VideoSurf catches a cool $16 million Series C

Image-recognizing video search engine scours the Web for the content you seek

If you’re one of those people convinced that Facebook and Twitter are the last social networking sites we’ll ever need and YouTube and Vimeo are the last video services anyone will ever use, you may as well stop reading. But then, what kind of entrepreneur or investor would think something like that?

Video search engine VideoSurf announced Friday that it has raised $16 million in Series C financing from Pitango Venture Capital and other investors, bringing the company’s total raised to $28 million.

VideoSurf also revealed that, in the last month, it was awarded a patent for “computer vision technology,” which powers the service’s video search engine. (I actually dug up two patents awarded to VideoSurf on the USPTO website, but both are nearly identical and equally difficult to understand: Method of geometric coarsening and segmenting of still images and Apparatus and software for geometric coarsening and segmenting of still images.)

The technology analyzes all the individual frames in a video, allowing VideoSurf to identify notable objects and content that could be significant when searched for.

This computer vision tech used by VideoSurf powers its search engine, which is supposed to deliver more relevant results to users. Since the service claims to be able to “see” the actual content of videos, it can search much more than just the accompanying text and tags the video uploader has included.

Even without this video vision capability, which almost sounds too good to be true, VideoSurf would still be a powerful video search engine, since it pores over uploads across all the biggest video hubs: YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Hulu, CNN, TMZ, Metacafe, Fancast, Comedy Central, and more.

Founded in 2006 and headquartered in San Mateo, Calif., Videosurf today serves over 20 million unique monthly users.

Though VideoSurf does not yet offer mobile apps (they say they’re coming soon), the service is available as both a Firefox extension and as a search widget for third-party websites.