Israeli start-up Cortica today announced that it has completed its second round of funding with a $7 million investment from Horizons Venturess, the venture capital fund owned by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing, and from Ynon Kreiz, the former Chairman & CEO of the Endemol Group, the world's largest independent television production company. The company had already raised $4 million from a group of high quality angel investors. Mr. Kreiz joins Cortica as its Chairman; founder Igal Raichelgauz continues as CEO.

Developed at the Technion, Israel's premier technology institute, Cortica's groundbreaking image recognition technology enables computers to comprehend photo and video content on the web. Fusing neuroscience with computer science, Cortica's platform can automatically recognize and interpret large amounts of visual data (photos and video) in real-time including objects, places, faces, logos, brands, events, products, etc. with zero false positives. This breakthrough is a vast 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 (Josh) Zeevi and Karina Odinaev, and engineer Igal Raichelgauz, who assembled a multi-disciplinary team of neuroscience researchers, digital multimedia experts and veterans of Israeli military intelligence to develop and commercialize the technology. The underlying technology was derived from scientific research focused on understanding how neural networks of the human cortex perform complex computational tasks, such as identifying patterns, classifying natural signals and understanding concepts.

Cortica's commercial team will relocate to the US and will be based in NY with an office in Silicon Valley. The first commercial applications of the technology will transform advertising, search and image analytics. For further information, log onto Cortica at www.cortica.com .