Web visual index company Cortica Inc. has raised $6.4 million in a Series B financing round led by Horizons Ventures with participation of Mail.ru Group and other high-profile angel investors. This brings the company's total funding to $18 million.
The funding will be used to scale Cortica's visual search platform and expand its commercial deployment with leading partners.
Cortica's technology simulates the brain's neuro-circuits in order to recognize patterns and enable computers to understand images with the highest degree of accuracy. Once identified, the images turn into engaging units for search, advertising and e-commerce. The funding will be used to scale Cortica's visual search platform and expand its commercial deployment with leading partners.
Cortica's engine processes recognize images based on patterns, just like the brain does, unlike other companies that have built a database of images through fingerprinting, modeling and crowdsourcing. Cortica patterns are clustered into digital concepts which are stored and mapped to keywords and contextual taxonomies that enable identification with zero false positives.
Cortica was founded in 2007 by CEO Igal Raichelgauz and neuroscientists Prof. Yehoshua (Joshua) Zeevi and Karina Odinaev, who assembled a multidisciplinary team of neuroscience researchers, digital multimedia experts, and veterans of Israeli Military Intelligence to develop and commercialize the technology.
The company is headquartered in New York City, with an office in Silicon Valley and development centers in Haifa and Ramat Gan.
Raichelgauz said, "Cortica's Image2Text(R) technology, which associates images -brands, landmarks, products, celebrities, cars and events - with concepts, brings a unique capability to the market on a large scale. This opens up a host of business opportunities for advertisers and marketers by enabling consumers to intuitively interact with images. This additional funding will contribute to further advancing our core visual search platform, expanding our commercial team and scaling product distribution."
Horizon Ventures director Jason Wong said, "With millions of images uploaded to the Web every day, there is a distinct opportunity to index these images to generate insights that will allow visual search and better targeted advertising. Cortica's core technology turns every image into native advertising inventory, providing consumers with a more engaging and relevant ad experience and generating more impactful results for advertisers, marketers and publishers."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on June 20, 2013
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