There’s a moment that happens a hundred times a day in every retail store, restaurant, and hotel lobby in America. A customer hesitates at a menu. A shopper pauses in front of a display. A guest waits in a lobby. The screen in front of them plays the same content loop it played yesterday — and the day before — regardless of who is standing there, what time it is, or what that person actually needs to see.
Those are the unseen moments. And almost nobody is doing anything about them.
That was the provocation we brought to NY Tech Week — and the thread that ran through a 90-minute fireside chat on June 4th that brought together Imre Szenttornyay, our CEO, Beatriz Burgos, WillDom SVP of Marketing and Managing Director, and Peter Czimback, our Advisory Board member in front of a room of founders, operators, and investors.
It was not a product demo nor a fundraising pitch. It was a conversation about what it actually takes to build a new category and why the moment to do it is now.
A Company That Rebuilt Itself
The honest version of our story doesn’t start with a product launch. It starts with a decision most founders avoid.
Three years ago, Imre Szenttornyay was running a services company that had made the Inc. 500 list three years in a row. By every external measure, the company was winning. And then he decided to blow it up.
“We weren’t building a company,” Imre said from the stage. “We were stacking projects. Those are very different things”.
The services market was saturating. Margins were compressing. The business was scaling in revenue but not in value. Meanwhile, three things were converging in the technology landscape that Imre saw as a narrow, open window: edge computing had become cheap and powerful, computer vision models had gotten good enough to run on small devices in real time, and privacy expectations had made cloud-based audience analytics a liability, not an asset. The ingredients were on the table and nobody had assembled them for the physical world.
So CieloVision pivoted — not gradually, but entirely. New product. New brand. New team. New positioning. All at once.
“You don’t do it alone,” Imre said. “The reason it held together is because we had a partner on the other end of the call who could move at the same speed. I’m not standing here pretending we did this ourselves. We did it with WillDom”.
The Partnership That Made It Possible
WillDom is not, as most people assume, simply an engineering shop. That distinction mattered on stage and it matters in understanding how CieloVision got built.
“Most engineering partners are handed a spec and asked to ship,” Bea Burgos explained. “We were handed something harder, a company that needed to become a different company. Engineering, brand, identity, all of it. You can’t ship a product into a market until you’ve decided what kind of company is going to ship it. We worked on both at once. That’s why it held together.”
WillDom brought engineering discipline built across hundreds of fintech and healthcare projects — verticals where data handling and latency are not optional considerations, they’re survival requirements. That same discipline, Bea noted, is exactly what an edge-AI product running in live physical environments demands.
Peter Czimback, who framed the evening’s conversation as a moderator but whose perspective carried the weight of thirty years in the industry, put it plainly: “Most transformations are sold by consultancies. You get a slide deck and an invoice. The difference here is that this one actually happened. The company on stage right now is not the company that existed 18 months ago. Product, brand, positioning, team — all new. And it works. That’s rare.”
The Market Problem Nobody Has Solved
Here is the scale of what we are addressing: there are millions of digital screens deployed across retail stores, restaurant chains, hotels, fitness centers, and public spaces in the United States right now. The vast majority of them play the same content loop regardless of who is standing in front of them.
A teenager approaches a screen — same content. A family of five — same content. An empty room — same content.
“The ingredients are already there,” Imre said. “The screens exist. The content exists. The cameras exist. The computer exists. Companies have just failed to assemble them the right way. What we built with WillDom is the layer that connects what’s already there to the person standing in front of it, in real time”.
Peter picked up the thread directly: “We’re not asking anybody to rip and replace what they’ve got. We’re not asking for a five-year transformation project. You have a camera, you have a screen, you have content. You’re missing the layer that decides what should happen. That’s what they built”.
What “Orchestration” Actually Means
We spent time on stage drawing a line between what exists in the market today and what they’ve built, a distinction that turns out to be the entire argument.
“Most companies in this space are doing analytics,” Bea said. “They look at what happened and tell you about it later. CieloVision is doing orchestration — it decides what should happen, in the moment. That’s a different category of product. And it’s a much harder build, which is why most companies haven’t done it”.
Imre gave operators in the room a plain-English version of what that looks like in practice: CieloVision sits on top of screens you already own. It observes the audience in front of the screen — anonymously, processed on the device itself, no data leaving the premises — and decides what content should play at that moment. Different audience, different content. Different time of day, different content. Different context, different response.
“Most digital signage systems decide what plays,” Imre said. “CieloVision decides what should happen.”
The performance numbers are not projections. In live deployments, the system produces a 25.7% lift over static content. “That’s not a number we got from a focus group,” Bea noted. “It’s a number we got by building the system, deploying it, and measuring it in live environments. That number is the discipline”.
Why This, Why Now
The question the room kept returning to — implicitly and explicitly — was timing. Why is this the moment?
The answer Imre gave was structural, not opportunistic. The physical world has been ignored by software for thirty years. Applications changed what happened on screens. Intelligence is now starting to change what happens in spaces. The companies that build the orchestration layer for physical environments aren’t riding a trend — they’re establishing the category that will define how businesses operate in the next generation.
“For thirty years, software changed what happened on screens,” Imre said. “In the next thirty years, intelligence will change what happens in spaces.”
Bea added the market-level pattern she sees across WillDom’s portfolio: “The teams winning the next phase aren’t building better chatbots. They’re building systems that change what happens in the real world. That’s a much harder build — and it’s where the durable companies are going to come from”.
What the Room Left With
Peter closed the evening with three points he wanted the audience to carry out with them.
The first: CieloVision didn’t exist in its current form 18 months ago. The reason it does is what happens when a founder bets right and finds a partner who can build — and rebuild, brand and all.
The second: the screens you walk past every day are dumb. They don’t have to be.
The third — and the one that may matter most as this market develops — is about the shape of the partnership itself. CieloVision is a US company. WillDom is Argentine. The product running in American stores was built by a cross-border team that combined strategic vision with deep technical execution, fast.
“This is what a US–Argentina partnership looks like when it works,” Peter said. “There’s going to be a lot more of these”.
The Thing Worth Paying Attention To
Billions of moments pass in front of screens every day without anything happening. A hesitation. A glance. A pause that could become a transaction and doesn’t.
The technology to change that already exists. The screens are already deployed. The cameras are already in place. The only thing missing has been the layer that assembles all of it into a system that responds — in real time, to the actual person standing there.
That layer is built. It’s measured. And it works.
If you’re running a retail chain, a restaurant group, a hotel portfolio, or a fitness brand — and you have Samsung screens already deployed — the conversation worth having is not about buying new hardware. It’s about what the screens you already own are leaving on the table every day.
Ready to see what your screens are missing? Book a demo