Slyce Acquires Tel Aviv’s BuyCode for $5 Million

Visual product search platform Slyce has made its first acquisition as a public company.

The Calgary-born firm has acquired BuyCode, as Israel-based company that developed Pounce, an image recognition-based shopping app. The transaction was valued at $5 million.

Pounce, which launched in 2012, is a mobile commerce app and platform which enables consumers to hover over product images with their smartphone’s camera and, using image recognition, carry out frictionless one-click checkouts of the items they discover. By acquiring a fully functioning consumer app and integrating its own image recognition platform, Slyce says it will save significant development time and investment and fast-track their B2C strategy.

“We’re incredibly excited to be acquiring both the technology and the immense talent that Pounce comes with,” said Slyce CEO Mark Elfenbein. “We are consistently looking to add and perfect the functionality we can offer major retailers with the Slyce visual search platform.”

“Through integrating the technologies,” he added, “we can offer our retail partners an almost seamless discovery-to-purchase process for their customers—whereby consumers can go from seeing an item in the real-world to purchasing that item from the retailer’s inventory in literally a few clicks.”

Pounce founder and CEO Avital Yachin will join the executive team of Slyce, a Techvibes 20 company.

“We’re very proud of what we’ve created with Pounce over the last two years and are excited to join forces with Slyce at a time when mobile commerce is seeing explosive growth and Slyce has an impressive adoption pipeline,” said Yachin.