Image Shopping Search Taobaosou announced a new round of funding from DT Capital Partners and existing investors, CDH Investments and Alibaba, that adds the total capital it has raised to over USD20 million.
Taotaosou was the winner of a contest held by Taobao. Shortly after its launch in March 2010, it received 3 million yuan funding from Alibaba. Later in late 2011 CDH Investments invested several million US dollars into it.
Now Taotaosou is focused on clothing and accessories. After you import an image of a good, Taotaosou will return a webpage full of tags for you to choose from (see below). Then the pictures of the same product in the image and similar ones will show up. Every image would direct you to a Taobao store. A variety of ways are available for importing an image: uploading or dragging a picture from your PC, taking a screenshot with QQ Screeshot, or pasting the address of an image.
In the early days it also returned results from e-commerce retailers such as JD.com (formerly 360Buy) and Vancl. It’s unknown when or why it dropped those none-Taobao sources. It is estimated Taotaosou receives CPC/CPS-based commission fees from Taobao stores.