New innovators: Beautifeye

"The web is becoming more and more visual. For example, billions of images have been uploaded and shared to Instagram since it started in 2010 and its current average daily posts are 60 million images.

"Then there is Facebook's 250 million images a day, not to mention Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr and many more," says Lucca Marchesotti, founder of Dublin-based start-up Beautifeye, which has developed a system that can sort and analyse images to extract data for commercial use.

Marchesotti says there is a huge amount of information contained in images on social media platforms that companies and brands could use to their advantage once they know what it is.

For example, a million photos of people all wearing blue baseball caps back to front will tell a cap maker about preferred colour choices and wearing styles.

This knowledge can be incorporated into future product design and marketing.

However, processing a million individual images would be next to impossible. Beautifeye’s super smart image analysis software does the sorting automatically.

"We have created cutting-edge technology that crunches pixels to unlock key information about brands. Our system will also curate and catalogue images," says Marchesotti, an expert in computer vision and machine learning who left his job as a senior researcher with Xerox's European research labs in France to set up his company in Ireland.

Beautifeye has identified a number of uses for its technology but is focusing initially on the visual side of social media to help brands and advertisers maximise their social-media advertising budgets.

“In 2013, social media advertising accounted for 21.8 per cent of all advertising spend worth an estimated $109 billion [€80bn] and this is growing fast,” Marchesotti says.

“We can give clients unprecedented analysis, search capabilities and analytics for images that relate to them. Images are factual and a picture is a very good approximation of reality. By engaging with this information from social-media sites, our customers will learn how to better serve their customers and can target their investment to produce a more customised product that is meeting a clearly identified demand.”

Big names such as Nike, for example, have an estimated 25 million images associated with their brand and products on the Instagram platform alone.

“We can analyse large volumes of images to a very high standard very cost-effectively (its revenue model is software as a service) and our ambition is to become a pioneer and market leader in this space,” Marchesotti says.

He made an initial personal investment of €10,000 to set up Beautifeye. He joined the DIT Hothouse enterprise programme in January and the company’s service went live in March.

Beautifeye is already working with two paying customers and expects to have at least 10 more clients by the end of the year.

The company employs two people full-time and supplements this with the services of skilled local professionals on a contract basis. It expects to employ 15 people within the next two years.

"Enterprise Ireland played a pivotal role in the creation of Beautifeye by providing me with mentors who helped me make the jump from being an employee in France to an entrepreneur in Ireland," Marchesotti says.

“We are out of the validation period now, we have a revenue stream and are ready to consider taking investment in order to scale our platform and build our customer base.

“We hope to be designated as a high-potential start-up by Enterprise Ireland and believe we have the potential to have a portfolio of international brands in the financial services and FMCG [fast-moving consumer goods] sectors.”