EXCLUSIVE: Artificial Intelligence startup SnapShopr raises angel funding led by Amod Malviya

Snapshopr, the AI based visual and image search platform today raises an undisclosed amount of angel funding. Earlier, the firm had announced its first investment from Amod Malviya as part of its ongoing round in September last year. Lead by Amod Malviya, this round saw participation from other angel investors like Pallav Nadhani, Saran Chatterjee, Apurva Dalal, Bragadish Sureshkumar, Sanat Rao and others.

With this round of funding the team plans to expand and strengthen its team and work more strongly on its research and technology. Based out of Bengaluru and now Palo Alto, SnapShopr aims to expand its consumer base to a global audience.

Earlier Navneet had told YourStory exclusively, “To get a tech guru like Amod Malviya to believe in our product and invest in it is a great validation for our technology and the efforts our team has put in.”

Snapshopr which had initially begun with image search and recognition has dived deep into Artificial intelligence research like with their current work on ‘Project Tuning’.

The team was also recently awarded NVIDIA Innovation Award 2015 for its work in deep learning and computer vision. It has also been recognised by giants like Google and IBM.

Navneet claims that their research team currently holds the top rank among independent AI companies in the highly competitive AI competition MS COCO challenge. “While the team is intent on expanding in different verticals, we want to tread slowly into them as the market matures for a paradigm shift in search and discovery of products,” adds Navneet.

Speaking about his role and investment in SnapShopr, Amod Malviya says, “The role of AI in solving day-to-day issues is often underestimated by companies. I liked the fact that Snapshopr goes about solving these day-to-day problems that matter, instead of confining themselves to labs alone. They bring immediate value to companies, thanks to their specialised AI talent.”

Navneet adds, “The association of technology leaders and founders from different kinds of companies from search to ecommerce to SaaS will further assist Snapshopr to get more insights into the industry as well as provide suitable connections as they grow.”

"Solving image search, understanding and analytics with Deep Learning is a complex computer science area which is ripe for innovation and has a number of very interesting applications in ecommerce. Beyond Google, very few companies have been able to make tangible leaps in this area. I found the IP, tech team talent and disruption potential of Snapshopr's approach to be quite unique," says Apurva Dalal, a former Googler and now CTO, Urban Ladder.