Image recognition start-up Cortica Inc. has raised $7 million in its second financing round from Li Ka-Shing's venture capital fund Horizons Ventures, and Ynon Kreiz, the former chairman and CEO of Endemol Group, the world’s largest independent television production company. Kreiz will become chairman of the company.
Cortica, founded by CEO Igal Raichelgauz, in 2007, previously raised $4 million from private investors. The company is headquartered in New York City, with an office in Silicon Valley and development centers in Haifa and Ramat Gan.
Cortica's image recognition technology was originally developed at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. The technology enables computers to comprehend photo and video content on the web. The platform combines neuroscience and computer science to automatically recognize and interpret large amounts of visual data in real-time, including objects, places, faces, logos, brands, events, products, etc. with zero false positives. This breakthrough is a major improvement over decades-old face recognition and newer fingerprinting technologies, and addresses one of the greatest computing challenges on the Internet - automatic identification and processing of visual content.
Cortica was founded by neuroscientists Professor Yehoshua (Joshua) Zeevi and Karina Odinaev, and engineer Raichelgauz, who assembled a multidisciplinary team of neuroscience researchers, digital multimedia experts, and veterans of Israeli Military Intelligence to develop and commercialize the technology. The underlying technology is derived from scientific research on understanding how neural networks of the human cortex perform complex computational tasks, such as identifying patterns, classifying natural signals and understanding concepts.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on August 5, 2012
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