Everseen is a company that has developed computer vision AI technology, which is trusted by over half of the world’s top 15 retailers to mitigate and reduce shrink, streamline operations, and help deliver a better customer experience. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Everseen co-founder and CEO Alan O’Herlihy to learn more.
Alan O’Herlihy’s Background
O’Herlihy founded Everseen in 2007, drawing on his experience with large SAP installations as well as early roots in retail.
“I identified a way to help retailers minimize shrinkage – creating a new computer vision and AI solution to address the industry’s $100 billion in annual losses,” said O’Herlihy.
Formation Of Everseen
How did the idea for Everseen come together? “I am the son of grocers from Cork, Ireland, and I used to work in the family shop from an early age. I founded Everseen combining my passion for invention with the ability to lead large-scale enterprise installations. I continue to set the company’s direction and vision as we expand our retail AI solutions and enter new markets,” reflected O’Herlihy. “Everseen is one of retail’s largest producers of visual metadata as we turn unstructured video data into immediately usable business facts and insights. Linking this to existing data lakes forms the ‘modern data estate’, enabling retailers to receive query answers to previously impossible questions – and integrates AI intelligence into the existing management information ecosystem.”
Challenges Faced
What are some of the challenges O’Herlihy faced in building the company and has the current macroeconomic climate affected the company?
“We are experiencing significant demand for our technology from retailers who are grappling with the dual impact of declining customer spending and rising operational losses (including shrink, which has doubled for many retailers over the past 2 years, severely impacting retailer profitability) due to rising cost-of-living and inflation. The retail industry is also facing additional challenges such as labor shortages, and labor cost inflation making our technology even more valuable in addressing these issues. In response to this demand, we plan to scale the business by operating globally and continuing to develop our computer vision AI technology,” O’Herlihy acknowledged. “In terms of tech spend, we have seen a reallocation of budgets as the challenges for retailers are evolving with tackling shrink being viewed as a top priority in the industry. Retailers are also focused on sweating existing technology assets as much as possible so systems that can integrate with existing hardware and software create an ecosystem that can scale, ensuring the deployment of AI is an ongoing success.”
Core Products
What are Everseen’s core products and features? O’Herlihy replied:
Everseen is a leading provider of AI-powered computer vision and hyper-automation solutions creating the ability to see problems and solve them as they happen. We use computer vision AI at the edge to transform physical retail space into valuable and actionable data providing the missing context needed to make decisions and solve problems in real time. Providing this missing context in real time reduces unnecessary friction and removes mundane and repeatable tasks that can otherwise be automated.
Everseen technology brings patented AI-powered process-aware computer vision to core business challenges to improve business outcomes – mitigate and reduce shrink, streamline operations, and help to deliver a better customer experience.
We tackle the $100 billion global annual retail shrink problem (from store to warehouse and check out to shelf) by processing and analyzing video in real-time while monitoring 220 million products and 22 million customer interactions per day.
Our real-time systems dynamically deliver intuitive fixes and split-second decision-making (less than 300 millisecond response time), resulting in unrivaled prevention, deterrence, and intervention – whether these are shrinkage problems due to theft, errors, waste, or accidents.
Our AI models can understand the moving scene unfolding, not just a frame, by detecting and tracking objects of interest, analyzing how objects interact, and recognizing actions of interest performed by humans. All of these elements serve as key input allowing our solution to “nudge” a customer to self-correct or instruct a store associate to engage and aid the customer in question.
For example, we have reduced the need for interventions at self-checkouts from about 20% of the time when weighing scales are present to less than 2% with computer vision AI. Our goal is to stop and recover the loss, enable the retailer to intervene with bad behavior, promote great customer interactions, creating fluid processes while improving the overall customer experience and positively impacting the bottom line.
Our ability to handle complex data models and workflows and adapt to different data types and data processing requirements are two of the core pillars behind our Visual AI Platform approach. Our global scale and reach have allowed us to develop a user-friendly, secure, and agile platform that can connect with other systems and tools such as BI tools, data warehouses, ERP, and other order management systems.
Significant Milestones
What have been some of Everseen’s most significant milestones? “We now have approximately 1,000 employees globally. We are headquartered out of Cork, Ireland, with customer supporting teams in the US, Europe, and Australia, research teams in Barcelona, Serbia, and Romania, and annotation and technical support teams in India,” O’Herlihy shared. “The company has doubled its store installations in the last year, with growth driven by expansion with grocery retailers in the U.S., Europe, and Australia. We have expanded our technology partner program to integrate computer vision AI into existing solutions used by retailers. Partnerships now include Dell, Lenovo, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and others. Everseen’s solutions are tech-agnostic, seamlessly integrating with customers’ existing cameras, computer hardware, point-of-sale, and other business systems.”
Customer Success Story
When I asked O’Herlihy about customer success stories, he noted that Everseen’s computer vision AI technology is trusted by over half of the world’s top 15 retailers – deployed in over 6,000 major retail stores and at over 80,000 checkout lanes.
“Retailers are turning to AI to address loss prevention and simultaneously deliver a great customer experience. Everseen’s computer vision AI delivers insights that enable retailers to see and solve complex challenges in real-time to significantly reduce losses and improve margins by up to 20%,” O’Herlihy highlighted. “One of our most successful customers began with a pilot implementation in just a few stores, then expanded to over a thousand. After successfully integrating AI into its operational and shopper experience at the checkout for a few months in 1,800 stores, it is now progressing to have AI-based loss prevention in place in all its locations – more than 2,600 stores. This customer started using computer vision AI for loss prevention at the checkout and is now exploring using the same technology in the heart of the store for shelf availability and in the backroom for deliveries.”
Funding/Revenue
A €65 million Series A funding round was raised on May 11, 2023, led by Crosspoint Capital.
“100% of the investment is equity – we believe it is important to remain debt-free at this time for the business’s long-term success,” O’Herlihy explained. “We are a Software as a Service (SaaS) company, and our income is from annual recurring revenue (ARR) from customers.”
Market Opportunity
What is the market opportunity Everseen is pursuing? “Our long-term vision is to use our computer vision AI platform for any process in any industry. According to PWC, AI could contribute up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy – of this, $6.6 trillion is likely to come from increased productivity,” O’Herlihy assessed. “Our current focus is retail, where less than 1/3 of food retailers are using AI but 71% report that they plan to increase spending on AI. The retail industry’s $100bn annual shrink problem is estimated to grow at 20% every year and computer vision AI can tackle that as well as improve customer service and optimize productivity.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Everseen from its competition? O’Herlihy noted:
We view competitors in several different ways:
Bespoke solutions that compete using individual use cases (e.g., computer vision for checkouts, cameras for shelves, delivery, queue management, etc.). These pointed/siloed solutions have seen small (under 500 stores) adoption and are based on still images captured on a restrictive pre-defined cadence. They represent a snapshot/history lesson in time and don’t offer the ability to be re-used elsewhere or adapted to similar use cases as our platform offering enables using real-time video.
Platform solutions that focus on machine learning algorithms working on large datasets, performing post-event analytics, and offering asynchronous insights vs. hyper-automation.
Autonomous store technologies that are trying to redefine how people shop but demand substantial hardware investments and are still only suitable for niche environments like airports, sports stadiums, and university campuses (vs. the remodeling and remerchandising flexibility that would be required of Grocery, Mass, Drug, Value, C-Store and other formats we enable with operationalized AI end-points).
Finally, we also compete with legacy systems that retailers may feel are ‘good enough’ but cannot compete in terms of speed, accuracy, customer expectation, effectiveness, and delivery of ROI (e.g. self-checkout weigh scales introduced circa 2000s).
Future Company Goals
What are some of Everseen’s future company goals? “Most computer vision solutions are currently very siloed and targeted at solving specific problems. We are seeing increased demand for our Visual AI platform as customers are seeking to solve other problems (beyond shrink) across the retail store estate. Our recent investment will enable us to respond to that growing demand with a targeted product roadmap,” O’Herlihy concluded. “Our longer-term vision is to use our computer vision AI platform for any process and in any industry. Starting with retail allowed us to develop both a foundation and library of computer vision AI use cases that are relevant for other (adjacent) industries (e.g., supply chain, manufacturing, etc.).”
