Aipoly Vision

Client: Alberto Rizzoli, Co-founder and CEO, Aipoly

When he applied to TREAT’s commercialization assistance program in September 2016, the Silicon Valley tech community was already buzzing about Alberto Rizzoli’s San Francisco start up, Aipoly.  His mobile application technology, Aipoly Vision, is capable of identifying thousands of objects in real-time through a smartphone camera and communicating the information through audio to a visually impaired person.

Due to the media attention the app had attracted, Aipoly had amassed over 100,000 users without spending a single dollar on marketing.  The company applied to TREAT with a request for funding that would further product development and leverage TREAT’s in-kind assistance on business development for their paid version, Aipoly Vision Pro.

With guidance from TREAT, the Aipoly team surveyed current customers and potential users in order to identify what product features the app’s users cared about most.  Learning from that information, Aipoly developed a profitable pricing plan for the Pro version.

A Best of Innovation Award at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show was a welcome boost for the company, resulting in a sharp increase in users.  Not uncommon for rapidly growing companies, the growth challenged Aipoly’s ability to keep pace with their server costs. Stated Alberto, “The TREAT grant was very helpful in keeping the company running during a fast user growth period between January and March 2017 in which we would gain over 30,000 users a week, skyrocketing our server costs.”

With only two people running the show, there were too many areas which required their attention. Alberto’s focus pivoted toward licensing their technology and developing additional revenue streams.  In 2018, Aipoly won a CES Innovation Award yet again, this time for their Autonomous Store Platform technology.  We can’t wait to see what they do next!