Quintura scores another round of funding for visual search engine
Visual search startup Quintura has raised a new round of funding to continue building out its engine, which is used on several media sites, including Maxim, the Russian version of Cosmo and ReadWriteWeb. As with its last round of funding, Quintura’s founders have not disclosed the exact amount, only calling it “several million dollars”.
Founded by Russians, the engine appears to have gotten the most attention in that country. However, it also recently hired a chief marketing officer in the United States, so that situation may change over time.
The attraction to using Quintura is its ability to show subjects in the form of a tag cloud. So when you search for something on a media website like Maxim, Quintura will not only give traditional search results (drawn from the big search engines), but will also list other topics that come up in connection with the term you searched for.
In the below example from Maxim, the search “hotties” brings up people that Maxim thinks are hot, how to find them (although it’s a bit sad that “video games” came up, and the result “surveillance” is just creepy).
Several other US publishers are in the process of testing out the search method on their sites, according to Quintura, which says it gets 8 million monthly visitors. The funding, a bridge round atop its first official venture round, was provided by Mangrove Capital Partners.
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About the Author, Chris Morrison
Chris Morrison writes about cleantech and environmental issues for VentureBeat, with occasional forays into gaming and semantic technology. He got his start writing about tech for Business 2.0 magazine, but quickly realized new media was the ticket when that institution closed its doors in 2007. Chris has also covered public equities and regulatory issues. He originally hails from southern Virginia, graduated from Evergreen State College in Washington, and now lives in San Francisco.