Drawing on cave walls before they could speak, humans have always been visual beings. Centuries later, little has changed, according to Apu Gupta, cofounder and CEO of Curalate, a visual analytics provider. On a daily basis, Internet users share more than 1.8 billion images, and as brands become increasingly aware of the role that social media plays in customer engagement, marketers are finding ways to harness the power of this largely unstructured social Web data. 

Founded in 2012 by Gupta and Nick Shiftan, Curalate offers solutions on two fronts. The first is a dashboard tool that enables marketers to take a brand-owned image, share it via social channels, and track how it gets shared throughout the Web. The second—Curalate’s FanReel product—captures user-generated images, allowing marketers to match them to items in a brand’s catalog, and turn fan photos into ads featuring clickable, buyable products. Curalate is the only visual analytics vendor that “works both ways,” Courtney Eckerle, a MarketingSherpa analyst, says. 

Though straightforward, the technology is not simple. “Our technology works like a massive memory game. It memorizes every single pixel in a given image, and flips each pixel over in other images to determine whether there’s a match, reading over 200 million images daily,” Gupta explains. 

Originally, Curalate was focused on Pinterest, but quickly added Facebook and Instagram analytics to its offerings. In early 2014, the company extended its platform to Tumblr. “Consumers don’t live on one network,” Gupta says. “They browse on Pinterest and then brag on Instagram. We believe that these are the new bookends to the shopping process.” 

Curalate works with 425 brands, including Neiman Marcus, Gap, Kraft Foods, and Sephora. “Curalate helps its customers collect deep insights on how their campaigns are performing and use them to boost engagement, all while allowing companies to stay true to their brands and integrate easily. Clients uniformly rave about it,” Eckerle says. 

But more than customers are pleased with Curalate. The social networks that it operates on have recognized the company as well—in April 2014, Tumblr invited Curalate to join its A-list partner program, naming the vendor its only visual analytics partner, and in May, Pinterest selected Curalate to participate in the newly launched alpha of its MarTech initiative, making Curalate one of a few third-party software developers to gain access to the Pinterest Business Insights API. “Curalate is a really innovative, smart company,” Eckerle says, “and I think we’ll be seeing big things from them.” —Maria Minsker