The Take raises $2 million in first round of venture funding

New York startup The Take plans to roll out an app – and update its existing website – to allow shoppers to buy almost anything they see in film or trailer.

Two million dollars were raised in the company’s first round of venture funding. The Take is now being backed by a number of investors including the media investment and film financing group Demarest Films and and former NBC Entertainment Co-Chairman and current Electus Chairman Ben Silverman.

Proceeds from the new investments will be used to create an app, which The Take is referring to as a “Shazam for movies”. The app will use automatic content recognition to identify a film and display a scene on the mobile or tablet so users can buy the products shown in the scene.

The Take will also be updating the catalogue of films on its existing website. The site currently allows consumers to look for items from 60 movies, searching by film, actor or product category.

The site has potential for more than just sales. The Take is collecting data on which actors and brands are the most popular and may use this information to sell contextual or native advertising, serving up ads to other goods when a shopper enters a particular search.

The company is a brainchild of Tyler Cooper, a former MGM Studios sales employee. Cooper spoke to Techcrunch about the software and human labour that goes into tracking products in films.

 “It’s a mix of manual and computer vision technology. We use proprietary stuff that we’ve built in-house to track products in a film. We identify what that product is, working with the studio, working with the brand, or working through the costume designer [and] we use our software to track that out and tag it out in the film.”

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