Led by Acadia Woods, the series A will allow the company to further develop its product.
Luminoso, spun out of MIT Media Labs in 2010, has secured $6.5m in its series A. The round was led by New York-based Acadia Woods and also included Tokyo-based Digital Garage.
Luminoso provides text analytics in the cloud. The software’s unique selling point is its fully automated ability to build a taxonomy on the fly. The system can recognise when slang enters the lexicon and infer its meaning from contextual clues of users, and is also able to make sense of large amounts of unstructured data.
Although the technology has many usage scenarios, the company is currently focused on businesses doing market research that need to understand customer interactions. Luminoso is running a proof-of-concept with Sony, where it is compiling social media reactions to the World Cup in real-time.
The company’s total funding now stands at $8m, having raised $1.5m in a 2013 seed round. The fresh investment will be used to continue building the company and hiring more staff.
Catherine Havasi, co-founder and chief executive, said: “People are creative about the way they talk about a product. We wanted to give computers intuition to understand creative language. At the Media Lab, we built a set of data that acts as a model of how people think about the world.”
