SAN FRANCISCO—Cognitive Networks, a creator of automatic content recognition for smart TVs, announced the completion of a $14.5 million Series B financing round. The round brings three new investors into the company: Hearst Ventures and two undisclosed strategic partners that provide an exceptional foundation to drive dramatic growth. Existing investors Rogers Venture Partners and DCM Ventures also participated in the financing.
Cognitive’s ACR also powers a big-data platform that in turn powers a diversity of TV data applications for media buying, selling, measurement and targeting.
“This latest round of financing will fuel continued enhancements of our ACR platform to meet the scaling and performance expectations of our customers while we continue to increase our lead over our competitors,” said Michael Collette, CEO of Cognitive Networks. “Content recognition transforms television, enabling more engaging, targeted and relevant TV. It also produces vast, detailed, real time data that can be used to measure, target and optimize TV advertising and content in powerful new ways. These virtues provide benefits to the entire TV ecosystem and are particularly valuable to our TV OEM partners. We’re honored to have the support from a broad base of Tier 1 investors and partners.”
Earlier this year, Cognitive Networks was selected as a 2014 Red Herring Top 100 North America winner. Cognitive Networks was also selected as one of the top 10 startups by SPROCKIT, an innovation program working in partnership with the National Association of Broadcasters.
