Kontera Secures $10.3 Million in Funding
Existing investors Sequoia Capital and Lehman Brothers participate in this second round of funding
San Francisco, CA, Monday, 12 August 2007 – Kontera, the leading In-Text Advertising solution provider for web publishers and advertisers, announced today that it has secured $10.3 million in their second round of funding from Carmel Ventures with participation by Sequoia Capital and Lehman Brothers. Rina Shainski, General Partner of Carmel Ventures, will be joining the board of Kontera.
ContentLinkSM, Kontera’s flagship product, is an In-Text ad unit based on a patent pending real-time contextual analysis technology that finds relevant keywords on a publisher’s web page and automatically turns them into a link to the most relevant ad from among Kontera´s thousands of advertisers. ContentLink, available with text, images, rich media and video, enables web publishers to monetize untapped and incremental ad revenue, while providing marketers with a better ROI than with other advertising vehicles. To learn more about the ContentLink and ContentLink Rich Media, please click here.
"The field of In-Text Advertising is rapidly growing and enhancing the world of online advertising, which is eager for innovation. We believe that Kontera, with its unique offering and superior technology, is well-positioned to lead in this growing market,” said Rina Shainski, General Partner of Carmel Ventures.
With user intent driving the growth of social networking and other forms of user-contributed media, Kontera’s solution is uniquely positioned to generate revenue for publishers and improve ROI for advertisers. Only Kontera’s In-Text Advertising technology analyzes web content and serves contextually relevant keyword links in real-time.
“Kontera’s ContentLink In-Text Advertising is a great way for a web publisher to easily monetize their website without being intrusive or spammy,” said GrownUpGeek website and blog founder Randy Brown, “and a great complement for AdSense.”
“The Click-Through Rate (CTR) we see with Kontera is phenomenal compared to our other advertising. We usually get about a .3% with most of our pay-per-click advertising campaigns,” said TechSmith Advertising Specialist Jennifer Bedford, ”but with Kontera’s In-Text advertising, we’re seeing CTRs upwards of 10%.”
“We at Kontera continue to deliver on our vision for the In-Text market by serving ads and information that best match the user’s intent as deduced from the content the user is browsing,” said Yoav Shaham, CEO and founder of Kontera. “With user intent driving the growth for online activities today, from social networking and widgets to blogging and product reviews, Kontera is the right choice to maximize value for publishers, advertisers and users alike.”
“This round of funding will be used to scale our sales, marketing and R&D operations to meet client and market growth,” added Shaham.
About Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital provides venture capital funding to founders of startups who want to turn business ideas into companies. As the "Entrepreneurs Behind the Entrepreneurs", Sequoia Capital's Partners have worked with innovators such as Steve Jobs of Apple Computer, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Bob Swanson of Linear Technology, Sandy Lerner and Len Bozack of Cisco Systems, Dan Warmenhoven of Network Appliance, Jerry Yang and David Filo of Yahoo!, Jen-Hsun Huang of nVIDIA, Michael Marks of Flextronics, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen of YouTube and Dominic Orr and Keerti Melkote of Aruba Wireless Networks. To learn more about Sequoia Capital visit www.sequoiacap.com.
Contact:
Haim Sadger
SEQUOIA CAPITAL
haim@sequoiacap.com
