Imagga, a company from Sofia, Bulgaria, is innovating the ways that businesses use images in websites, databases and other digital environments.

Imagga’s "image recognition platform as a service" allows images to be easily tagged through the use of application programming interfaces, or APIs. Images get sent to the tagging API, which returns them to the client system.

“It's the first one of its kind on the market,” Imagga’s marketing manager, Ivaylo Pozharliev, told Balkan Business Wire. “Our purpose is to offer an amazing image recognition service -- one that evolves and delivers consistency over time. We want to meet business needs … for businesses who are starting to recognize image recognition as a service that can help them.”

Integrity is one of the most important values to bring to the evolution of a small company, Pozharliev said.

“We are always looking for a win-win, even when presented with the opportunity to squeeze a few bucks out of a project,” Pozharliev said, citing a churn rate that is close to zero and indicating the company is building long-term relationships with clients.

“Bulgaria is a decent place to live, with an affordable cost of living and great engineering minds; combining it with the fact that it is part of the EU makes it a great place to start a business,” Pozharliev said. “These two reasons alone are enough to build something big without the excessive need of outside funding.”

Pozharliev cited the success of companies like Telerik (acquired by Progress Software) and Chaos Group (the creators of V-Ray) that show it’s possible to be at the top of a field with local origins.

“Our products are superior in terms of both quality and features compared to companies with huge budgets,” Pozharliev said.

Pozharliev sees a bright future for Imagga in a quickly changing and highly technical business world.

“AI is on the rise, and we are well positioned with a lot of customers in this space,” Pozharliev said. “Companies on both enterprises level and MNCs are showing interest are using our solutions, we are competitive with Google, Microsoft and Amazon in the AI race.”