Imense of Cambridge raised £500k in 2007 to fund the development of a new search tool for images. Images and video together account for 70% of digital data on the Internet. Currently search tools rely on tags. Imense must be in stealth mode as there is little information on either the Imense site or the previous name of Cambridge Ontology Limited. “Cambridge Ontology’s research and development programme is supported by grants from STFC and EEDA. Our initial research programme was supported by a UK DTI Grant for Research and Development“.
“Dr David Sinclair, one of the founders of Imense Ltd, explains, “We built a prototype of our new image analysis and search technology, but simply weren’t able to test our software on sufficiently large numbers of photos. We knew we could search tens of thousands of pictures, but couldn’t afford to try it on hundreds of thousands or millions of images. This made it difficult for Imense to get the investment we needed to develop a commercially viable product. That’s where our partnership with the particle physics Grid came in.” ”
There is not much detail on funding except the quote “The Council’s Knowledge Exchange Service put the two teams together and provided modest funding to start them off – the new investment attracted by Imense represents a ten-fold return on the initial development funds”.
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