Apr 5, 2018
Mark Cummins is the co-founder of Pointy, a startup that helps local retailers get their products online. Retailers just plug in a Pointy device, and the complete contents of their store is displayed online automatically. Previously Mark co-founded Plink, a visual search engine company that was the first UK-based company acquired by Google in 2010. Mark spent several years at Google post-acquisition, working on the Visual Search team.
Mark was the first person in the UK to sell a startup to Google, when he sold his previous company Plink, which now makes up a huge part of Google image search. Mark and Pointy have some interesting backers like Paul Allen of Microsoft, the founders of Google Maps, Draper Associates and Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress and Michael Birch of Bebo. Mark's co-founder Charles Bibby also designed the security system for London Olympics in 2012
Pointy allows independent retailers to bring their inventory
online through their unique device. He's got some great figures on
how the "Retail Apocalypse" is overstated and how bricks
and mortar retail is growing. Pointy is reimagining search,
creating a database of all of the world's offline products that
gives your average bricks and mortar store more of a foothold in
the fights against Amazon. Pointy has the ability to create the
largest system of distribution warehouses in the world too as a
result.