E-commerce and media group Naspers has led a $12.5m series A round for Israel-based search engine technology developer Twiggle, TechCrunch has reported.
Internet company Yahoo Japan also invested as part of the round, as did venture capital firm State of Mind Ventures and businessman Sir Ronald Cohen.
Founded in 2013, Twiggle is developing technology that will help the search engines of e-commerce platforms provide more specified, relevant results for users by sourcing additional product information from the web.
A user would be able to type in a specified query which could then result in links to the right products without false positives. The company is still operating in stealth and plans to bring its product to several sites, some of which will be Naspers portfolio companies, in August this year.
Twiggle had previously received $2.2m in seed capital from backers including State of Mind. It will use the series A funds to grow its engineering team and integrate its technology into e-commerce platforms before starting work on an ecosystem that will incorporate mobile and voice-to-text search functions.