Today’s high-tech and smart intelligence does not just make lives expedient but can be applied to bring art to everyday lives, according to Wescover, a San Francisco-based startup.

“Wescover is a platform for extraordinary things in familiar spaces," Rachely Esman, founder of Wescover, told Maeil Business Newspaper in an interview.

Wescover collects details on art pieces, like sculptures, installed in cities by allowing artists to add information about their artworks. If an artist draws graffiti, the person can input the location and other details of the art piece in Wescover. The startup then processes the data and share them with its partner Google LLC to relay information to Google Lens users.

Google Lens is an image recognition technology developed by Google, which identifies and brings up information on pictures of objects taken by smartphone camera. Wescover earlier this month announced its partnership with Google to allow Google Lens users to search and learn about artworks in cities across the world.

"Google Lens does not have enough data on the arts even though it has superior ability to discriminate things like tables and chairs," said Esman. For example, Google Lens recognizes art pieces installed in the lobby of a Twitter building simply as “shelves” or “wine cellars” when they were to depict “mailboxes.”

Google’s AI system has not learned to recognize art as art yet, said Esman, believing Wescover can fill up the gap.

Wescover has 127 artworks registered in its database from San Francisco alone, and it is rapidly building up its data network by collaborating with public institutions across the world. In the second phase following ramping up the database, the startup plans to add a feature that artists can participate in trading their artworks. The startup believes it could not only help low-profile, local artists to share their creations with the world but also gain a chance to make profits.

Wescover has secured $3.11 million funding from six investors, according to private market data provider Pitchbook. It is reported the investors recognized the operation cost was relatively low while the platform is very well built to handle explosive growth in database.

Rachely Esman previously served as head of R&D unit in Israel Defense Force. She also was chief executive officer of fintech platform MarketsPulse that she co-founded.

By Hyun Kyoo Shin, Seung Yoon Lee, correspondents in Silicon Valley, and Jeehyun Cho

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