating efficiencies in their content development and digital shelf workflows.
In the case of Mars, Vizit’s AI platform has helped drive a 30% increase in ecommerce conversions for several of their brands. Our customers need Vizit because we solve an essential missing piece of the content equation for them. With Vizit they now have a systematic way to measure, optimize, and ensure content effectiveness in all new projects and across their entire product catalog. While the old way of working involved lots of disconnected tools, one-off projects, lots of email and drafts, one-off surveys, and multiple campaign a/b tests with minimal insights. The new way enabled by Vizit gives brands one content effectiveness language, process and platform the entire organization can align around.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right? Well, at Vizit we took that quite literally and pioneered a way to simulate the beholder. We are the only company in the world that has the technology to create synthetic audiences. We’ve patented it and use our data and AI to power Vizit’s proprietary image scoring system and content effectiveness platform. Vizit’s AI learns and replicates the visual preferences of a population of people to evaluate new content from the perspective of a specific audience. We call these AIs “Audience Lenses” and they function like an artificial set of eyes. We’ve used this technology to pioneer a new category of AI software — Predictive Content Analytics — for anyone who wants to be more appealing online. And at the core is our proprietary Vizit Score which is like Nielsen ratings for visual content — but, unlike Nielsen ratings, ours is predictive.
It has been really eye opening to discover how many different people, products, teams, and companies in the world depend on having successful visual-based communication with their audiences. Visual content is one of those things, kind of like email, that has horizontal and vertical applications. Lots of different teams use visual imagery to accomplish different tasks, and that visual content takes multiple forms. This complexity is something we relish at Vizit because it creates more opportunities for us to make an impact for our customers. And from my vantage point, we’ve barely scratched the surface of the total opportunity.
Being a first time founder, I know what I know and I know what I don’t know. Our investors have been incredibly helpful with organizational design, functioning as a sounding board for problem solving and strategic planning, and have really been terrific partners to me in preparing Vizit for scale. They’ve also been helpful in recruiting A-player talent to join our team and walked us into multi billion dollar brands who have now become customers. I’m a big believer that great people build great businesses. And if you add great investors into that equation you get teams that build generational businesses. And we’re well on our way at Vizit.
What’s really exciting about Vizit is we have pioneered an entirely new industry - Predictive Content Analytics - and we’re just getting started. In a world where image is everything and you only get one shot to make a first impression, Vizit is the essential quality check for visuals before putting them to work. We see a world where not using Vizit to check your commercial images is as reckless as not using spell check in an email or an important document.
