Imperial injects £1.5m into Cortexica

The deal marks the third investment made by Imperial in Cortexica. The firm first backed the company in February 2009, providing seed capital a year after the business had spun out from Imperial College in London.

Imperial then injected a further £333,000 into Cortexica in August of the same year, procuring a 31.5% stake in the business.

Following the new investment, Imperial will hold a 73.4% stake in Cortexica following a conversion of loan stock.

Company
Cortexica span out from Imperial College London in 2008. The company is headquartered in London with a US base located in San Francisco. It employs slightly less than 20 staff.

The business has developed its FindSimilar technology, an algorithm-based image recognition and visual search and categorisation software-as-a-service. Cortexica's FindSimilar for Fashion product is designed to return visually similar images from an online database when a user takes a photo of an item of clothing or accessory on a mobile device.

Early customers of the software include VC-backed Zalando, ShopStyle and Style Thief.

People
Iain McCready is the CEO of Cortexica. Imperial director of technology ventures Jon Edington sits on the company's board of directors.

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