Rakuten Ventures has led and invested alongside new investors Walden International and UOB Venture Management in a series A round of funding worth $3.5m, closed in February. The target company is ViSenze, an online visual search spin-out company from National University of Singapore. The investment comes within 7months of the company’s first announcement of its collaboration with Rakuten Taiwan.
Funding was raised to accelerate R&D activities and to fuel rapid international expansion.
The company has developed software tools that provide what is called intelligent visual recognition, visual search, matching and recommendation functions on the Web and mobile platforms, for ecommerce and contextual advertising applications. Since the Rakuten collaboration the company has made great traction to attract new customers to its technology, including SingTel Digital Media and online fashion e-tailer Zalora, and Clozette, according to the company’s CEO Oliver Tan.
Tan said the investors will be invaluable in their efforts to provide their international networks, which will in turn help ViSenze to scale operations faster. Funding will also contribute to the company’s costs related to engaging key players in North America and China to adapt their video visual recognition technology into their web infrastructure.
Visual search enables web sites and related searches to recognise an image searched and replicate similar images as a means of the customer’s preference. This is ideal for online retailers. Photo sharing web sites and image based networks, such a Pinterest, are gaining more revenues through photo sharing. For example, Pinterest generates 4x more revenue per click than Twitter and 27% more per click than Facebook. Notably, Rakuten is an investor in Pinterest.
ViSenze derives revenues by enabling social networks, affiliate networks and media publishers to monetize the traffic on their visual media assets , and helping e-tailers to achieve significant improvement in conversion rates on their visual merchandise with APY based visual tools such as reverse image search, visual based similarity product search and recommendation.
Saemin Ahn, Managing Partner of Rakuten Ventures, said, “We Believe the company has cutting edge visual technology that will render game changing applications in contextual advertising and online video commerce.
“ViSenze differentiates itself from other visual search companies by focusing and leveraging deeply on the domain knowledge of each vertical to render highly accurate search results. This enables its visual search engine to detect and recognize target objects in complex images and videos automatically while in ongoing the similarly complex backgrounds.”
Ahn also explains that the search engine is also able to process huge amounts of visual data (including user generated photos and videos) in real -time, and concurrently perform searches against large visual databases of related products and services.