Viewdle

Viewdle is about capture in the moment.  We’re focused on enabling consumers to manage, tag, and share their media as they create it, anywhere.  

Viewdle was founded in 2007, with the vision of helping people share and tag all of their photos and videos on any media creation device - from servers to laptops to mobile phones - through visual analysis and facial recognition technology. 

Laurent Gil (CEO):

Laurent leads the company's technology, marketing, business, and corporate development strategy as the CEO of Viewdle.  He has a seasoned background in Finance and Computer Science, with accomplishments ranging from technology investment banking in Asia and the US to mobile and internet entrepreneurship in Latin America and Africa. 

Laurent spent over 5 years in investment banking as a Senior Investment Banker in corporate finance and capital markets at the French investment bank Credit Agricole, with assignments in New York, Tokyo, and Paris. 

During his MBA at Wharton, Laurent began his career as a serial entrepreneur, co-founding a boutique investment bank in Brazil which completed large transactions in the telecom sector in Latin America.  Through this experience, he co-founded and served as CFO of TAHO, a wireless internet service provider in Rio de Janeiro, which raised US $10MM in 2001 to develop a broadband wireless internet network in Latin America.  Before leaving Brazil, he co-founded IdeaValley, the leading provider of electronic paper in Latin America.

Most recently, Laurent spent 2 years in West Africa deploying wireless networks in high schools, for a non-profit organization he founded.

Laurent has a MBA from the Wharton School of Business, Philadelphia, USA (2003), a Master of Science degree in Mathematics and Signal Processing from the French graduate Engineering school, Supelec; a post-graduate degree in Management from the College des Ingenieurs in Paris, France, and is a Summa Cum Laude graduate from The University of Bordeaux in France with a B.S. in Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science.

Jason Mitura - Chief Product Officer (CPO):

As Viewdle's Chief Product Officer, Jason focuses on finding new opportunities for Viewdle's technology in consumer applications - from desktop to mobile phones. Jason was previously the CEO of Blogstar, a white label provider of content management, video social networking, and e-commerce solutions for large-scale content owners and brands. Blogstar worked with celebrities such as Bam Margera and Kelly Slater to build interactive fan experiences.

Prior to Blogstar, he was the Co-Founder and President of Operator11 Exchange Corporation, a leading-technology video social network, which was sold one year after its founding.  Operator11 developed a browser-based multi-user video broadcast and syndication platform as its core technology.  Core innovations included low latency switching between multiple video streams, a community-based live video production environment, and social syndication tools that pushed the stream live throughout the web.  He grew Operator11's production studio in Hollywood to having tens of thousands of hours of videos viewed in a day and more than 40 shows produced per week; from nightly concerts to a web news desk. 

 At the start of his entrepreneurial career, Jason founded Featured Publications which published a quarterly magazine and restaurant-focused mass mailers.  Featured's content was licensed from publishers like Conde Nast, and was complemented with high-profile national advertisers and local business.  This was an offshoot of his experience working with the online music and video startup Ruckus Networks, where he built and managed its new customer acquisition and marketing teams.  He holds a bachelors degree from the University of Southern California, and studied in the highly selective Business-CinemaTelevision program.

Viewdle's facial recognition engine is very scalable (less than 1% of false positive, on a database of 34,000 reference people, and growing), and fast (real-time performances on simple off-the-shelf servers, with sub-linear dependency to the size of the reference database). The technology is based on proprietary algorithms, developed by Viewdle's R&D team in Ukraine.