Cortica, the first company to visually index the Web, has raised $6.4M in Series B investment led by Horizons Ventures, including participation from Mail.ru Group and other high-profile angel investors. This brings the company's total funding to $18M. Cortica's technology simulates the brain's neuro-circuits in order to recognize patterns and enable computers to understand images with the highest degree of accuracy. Once identified, the images turn into engaging units for search, advertising and e-commerce. The funding will be used to scale Cortica's visual search platform and expand its commercial deployment with leading partners.

Cortica has spent more than 10 years in research and development to create its Image2Text® technology, which is protected by more than 50 patents. Cortica's engine processes and recognizes images based on patterns, just like the brain does, unlike other companies that have built a database of images through fingerprinting, modeling and crowdsourcing. Cortica patterns are clustered into digital concepts which are stored and mapped to keywords and contextual taxonomies that enable identification with zero false positives.

"Cortica's Image2Text technology, which associates images " brands, landmarks, products, celebrities, cars and events " with concepts, brings a unique capability to the market on a large scale," said Igal Raichelgauz, co-founder and CEO of Cortica. "This opens up a host of business opportunities for advertisers and marketers by enabling consumers to intuitively interact with images. This additional funding will contribute to further advancing our core visual search platform, expanding our commercial team and scaling product distribution."

"With millions of images uploaded to the Web every day, there is a distinct opportunity to index these images to generate insights that will allow visual search and better targeted advertising," said Jason Wong, director, Horizons Ventures. "Cortica's core technology turns every image into native advertising inventory, providing consumers with a more engaging and relevant ad experience and generating more impactful results for advertisers, marketers and publishers."

About Cortica

Cortica was founded in 2007 with a single vision: to fundamentally revolutionize computers' ability to understand images and video. Cortica's technology simulates the human cortex in order to understand and recognize images with the highest degree of accuracy. The company was founded by a multi-disciplinary team of neuroscientists and big-data engineers that includes Igal Raichelgauz, Karina Odinaev and Yehoshua (Josh) Y. Zeevi. Cortica's headquarters are in New York with R&D centers in Israel. Cortica is funded by Horizons Ventures (which manages the private venture investments of Mr. Li Ka-shing in the technology sector globally), Mail.ru Group and high profile individuals, including Ynon Kreiz, the former chairman and CEO of the Endemol Group and current executive chairman of Maker Studios, who also serves as Cortica's chairman.