Augmented reality app maker Blippar has raised $54 million in Series D funding, to help it build a ‘visual browser’ to help in augmented reality (AR) applications. CEO and co-founder Ambarish Mitra told Business Insider last year that the project “is bigger than the internet itself”.
The company is attempting to build a visual catalogue of every object in the world, using image recognition technology and machine learning. The concept is that the browser would recognise whatever a user pointed their phone’s (or eyewear’s) camera at, including live objects like animals.
Blippar’s latest funding round is sufficient for the objectives that it is seeking to achieve over the next 18 months, Mitra said.
One of the goals of the visual browser is to help the people in the world with no or very basic literacy skills (estimated to be 3/7 of the world’s population). For instance, the tool could be used to ask, ‘What is that piece of equipment?’ or ‘What plant will grow in this soil?’
Over the next 12 months, Blippar is focused on making its tool a ‘utilitarian layer’, which could be used two or three times a day. There may be product announcements in the next six months. Currently, the browser is still said to be returning ‘a lot’ of false positives.
Analyst Comment
Somebody recently said in a mail to me that “VCs rarely have much idea if the investment will actually pay off”. I would classify this investment in that category. Image recognition to the level of a human is a very, very hard problem and, as far as I am aware, nobody is close. I have to say that I wouldn’t invest my pension money in this venture, which reminds me of a famously hyped UK software code generator called “The Last One“, released in 1981, which claimed it could “replace all software and programmers”. Mitra is clearly just as ambitious! (BR)
