""It's a lot of money because we think we have a big opportunity," said Peter Rip of Leapfrog Ventures, which had been part of Riya's $4-million first round during March 2004. He said the cash should last three years, enough time to let the startup test its mettle as a stand-alone company.

Riya's secret technical sauce pushes it ahead of many of today's lightweight web services startups. As founder and CEO Munjal Shah puts it, "not just another neat use of Ajax." (Ajax, a technique to make web pages more responsive, is named for its combination of asynchronous JavaScript and XML.)

"What we're trying to build is basically an ability to look inside the photo itself," said Mr. Shah (see Q&A: Riya's Munjal Shah).

The company has 24 employees, nine of them in India, with a core of Facial-recognition-focused computer science PhDs. It plans to launch at the DEMO conference during February."