• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, April 7, 2016

A couple of Google's first employees in Israel received Series A funding for their search engine startup focused on ecommerce.

Naspers led the $12.5 million in funding in Twiggle, with support from Yahoo Japan. State of Mind Ventures, a prior investor, and Sir Ronald Cohen, also joined the round. This brings the funding to $14.7 million to date. One report suggest the site will launch in August.

The "deep learning" engine is focused on natural language processing, data science, and artificial intelligence, and is intended to make it easy to find products using natural language such as "I'm looking for a two-door refrigerator on top and one-drawer freezer on the bottom in stainless steel."

The startup was co-founded in 2013 by CEO Amir Konigsberg, and chief technology officer Adi Avidor, formerly a lead software engineer at Google Israel.

Twiggle also provides context about different types of products for shoppers who don’t know what they want. It means a search for a refrigerator will return specs about important features, whether it has an icemaker inside or on the door of the frig.

Retail ecommerce sales worldwide will reach $2 trillion in 2016 -- up nearly 22% to about $2.5 trillion in 2017, according to eMarketer. The research firm estimates that in the U.S. retail ecommerce sales will reach $384 billion in 2016, up 12.2% to $431 billion in 2017.

Konigsberg told Techcrunch that Twiggle wants to "treat search as a way to give people answers to questions and give them timely information." Sound familiar? For years, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have called search queries the question and ads the answers.

"We don’t want to send them to a product page and then have to find the information themselves,” Konigsberg told Techcrunch. "If they ask for a quiet laptop, then we want to rank results by quietness, instead of creating more confusion. We look at the Internet at large and create a very large knowledge graph with use cases of products and the relations between them."