Superfish Inc., which has developed algorithms and a platform for visual mapping of the Internet, has raised $10 million from Vintage Investment Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and its Israeli affiliate, DFJ Tamir Fishman Ventures Ltd. (TASE: TFVC). The company will use the proceeds to expand its development team to 25 people for its flagship project, Venn, which brings mapping technology to the world of social networks.
Superfish was founded in 2006 by CEO Adi Pinhas and CTO Michael Chertok. It has raised $22 million to date. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, and has a development center in Givat Shmuel.
By interfacing a Facebook account with Venn, Superfish's platform scans all image updates on Facebook, categorizing them as food, sports, events, cars, people, pictures, etc. The classification does not use the images' captions or texts, but an in-depth analysis of the image itself.
Pinhas says, "The Venn platform is basically the next stage in the online search engine, which will change the way we search for, discover, shop, and share information on social networks. Since ordinary search engines do not consider images at all, but are based on the accompanying text, there are hundreds of billions of pictures on the Internet which are not mapped anywhere, and lie there like an unturned stone. These pictures are an untapped ocean of information."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on July 30, 2013
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