Russian visual search vendor Quintura says it’s raised $1 million to make in-roads in to mobile search. Quintura CEO Yakov Sadchikov didn’t disclose the investor’s identity.
Why the money? “We are going to shortly launch Quintura search apps for mobiles (iPhone/iPad, Nokia/Symbian, HTC/Windows Mobile, HTC/Android, etc.) as well as turn our existing search services such as search for kids, hosted site search, etc. into paid search,” Sadchikov said.
The company raised first-round money, reported to be $5 million, from Mangrove in 2007, before later bridge funding in 2008.
Quintura has been operating a visual search engine interface, which shows results in a relational, contextual cloud format, since 2005 and was last year awarded the latest of eight U.S. patents.
Last May, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) introduced its own little-used visual search interface, Wonder Wheel, tucked away in its search options, that offers similar functionality, and, prior to announcing the funding, Quintura made a show of claiming patent infringement.
When it comes to mobile search, Google is keener on using mobile sensors as search input than displaying search results on mobiles diagrammatically.
Quintura operates its existing search facility at its own quintura.com, but the site is mainly a shop window for the technology. The company