French event sales specialist Vente-Privée buys AI start-up Daco

By

Matthieu Guinebault

Translated by
Nicola Mira

Published
Oct 17, 2018

French online event sales leader Vente-Privée has announced the acquisition of French company Daco, a start-up which develops AI-based image recognition tools for real-time competitive retail benchmarking. Daco was part of the Vente-Privée Impulse accelerator at Parisian start-up campus Station F.

The founders of Daco, Anis Gandoura, Claire Bretton and Paul Mouginot, will work together with Vente-Privée and continue to develop new image recognition tools. Daco was created in 2016, and the software it has created is able to identify and classify tens of millions of different products, allowing consumer brands to keep track of their retail-based competition.

“We are keen to establish long-term connections with start-ups, based on our long-term business vision which puts innovation and technology at the heart of our growth strategy,” said Jacques-Antoine Granjon, CEO and co-founder of Vente-Privée. The latter, and other French groups like L’Oréal, Vivarte, Bréal, Cache Cache, NellyRodi and Galeries Lafayette, are all clients of Daco's.

Vente-Privée has more than 6,000 employees, and in the 2017 financial year it generated a revenue of €3.3 billion. It currently claims over 72 million subscribers in 14 markets, including, besides France, Italy, Spain, Germany, the UK, Austria, Benelux, Switzerland, Denmark, Poland, Brazil and Mexico.