Riya Nails Second Round Financing
Michael Arrington
23 comments »
Facial Recognition company Riya has marked the new year with a whopping $15 million second round venture raise from existing investor Bay Partners.
This is exceptional news for Riya and a great recovery after the acquisition rumor fiasco late last year.
My early review of Riya is here - it is a killer product. Riya continues to take alpha tester requests at the email address: riya_alpha@riya.com.
MyHeritage.com is a better product, no? Certainly growing faster in terms of site traffic - and blog mentions. They must have another product or fundament new business model that they’ve kept secret from all but the funders.
Hi Mike:
Small typo. I think you meant to say from “existing investors and Bay Partners”.
Happy New Year. Call me sometime. Much to catch up.
PR
I’m not sure if I am a big fan of this move. Surely Riya’s technology is with it; their beta testers are having a good time with it, so it seems legitimate enough. Now, why do you go and get millions of dollars now, when you could keep on chugging and end up with a much greater share of the company than you will have now.
Their product is so worthwhile that there are many ways that I see they can be making money: Charging people to use the service and upload unlimited photos, and/or charge them to print them. Affiliate yourself with Yahoo photos or MSN due to superior technology, BUT DONT GET BOUGHT OUT. Or create software for other industries that might be interested in facial recognition software, such as photographers, modeling agencies, movies, etc.
My 2 cents
Insiders say the money is for improving the platform and making a real go of it, now that the sale didn’t happen on the initial build of “dazzleware”.
Cool tech, no doubt, but Munjal Shah’s flip strategy is going to take longer to reach fruition.
[ Ben Bakhsi ] Surely Riya’s technology is with it
To me it looks like flickr + face recognition software. Is there more to it than that? I’m not sure how this is worth $1.5M let alone $15M.
This is good news for Riya. I guess Riya must have enhanced its application quite some for the investors to part with their money again. I am looking forward to the Feb release.
But I still am struggling to understand the high praise you have for Riya based on the alpha release. My experience with Riya’s alpha release was extremely disappointing. Here is my review: http://balak.blogspot.com/2005.....html#links
with actual examples where Riya failed!
I asked here before, could you please share some samples from your Riya testing?
Bala, I didn’t have the same problems as others, including you, but the company did hand hold me through the process. This obviously helped.
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