Seed Funds for Visual Analytics Firm

US-based Curalate, which offers a monitoring and analytics platform for socially curated sites, including photo sharing web site Pinterest, has launched with $750k in seed funding.

The round was led by NEA, First Round Capital and MentorTech.

Philadelphia-based Curalate provides analytics to measure users' visual-based interactions across social media sites. Its solution was developed to track how a visual piece of content moves through Pinterest, and if that content eventually links to a company's site and results in a sale.

Using a combination of proprietary image recognition technologies and big data analytics Curalate says it is able to give companies visibility into how their brand is influenced by the activities of both the brand and its fans.

For its official launch, the firm emerges from beta with more than 150 brands and agencies on board, showing the importance brands place on making sense of today's socially curated sites, according to CEO and co-founder Apu Gupta (pictured).

NEA Partner Patrick Chung adds: 'The emergence of sites such as Pinterest, Instagram, Fancy and Wanelo show us the power and universal appeal of communicating through images, not just text. These sites give brands the ability to identify and understand the products people care about right now, so that brands can dynamically adapt their e-commerce strategies to target the products that are top of the mind.'

Web site: www.curalate.com .