Pixazza, a photo tagging and advertising company, has announced that it has raised an additional 12 million in funding from a number of venture capital firms. The round was lead by Shasta Ventures and existing investors, August Capital, CMEA Capital and Google Ventures, also contributed. Pixazza says the funding will be used to expand its current offering and enter international markets.

“Images dominate the Internet and comprise the most visually appealing aspects of many websites, yet images have remained static for more than 15 years,” Bob Lisbonne, CEO of Pixazza, said. “This new round of funding provides the resources to realize our vision of making every image interactive by revealing the information inside the trillions of images across the web.”

Pixazza offers a service which embeds shopping links in photos to enable users to buy items they see in the images. It integrates with existing websites and tags the images on their sites with the name of the products in the photos or similar items. Visitors to the sites then get links to shopping sites for the products or similar items.

The company says its product has proven quite popular and has a solid customer base especially in the US. It reaches 25 million people through the various websites that use Pixazza and 70 percent of them are from the US. Pixazza says it serves 8 billion photos per year and that the rate increased by 60 percent in the past three months alone.

The startup had already raised $5.75 million in its first round and counts Google Ventures as one of its investors. It now plans to scale its product and offer a self-serve version for smaller websites. This should expose the service to a whole new number of websites and potential clients.