Online media company Cooliris announced Monday that it has raised $9.6 million in Series C funding from existing investors, which include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Deutsche Telekom’s T-Venture, DAG Ventures, and The Westly Group. The company has raised $28.1 million to date.The central Cooliris product is a media browser plugin that transforms the most-used photo and video hubs into a rich and fluid media experience at the click of a button. For example, if you use Cooliris on a Google image search results page, the results will be transplanted to an “infinite 3D wall” which you can scroll through and interact with as you would expect. It basically brings fancy effects and colors to the ordinary process of sifting through photos online. Besides Google Images, the tool works with Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Picasa and more.
“With over 35 million downloads of our iconic Cooliris 3D Wall, we’ve established a good beachhead in media browsing,” said co-founder and CEO Soujanya Bhumkar, “and now with our newest release of LiveShare we are transforming the group media sharing experience.”Along with the new funding, Cooliris also announced the launch of LiveShare 1.2, a service that hosts group photo sharing.
Anyone who has ever uploaded photos from a big event like a graduation or party has likely experienced the annoyance of having multiple albums for the same event. There’s your album, your brother’s album, your brother’s girlfriend album–hundreds of pictures from the same place and time but fragmented across the site.
With LiveShare, Cooliris organizes photos into events–public or private–with family and friends contributing to the stream in real-time. Only people who have been invited to a particular stream can contribute.
LiveShare is available as a free app for iPhone, Android and Windows Phone 7.
Cooliris says it will be using its new funding to to form partnerships and continue scaling its “monetizable” user base and revenues.
