Cambridge startup Nara Logics, a "brain-like" web platform providing personalized restaurant recommendations, announced Tuesday that it has sealed a partnership with Singapore Telecommunications Ltd., the world's second largest wireline and wireless telecom company.
SingTel will license Nara's technology to "automate, curate and personalize Web data at Internet scale," according to the company's release. The cloud-based neural network technology will first be used to provide personalized restaurant recommendations, debuting in Malaysia, Australia, and Singapore.
“We are excited to expand Nara’s Neural Network globally and bring our technology to industry leaders like SingTel who want the ability to make a more deep and meaningful connection with their consumers,” said Thomas Copeman, CEO and founder of Nara in the release. “The Nara platform was designed to handle massive amounts of both structured and unstructured data and provide personalization, thereby architecting the next generation of the web... We are looking forward to a thriving partnership as together we shape the future of personalized search and discovery throughout Asia.”
The partnership with SingTel keeps Nara's momentum from last winter, when the startup raised $3 million from Account Manager LLC, upping the company's total investments to $7 million. Nara is the third startup of serial entrepreneur Copeman, the man behind lululemon athletica and BodyGlide, who started Nara "based on the belief that we can all achieve a life well found."
Here's a description of how Nara works from one of our earlier posts:
When you sign up for Nara, you’re asked to input three of your favorite restaurants, and analyzing characteristics from those restaurants, Nara spits back restaurants with similar qualities that are likely appeal to your tastes. From a technical perspective, Nara utilizes an algorithm that is brain-like in its architecture, in which each of the properties of the restaurants is broken down into a node. Nara analyzes your preferences, which become the Digital DNA for your profile, and matches them with nodes from other restaurants. Similar to Pandora, the site allows you to give thumbs up or thumbs down ratings to restaurants, and saves that information for future reference.
From its launch in June 2012, this Yelp-Pandora hybrid has upped its restaurant recommending from eight to fifty cities, ranging from Montreal to Nashville. With today's partnership with SingTel, Nara broadens its business scope beyond North America.
Welcome to Nara from NaraWellFound on Vimeo.
