Explor AI

Explór AI was a technology start-up that aims to create a "search engine for discovering new products and experiences that you'll like, even before you've tried them". It aimed to create a general-purpose & self-learning recommender system to help people discover things they'll love with just a few swipes, regardless of the category. In retrospect, what we were building could be more intuitively described as "Tinder for things" - where it's not only you are looking for things to do, buy or try, but those things are also actively looking for you and presenting themselves to you if it could potentially be a good match. Explór (the product) made personalised recommendations based on users' individual tastes. Recommendations are made across virtually any user-defined categories such as (but not limited to) movies, books, restaurants, shoes, television shows or wines, etc. Explór was different to other recommendation engines in that it doesn’t rely on the content or item descriptions to make recommendations. Explór's algorithm was designed to learn the users' tastes, find other users around the world with similar tastes, and use reference collection of favourites to provide suggestions. In this way it suggests items users would like, rather than what currently has the most mainstream popularity. Explór AI was originally founded by two co-founders, James Hassett (CEO) and Jonathan Byun (CTO), soon expanding to add two new founding members (Bradley Wong and Tanja Mimica). I served as the CTO of the company in its early days. Brad and I left when the company radically pivoted away from the original vision, but the company endured. Since then, led by Tanja Mimica (CEO) and James Hassett (CTO) it had made multiple major pivots, eventually becoming Martin.ai, which was subsequently acquired by a publicly traded US tech company PubMatic, on September 14, 2022 in a deal valued at $45M.