The full investment is made by Imperial Innovations.

Cortexica Visual Systems, a visual search company, has secured £1.5m ($2.55m) from Imperial Innovations, the technology transfer company of Imperial College London.

Imperial Innovations, which invested £333,000 ($567,000) in Cortexica in 2009, will hold on conversion of loan stock, a 73.4% equity stake in the issued share capital of the company on a fully diluted basis.

Based on research by Anil Bharath and Jeffrey Ng from the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London, Cortexica’s technology offers image recognition, visual search and categorisation software for online businesses. Its technology, dubbed FindSimilar, uses algorithms that mimic the way the human brain recognises images and objects. This allows a rate of more than 95% for first time positive matches – higher than any competing technology.

The company currently has Zalando, ShopStyle, Style Thief and Trendabl among their clients. It has signed up ten new customers in the past six months. Cortexica will use the cash injection to attract more companies.