Singapore AI startup uses AWS to power its visual commerce platform

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced that ViSenze, a Singapore-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup, has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider to support its global expansion and the introduction of new products to its more than 900 retailer customers including UNIQLO, Urban Outfitters, and Zalora. ViSenze offers an image recognition platform that processes over one billion searches every month and runs on AWS, enabling retailers to help shoppers find relevant products through personalized image searches instead of keywords. ViSenze relies on AWS’s proven global infrastructure to support their international locations around the world, including São Paulo, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo, Seattle, New York, Dublin, and the company’s headquarters in Singapore.

Visual searches have a conversion rate five times higher than text searches because they make it easy for consumers to find the same, or similar, product to a photo taken on their phone. Research conducted by ViSenze[2] found that almost 90 percent of shoppers are more likely to purchase a product if it is visually searchable on smartphones, because text searches often don’t produce accurate search results. ViSenze’s visual commerce platform is built entirely on AWS, using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances, which helps companies to manage their infrastructure costs efficiently through on-demand pricing, an especially important factor for startups. Amazon DynamoDB allows ViSenze’s platform to process millions of images per hour in real time, enabling a seamless consumer experience across search, discovery, and visual recommendations. Other AWS services like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service, provide a scalable, low-latency architecture, so the startup can focus its resources on core technology development to provide engaging customer experiences, and accelerate the introduction of new products. ViSenze is experimenting with machine learning services, including Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service that provides the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly as part of its efforts to further enhance platform accuracy and efficiency.

“AWS’s broad and deep portfolio of cloud services enables ViSenze to help our retail customers better connect shoppers with the brands they are looking for. AWS is our preferred cloud provider because its broad array of services enables us to innovate faster and scale with ease, and its global infrastructure helps us serve our customers around the world. AWS’s rapid pace of innovation provides us with new technologies we can use to accelerate the path to action for consumers,” said Brendan O’Shaughnessy, Chief Commercial Officer at ViSenze.

“AWS cloud-enabled machine learning services are redefining retailing and the consumer experience as we know it. ViSenze has been at the forefront of this shift and are now one of Asia’s fastest-growing visual commerce companies. We have collaborated with ViSenze since their inception and we’re excited about the next phase of our partnership as ViSenze scales globally,” said Conor McNamara, Managing Director of ASEAN at AWS.

ViSenze recently became an AWS Retail Competency Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN), which demonstrates their proven track record of helping retail customers to accelerate their digital transformation across the entire enterprise, including marketing, merchandising, supply chain, store operations, finance, and IT.