Twiggle funded with USD 15 mln to develop ecommerce

Twiggle’s total funding so far reach USD 33 million. Its other investors include Alibaba, Naspers, and Yahoo Japan.

It is reported that Twiggle will use its new capital to scale up its Semantic API, which allows companies to use its technology without replacing their existing search engines, add new search-related features, hire more executives, and grow its US-based sales team.

Twiggle’s natural language processing tries to replicate the experience of walking into a store and asking a sales associate to help you find something by supporting complex queries. Instead of trying to brainstorm keywords, for example, customers can simply enter conversational sentences describing what they want to order.

The company hasn’t disclosed which ecommerce sites use its technology but they presumably include platforms owned by investors Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, as well as Naspers portfolio companies (which include Flipkart, Avenida, and OLX).

Having Mizmaa Ventures (an investment firm that focuses on bringing technology from Israeli startups to China and the US) and Korea Investment Partners will help Twiggle’s expansion plans in Asia.

Twiggle plans to add feature extraction from product images, in addition to textual content such as product descriptions and reviews, in order to improve its search results and product recommendations. Twiggle is reported to have increased relevance and clickthrough rates on search results by up to 30% and conversion rates by around 20%.