Syte

The product: searching for clothes with a photo

Syte was founded in 2015 in Tel Aviv by Lihi Pinto-Fryman, her then-husband Ofer Fryman and her brother Idan Pinto, who teamed up with Dr. Helge Voss, a machine learning researcher from CERN. Its product solved a problem familiar to anyone who shops for fashion online: it is hard to describe in words an item you have seen. With Syte, a shopper can photograph a garment or upload a picture and get the most similar products from the store. You can also upload a picture of an item from your closet and get suggestions for what to wear with it. The brands that adopted the technology included Tommy Hilfiger, Marks & Spencer, Farfetch and Boohoo.

Beyond the image: tagging, search and recommendations

Over time the product grew from image search into a full product discovery platform. In 2020 the company launched text search that uses visual recognition: the system tags every product in the catalog by what can be seen in its picture, so it understands searches in shoppers' language, such as "red high heels for the evening". Alongside this, the company offered camera search, recommendation engines and personalization. It claimed an average increase of 177% in conversion rates, a figure that comes from the company alone.

Funding: about $70 million

In October 2020 Syte raised a $30 million Series C led by Viola Ventures, with investors including La Maison, MizMaa Ventures, Magma and Naver, plus $10 million in loans. This brought its total funding to $71 million. The company reported average quarterly growth of 22% since the start of 2020, a period when online shopping jumped because of COVID-19, and planned to expand into the United States and Asia.

2025: a request for a recovery process

In May 2025 Syte asked the Tel Aviv District Court for a court-supervised recovery process, after building up debts of about NIS 39 million, about $11 million. According to the request, about $70 million had been invested in the company since it was founded, and it had not managed to raise new money in the preceding months. At the time it had about 70 paying customers, mainly large fashion retailers, and estimated annual revenue of about NIS 25 million, about $7 million. Until shortly before, it had employed 57 people, 53 of them in Israel.

What remains: Syte by Nayax

The technology itself did not disappear. Nayax, an Israeli company traded on Nasdaq and in Tel Aviv, presents the product as Syte by Nayax. Its company profile at the Shoptalk conference says this is an evolution of the technology that was owned by Syte and recently acquired by Nayax. In June 2026 Nayax announced the launch of product discovery and personalization tools for retailers, "powered by a proprietary AI engine Nayax acquired and developed in-house", and built into its payments system. The terms of the deal were not published in the sources checked. Syte's story shows that a company can fail as a business even when its technology finds a new home.