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Venture Capital News: Ditto Labs Secures $2.2M

2014-05-14
BOSTON. MA, Pioneer in photo-analytics announces an additional investment of $2.2 million.
Ditto Labs - the pioneer in photo-analytics announces an additional investment of $2.2 million from leaders in media, technology and advertising. Ditto is the only company scouring the daily torrent of publicly shared photos for brands and products. This is a game-changer for marketers who have never been able to identify and engage directly with consumers who are sharing more than 5 billion photos on social media each week. Ditto automatically identifies who cheers for the Red Sox, who eats at Burger King, who drives a Jeep and who wears Prada.

Built by a team of MIT-trained computer scientists, Ditto's proprietary visual search engine adds structure to this unstructured data stream enabling enterprises to make better decisions about product use and audience targeting. Ditto helps digital marketers:

Target ads based on products, brands and categories consumers actually use
Identify customer affinities and analyze seasonal, geographic and competitive trends
Find, engage and grow audiences based on the content of public photos

'Our focus is to read the firehose of all public photos to discover how people use and interact with products and brands most important in them.' said David Rose, CEO at Ditto Labs. 'Marketers at every consumer brand can benefit from this meta data. Marketers only relying on text, follows and likes are literally missing the pictures--which everyone knows are thousand times more valuable.'

Given the rapid growth in photo sharing across Tumblr, Twitter and Instagram, image-based marketing and analytics is becoming critical to consumer products, consumer packaged goods, restaurants, sports, travel and fashion.

Ditto was recently recognized by packaged goods giant Kraft Foods at Ad Tech San Francisco. Kraft's Macaroni and Cheese brand selected Ditto as the company with the most potential for industry disruption and turnkey ability to help the brand become more relevant to its target consumers.

Investor Viewpoints

Ken Barnett, CEO The Mars Agency
'Previously, marketers could only discover brand-loyalists by searching social media for their use of key words, like the brand-name itself. Since photos tell authentic stories without the use of text, a meaningful signal of who is interested in what, was largely unavailable. Ditto identifies communities based on what appears in public photos, so marketers can now understand and target any audience as easily as they do with Google AdWords.'

Anthony Tjan, Managing Partner, Cue Ball Group
'We are thrilled to be working alongside David and his team of outstanding engineers and serial entrepreneurs at Ditto. The company is bringing an entirely new dimension to marketing and brand analytics by uncovering new insights in the big data of images. We are very excited by the potential of Ditto's platform because of its proprietary technology, its strong out-of-the gate traction, together, with all the application potential yet to be uncovered.'

Other investors include seasoned advertising executives, technology luminaries and investors - additional information on each can be found below:
John Battelle, Executive Chairman Sovrn Holdings
David William Baum, Partner, Stage 1 Strategies
David DeMuth, Co-CEO, Doner Advertising
Professor, Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder MIT Media Lab
Brad Oleshansky, Entrepreneur and marketing industry veteran
Mike Sheehan, former CEO Hill Holliday, now CEO The Boston Globe

About Ditto Labs, Inc.

Ditto is the only company adding structure to social media's unstructured visual content. Using proprietary computer vision technology, Ditto mines the daily torrent of photos to help brands understand and target audiences. The Company's real-time firehose and API access informs decision-making across the entire marketing organization. Ditto's name stems from the observation that people mimic each other's behavior and that this influence is communicated through photos.
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