Image credit: Instagram (YouScan)
Kyiv, Ukraine-based YouScan, a social media listening and image recognition platform, announced on Thursday that it has raised $2M (approximately €1.98M) in a follow-on funding round from Kinnevik AB and VNV Global AB.
The company says the proceeds from this round will help it to accelerate its growth and further develop its product.
A new CEO and CTO
Besides the funding, YouScan founder Alex Orap will be transitioning from his role as CEO and assuming the new position of Chief Growth Officer. “I’ll work closely with our sales and marketing teams, helping them with the new initiatives to win the hearts of our customers, industry experts, and analysts and build new industry partnerships for YouScan,” says Orap.
YouScan co-founder Leonid Lytvynenko will be the company’s new CEO.
Orap says, “Leonid was one of our two first software developers, then became a CTO and a true leader of YouScan’s tech team. Leo has developed all the traits that I believe a great CEO should possess: system thinking and excellent problem solving, attention to detail combined with a broad vision, and of course, respect from the team.”
YouScan has also appointed a new CTO, Ivan Korneliuk.
Helping companies listen to their customers and improve
Founded in 2009 by Alex Orap, YouScan is an AI-powered social media listening platform with image recognition capabilities. It serves over 600+ customers worldwide, including well-known consumer brands and agencies such as Nestle, L’Oreal, Chanel, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Michelin, Samsung, and McDonald’s, among others.
Besides analytics from an enterprise-class SML platform, YouScan also features Aina. This virtual AI-powered data analyst automatically delivers vital insights and alerts about customers’ brand discussions on social media.
The YouScan platform also provides image recognition capabilities, called Visual Insights. They include brand logo detection, scenes, objects, activities, persons, and other photo contents analysis and reporting.
YouScan Visual Insights provides marketers with unprecedented opportunities to uncover consumer insights, measure sponsorship ROI, find user-generative creative content and brand ambassadors, and much more, claims the company.
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