Leading Russian Internet group Mail.Ru Group announced yesterday that it has poured $1.5 million into the Israeli visual search developer Cortica. The funding is part of a larger round led by other undisclosed investors; it brings the total amount attracted by Cortica to more than $12.5 million.
The investment in Cortica allows Mail.Ru Group to “support and access its Image2Text technology,” the company said in a press release. This processing technology identifies the main concepts of an image and associates them with keywords and textual taxonomies, after which it is possible to offer users relevant content – such as background info or ads – based on the image they are viewing.
“Cortica’s breakthrough technology provides a degree of recognition and understanding accuracy that is comparable with that of the human brain,” said Mor Yegerman, Head of International M&A at Mail.ru Group.
Mail.Ru Group PR Director Ksenia Chabanenko told East-West Digital News that the company focuses on investing in startups whose technologies can be used in its own products. However, she declined to elaborate further on how Cortica’s know-how will be implemented in existing Mail.Ru services such as email and/or context advertising systems, mentioning only that all Cortica R&D activities will still be carried out in Israel.
Participation in Cortica’s funding round is the Russian Internet group’s first significant international investment in a long time. The group still has a small share in Facebook, which it considers purely a financial asset. The company currently holds 19.8% of the payment operator Qiwi, which raised $212 million in a NASDAQ IPO earlier this month.
Also noteworthy is the fact that Mail.Ru Group CEO Dmitry Grishin runs a fund of his own that specializes in robotics and recently invested $500,000 in California-based Swivl.
Cortica’s technology was initially developed at Techion, a leading Israeli technology institute located in Haifa. The company itself was founded in 2007, and has since attracted three funding rounds including the current one, totaling more than $12.5 million. Among its major backers is the Horizons Ventures fund owned by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing, which pumped $7 million into Cortica in 2012.
