$45m invested into Blippar to create world's first visual browser

Speaking about the funding round, Ambarish Mitra, Blippar founder and CEO, said:

‘This is a pivotal time for the image-recognition industry. While the digital advertising and marketing communities have been quick to capitalize on the potential of our technology to engage audiences with branded experiences, we have barely scratched the surface in terms of the potential impact that our technology can bring to other industries, particularly education, healthcare and charities. This funding brings us closer to our ultimate goal of creating a new kind of cognitive behavior, one that enables us to instantaneously access information and content directly from any of the physical objects or collateral in the world around us.’

Blippar already partners with many of the world’s largest and most influential consumer brands – Coca-Cola, General Mills, Proctor & Gamble, Pepsi, Nestle – to deliver engaging augmented reality and image-recognition experiences. Brand campaigns feature unique digital content that is unlocked instantaneously from physical triggers including billboards, products, logos and magazine pages when blipped via the Blippar app.

But Mitra sees our technology being used in a much more all-encompassing way in the very near future, one in which users can ideally point their mobile device camera at any object in the physical world and blipp to instantly unlock a range of relevant digital information about it.

Mitra will be giving an exclusive demo of Blippar’s latest technology this weekend at SXSW festival in Austin, Texas.

The exciting $45 million of funding follows Blippar’s acquisition of Layar in the summer of 2014, since which we have been pioneering this new visual browsing behavior and witnessing exponential user adoption.