Sophia Search, the Belfast-based innovation leader in semantic content analysis, Chaired by industry veteran Chris Horn, today announced that it has closed a $3.7 million Series A funding round. The investment was led by Atlantic Bridge, and will be used to increase marketing and sales efforts in North America and the UK and to accelerate product roll-out at its development facility at the Northern Ireland Science Park. This financing round represents one of the largest venture investments in a Northern Ireland company in recent times.

Sophia's products are unique in providing understanding and context within large sets of unstructured content. According to International Data Corporation (IDC), the global analytics market will continue to grow at a 9.8% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2016 to reach $50.7 billion. Sophia is well positioned to capitalize on the burgeoning market opportunity with a next-generation semantic analysis solution that leapfrogs traditional analytic search tools.

"Sophia's unique solution has shown it can greatly increase customers' ability to work with large data sets, giving insight and understanding into content that previously was unavailable. We were impressed by the list of US Tier 1 customers that Sophia is already working with in the advertising and publishing sectors, and we look forward to supporting the team as they continue to grow in this new and exciting space," said Elaine Coughlan, partner and lead investor, Atlantic Bridge.

Sophia's solutions are used in some of the world's largest advertising and publishing houses to automatically understand the meaning of content users are consuming and to intelligently leverage this insight to deliver the information and services they need. Advertisers can achieve up to three times higher click through rates by providing more relevant ad content without using cookies. Publishers' sales can be increased by intelligently recommending titles through an understanding of readers' interests whilst maintaining anonymity. For more information on Sophia's technology, see: http://sophiasearch.com/technology.

"With significant customer momentum and world class patented technology, this new funding will ensure that Sophia is well positioned to lead this market and is a strong endorsement of the world class technology present in Northern Ireland," said Sophia Chairman of the Board and NISP CONNECT program chair.

"Having a Top Tier Institutional Investor like Atlantic Bridge leading our financing round is a powerful endorsement of our strategy, technology, customer success and team," said David Patterson, CEO, Sophia. "This funding gives us the means to scale the business further in the North American market and create more jobs in Northern Ireland."

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About Atlantic Bridge
Atlantic Bridge is a growth equity fund focused on technology investments with offices in Dublin, London and Silicon Valley. The investment team comprises a unique multi-disciplinary team of industry professionals and serial entrepreneurs with deep domain knowledge and international know-how. For more information, please visit: http://www.abven.com

About Sophia
Established in 2007, Sophia is the innovation leader in semantic content analysis. Sophia specializes in automatically extracting precise meaning from content to intuitively understand what it is about without the need for training or human guidance. Sophia is headquartered in San Jose, Calif. with offices in Belfast, N. Ireland and St. Petersburg, Russia. For more information, please visit: http://www.sophiasearch.com.