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In the days after the serial entrepreneur Ben Kaufman exited from his retail store startup CAMP early last year, he found himself in Walmart’s hometown of Bentonville, Arkansas meeting with a fellow tech founder he had partnered with years earlier. Before CAMP, Kaufman had also founded consumer startups Mophie, Quirky and Homesick Candles, and held exec roles at BuzzFeed. Now, he was looking for inspiration on what he might pursue next.
The fellow entrepreneur was Yoni Bloch, an Israeli musical artist who in 2010 had founded a video tech startup now known as Eko, which Kaufman’s companies partnered with in the past. In its early years, Eko (formerly Interlude) was supposed to disrupt the entertainment business by creating technology that enabled interactive features like choose-your-own adventure type customization of videos for online viewers. As a result, it attracted strategic investors like MGM Studios and Warner Music Group, in addition to venture players like Intel Capital and Sequoia Capital’s former Israel-focused fund.
But when that didn’t catch on, layoffs and a pivot ensued. Eko finally found product-market fit in a less flashy but more monetizable space: the product catalogues of online shopping sites. More specifically, by bringing more detail and interactivity to product image galleries that the startup says drive higher engagement and better conversion rates from online shoppers.
One of the biggest supporters of the reimagined Eko vision has been Walmart and, perhaps more importantly, its CEO Doug McMillon. (When I was conducting interviews for my book Winner Sells All about the Amazon/Walmart rivalry, several former Walmart execs used the same phrase to describe Eko founder Bloch’s influence on McMillon—to them, he was the CEO’s technology “muse.”)
McMillon first met Bloch on a trip to Israel, the story goes, and a $250 million investment in Eko and joint venture followed. (In what is a rare startup occurrence that might only be interesting to an e-commerce nerd like me: Amazon sits alongside its retail rival Walmart on Eko’s cap table, thanks to the tech giant’s acquisition of early Eko investor MGM.)
Now, a year and a half after the Kaufman/Bloch powwow in Bentonville, Eko is announcing that it has hired Kaufman as its president and chief commercial officer, and that he’ll oversee the buildout and operations of a new 70,000-square-foot warehouse in Bentonville—what the startup is dubbing a “capture factory.”
Inside this “factory,” AI-powered robotic cameras will shoot images of eventually hundreds of thousands of products—predominantly for Walmart at first, but eventually for other e-commerce websites and brands in the future. Eko says it’ll hire 200 local residents to run the facility.