Giyst targets €1m seed funding for technology to sum up key points in the blink of an eye

Giyst provides easy-to-digest summaries and highlights of meetings and conferences which help event organisers and attendees to retain value after the event has ended.

“Nobody has ever gone to a conference and felt like rewatching an entire session. It’s like drinking out of a firehose – you get so much information. There’s information overload and you’re never going to rewatch the full-form content,” Avril Power, co-founder and chief operating officer of Giyst, said.

“There’s so much content to repurpose, especially video content. Giyst aims to solve the problem using artificial intelligence and machine learning.”

Giyst’s technology can take content from a keynote speaker or panel session and use its algorithm to take out the key points. It will then create a coherent story of either 10 per cent or 20 per cent of the original length.

“It drives engagement. If you watch a summary, it may make you want to watch the full-form content again. The discovery piece also makes it easier for you to find the content you were looking for originally,” Power said.

The idea for Giyst was born from Power’s own frustrations from attending conferences, as well as the explosion in video content. She started the company with Colm Murphy, her co-founder, in 2020.

“My background is marketing. I wanted to work out a way to repurpose all the video content into something meaningful. We spoke with trial partners about what they did to repurpose content,” she said.

“If they ran an event they’d get it transcribed, then someone would have to pick out the key parts, then it would go to a video editor. That could take a week to four weeks. Our technology can do it in five minutes.”

Giyst is supported by Enterprise Ireland’s commercialisation fund and has raised €525,000 to date. The business currently has five staff and is based at Ceadar in UCD, but will spin out into a Cork city-based office in December.

Ceadar is Ireland’s digital innovation hub for artificial intelligence, and Power said it was the support from Enterprise Ireland that enabled the business to access the technology it needed to grow.

“It was through the commercialisation fund that we got connected with Ceadar. Without that funding we wouldn’t have the technology. Myself and Colm’s background is more on the commercial side of the business but we got to work with the best there is in Ceadar,” she said.

“We’re fundraising for a €1 million seed round and we hope to close that early next year. From there we hope to join the high-potential start-up unit.”

While the company is still at an early stage, Power is confident of the commercial potential of Giyst’s technology.

“We’ve got natural traction with the events space. We’re really focused on the US space, that’s the largest market for enterprise video. The opportunity goes far beyond that,” Power said. “There’s the likes of internal communications and marketing too, because summaries of content go across so many aspects of a business.”

This Making it Work article was produced in partnership with Enterprise Ireland