About Cataloger AI

Meet the Creator

I'm Darien Nouri, a data scientist with a dual major in Data Science and Computer Science from NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. I'm currently pursuing a Master's in Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning from Georgia Institute of Technology. My professional experience spans quantitative finance at Citadel, founding PropertizeAI (a real estate ML startup), and research roles in predictive analytics and alternative data analysis. While I plan to pursue quantitative finance after completing my Master's, this app represents a personal passion project that emerged from a very different world – that of auctions and estate sales.

Why I Built This App

The inspiration for Cataloger AI came from watching my mother, Anne Nouri, an auctioneer, seek ways to leverage AI tools to help her team streamline their catalog creation process. She was eager to learn how AI could transform their workflow, but the existing tools required processing items one by one – uploading individual images, crafting descriptions manually, and spending hours on repetitive tasks.

As someone who gets genuinely frustrated by repetitive tasks and has an obsession with optimization, I couldn't just sit back and watch this inefficient process unfold. I started by writing scripts to automate batch processing of descriptions, which immediately saved her team hours of work. Then came the image processing bottleneck – they were outsourcing removing backgrounds from product photos, which took time, was costly, and added another pain point to the process. So I built advanced algorithms to handle background removal in bulk.

Seeing how transformative these automations were for her team, and learning that other auctioneers face identical time-consuming challenges, I was encouraged to expand the framework to help others in the industry. The encouragement also included creating a solution that could help pay my NYC rent while I continue product development and my studies.