Charles River Ventures has led an investment in Beijing-based Maxthon, the originators of the Maxthon Browser, which has been downloaded more than 55 million times since 2003.

Maxthon is the originator of one of the world's most popular Internet browsers and associated development platform for plug-ins.

CRV joins early investors Morten Lund, a seed investor in Skype, and WI Harper in providing Maxthon with funds to further fuel the company's growth. No details of the amount of funding was made available.

Maxthon utilizes the Internet Explorer rendering to provide basic browsing functionality and adds value with many additional features such as an RSS detector and reader, super drag & drop functionality, superior content filtering and ad blocking capabilities, mouse gesture programmability, podcast support and tabbed browsing.

"We are excited to work with Charles River Ventures. The people at CRV have proven to us that they have the experience to help us build our company and take it to the next level," said Jeff Chen, CEO and founder, Maxthon. "Although we have been adding millions of new users every month on our own, and have been profitable since our inception, we are excited to give them a stake in our future and to partner with them to execute our common vision."