Riya, the facial recognition start-up, raises $15 million
 |
Riya, the Redwood City start-up that is developing technology to recognize the people in your photos in order to let you tag and sort them more easily, has raised $15 million from Bay Partners, according to the company’s CEO, Munjal Shah. That’s a lot of cash.
Remember, this is the company that Google was supposedly flirting with for a possible purchase. But Google didn’t bite, or didn’t bite hard enough.
Perhaps the Riya product needs developing a bit more. Indeed, Peter Rip, venture capitalist at Leapfrog Ventures, and an existing backer of Riya, told us during the last barbecue at Michael Arrington‘s place, that the software still takes a while to recognize a face in a photo. You still have to feed the software quite a few photos of a person’s face before it is recognized permanently, and thus recognizable by Riya in other photos.
Next Story: Digg suffers madness of crowds…and of open source movement
Previous Story: Latest Silicon Valley news links — Google & non-Google
About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
