Kontera Caps Series A With Lehman Bros Investment

July 6, 2006 - Dow Jones

San Francisco - Advertising software start-up Kontera Technologies Inc. has capped its Series A round with $7 million, after adding $3 million from Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. The San Francisco-based company closed a $4 million first tranche from Sequoia Capital in April.

Kontera´s software platform is designed to automatically review Web sites and place "in-text" advertising within a site. Keywords, for instance, appear like hyperlinks throughout a section of text. When a user scrolls over the keywords, a small bubble appears with a link to an advertiser´s site.

Kontera´s flagship ContentLink platform serves ads from its own stable of advertisers and through a partnership with Yahoo Inc. Web sites including science research Web site ScienceDaily.com and online music community CDFreaks.com use the technology.

The new financing will be used to bolster product development and marketing. Kontera is building out additional services and software that include a self-bidding platform for advertisers, and a private label self-bidding product for publishers and their advertisers.

Though Kontera is only about three years old, the company´s technology is based on more than seven years of development. The company´s previous venture, eZula Inc., was a developer of contextual advertising software. Formed in 1999, eZula was funded by individual investors and was phased out in recent years in favor of the new business model represented by Kontera.

San Francisco-based Kontera has offices in Herzelia, Israel, and has about 40 employees.
 
- by VentureWire staff reporters