Excerpt from Habertürk's Vispera Coverage in their Venture Garage Section: Vision based retail technologies development startup Vispera reached 10 million dollar in valuation. Aytül Erçil, founding partner of the local venture stated that they have received 1 million dollar in investment so far.
Founded in 2014, Vispera is actively performing technology based processes for in-store execution, tracking and auditing. Vispera founders Aytül Erçil and Ceyhun Burak Akgül said that through vision processing and machine learning methods they reduce the potential problems to minimum. They explain their success as the result of innovation, development and their market focused R&D work. Stating Vispera’s vision as the development of retail processes while bringing new solutions to the sector, Aytül Erçil said “Thanks to the Vision Recognition Service we have developed, based on the shelf photos taken in the store, we track the count and position of the products on the shelves and we can determine the stock availability, facing counts and planogram compliances. We perform 99 percent accuracy in recognition of any product that the human vision is able to perceive.
“We want to go Global”
Stating that they have set their goal as becoming a global enterprise, and raising a technological unicorn form Turkey, Erçil added “We have developed projects with companies like Ülker, Unilever, Efes, Migros and Carrefour. On the other hand we have initiated projects through international collaborations in Israel, Azerbaijan, Poland, Ireland, England, Sweden and Cyprus.”
Regarding the entrepreneurs Erçil said: “Adding value in the area of one's expertise and creating a difference by producing a solution to a real demand should be the rule for entrepreneurs. Focusing on a single area, they should aim for producing global products." Regarding the development of the Turkish venture ecosystem she sees corporate management approach to the venture endorsements as beneficial. She also said that the reduction of bureaucracy in government subsidies and venture friendly approach performed by the banks would also be helpful.
Erçil stated that they are planing to go public in the long term and Vispera's team of 21,half of which focuses on R&D, has grown 100 percent in 2016. She concluded that they are working on data mining and are planing to become the data analytics platform of the retail sector.
