Luminoso, a US-based text analytics startup, announced on Tuesday $6.5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Acadia Woods, with participation from Digital Garage also.
Luminoso grew out of MIT’s Media Lab and has developed artificial intelligence software that promises to help companies understand and derive meaning from huge amounts of unstructured text. As re/code explains, “the company says it can cull through millions of communications collected from social networks and websites by its customers, identifying shifting sentiment, picking up subtext and translating slang. And the text analysis technology works in English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Chinese and Japanese.”
Customers of the startup have included Yelp, Oliver Garden, and Intel. More recently, however, the company has partnered with Sony to provide a social network dedicated to the World Cup. The language processing capabilities of Luminoso is the underlying technology powering Sony’s One Stadium Live, “bringing organization to the many World Cup conversations taking place across the world on social networks Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.”
Talking about Luminoso, the CEO and Co-founder Catherine Havasi said, “People are creative about the way they talk about a product. We wanted to give computers intuition to understand creative language”…“we are taking what was a qualitative process and turning it into a more quantitative process.”
Luminoso raised $1.5 million in seed funding 2012. The recent Series A funding round brings the total investment in the company to $8 million.
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(Image Credit: LUMINOSO)
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