London-based augmented reality startup Blippar, responsible for the eponymous augmented reality and image recognition platform, has secured seed funding from Qualcomm Ventures, the investment arm of the chip designer. 

The total amount of investment hasn't been disclosed, though Blippar has stated that it expects the investment to act as starting point for its Series A funding round, to close later in 2012.

Seeing something new

Blippar's technology focuses around presenting virtual information onto a real world background via smartphone cameras and can be seen at work in the video below.

Since its debut seven months ago Blippar claims to have seen hundreds of thousands of downloads, with Tesco, Nestle, Samsung and Unilever having jumped aboard.

Qualcomm has been aggressively pushing AR with mobile games and apps, running an $200,000 Android AR game competition in early 2011, as well as extending its vision-based platform to iOS later in the year. 



[source: TechCrunch]