Facial recognition technology companies have been in the limelight lately, with Apple buying Polar Rose for a rumored $29 million and rival Face.com raising $4.3 million from Russian search juggernaut Yandex and others.
A lesser-known but equally impressive startup in said field, Viewdle, announces today that it has secured $10 million in Series B funding from a group of noteworthy investors that includes Best Buy, BlackBerry Partners Fund and Qualcomm.
In conjunction with this investment, Best Buy Capital’s Kuk Yi and John Albright from Blackberry Partners Fund will join Viewdle’s board. It’s also worth noting that Viewdle’s Series A investor, Anthem Venture Partners, also participated in this new funding round.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given the names of the new backers, Viewdle plans to use the additional financing for the launch of new consumer products over the coming months.
Viewdle has developed impressive technology, the result of over fifteen years of research and three years of commercial productization, that is capable of real-time, cross-platform visual analysis at the point of capture.
The startup says its patented facial recognition system automatically identifies faces in videos and photos across mobile phones, computers and in the cloud.
Quick sidenote: I organized my first Plugg conference back in March 2008, and the fledgling company took home the top prize at the startup competition that year (it later went on to win the one at Le Web, too).
Keep a close eye on this one.