Superfish reels in $4M to go window shopping in your browser

Visual product search company Superfish has received $4 million in third round funding, the startup told VentureBeat Thursday, an infusion it says it will use to muscle up its market position and focus on developing its “visual DNA” search technology.

The San Mateo, Calif., company was in stealth research mode for several years before rolling out its first prototype, Window Shopper, in April. The Firefox and Internet Explorer browser add-on allows users to search for images instead of text to find a broad range of similar products across thousands of sites simultaneously. At this time, the company doesn’t offer add-ons for other browsers like Google Chrome, Safari.

“The Superfish visual search system can take any image as a search query, analyze and convert that image into a series of vectors, and compare those vectors against our index of over 100 million images to find identical or similar matches within seconds,” Head of Product Joe Dew told VentureBeat.

Since its launch last spring, Window Shopper has grown to over 1 million active users and continues to expand across all sectors as it competes with other similar visual shopping sites like Spezify.com and Google acquisition Like.com

However, the company said Thursday it has an edge in the market because it uses fundamentally different components to search over 60 million products across a product index that includes Amazon, eBay, Best Buy, Target, Macy’s and Walmart.

“Superfish is changing the way search is done by adding a visual component,” said Adi Pinhas, co-founder and President. “This funding will enable Superfish to explore new avenues for visual search and updated ways for both consumers and brands to use the power of visual search to improve their search experience.”

The funding round was led by original investors who “doubled down,” including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, DFJ Tamir Fishman Ventures, Individuals’ Venture Fund and Xenia Venture Capital. The company had earlier raised $5.3 million in January of 2009.