Blippar, the world’s largest augmented reality and image-recognition platform, has completed a $45m funding round.
The tech firm will leverage this new financing to expand its engineering team and extend the global reach of its image-recognition capabilities in order to further realise its plans to create a visual search engine for the physical world.
Ambarish Mitra, Blippar founder and CEO, said the investment comes at a “pivotal time for the image-recognition industry”.
He said:
“While the digital advertising and marketing communities have been quick to capitalize on the potential of our technology to engage audiences with branded experiences, we have barely scratched the surface in terms of the potential impact that our technology can bring to other industries, particularly education, healthcare and charities.
“This funding brings us closer to our ultimate goal of creating a new kind of cognitive behavior, one that enables us to instantaneously access information and content directly from any of the physical objects or collateral in the world around us.”
Blippar partners with many of the world’s largest and most influential consumer brands — Coca-Cola, General Mills, Proctor & Gamble, Pepsi, Nestle — to deliver augmented reality and image-recognition experiences.
Brand campaigns feature digital content that is unlocked from physical triggers including billboards, products, logos and magazine pages when scanned or ‘blipped’ via the Blippar app.
Following its acquisition of Layar in 2014, Blippar has pioneered a new behavior and has seen exponential user adoption, amassing a global user base of over 50 million people with over 1.5 billion blippable interactions.
Blippar’s operations have expanded to represent more than 200 employees across ten international offices in US, Europe and Asia.