April 27, 2006, by Clancy Nolan, Dow Jones
With a first round of financing from Sequoia Capital, Kontera Technologies Inc. aims to provide another avenue for online advertisers to get their message out.
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 partners with Web publishers and advertisers to serve the ads, and generates revenue on a cost-per-click basis. "We´re basically providing them a new platform to generate revenue," said Henit Vitos, vice president of business development for the company.
Kontera´s ContentLink platform serves ads from its own stable of advertisers and through a partnership with Yahoo Inc. About 1,000 Web sites use Kontera´s technology, said spokesman Uriah Av-Ron. They include science research Web site ScienceDaily.com and online music community CDFreaks.com.
Kontera wouldn´t disclose how much money it has raised, but said that 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. "It was a process that was based on the uses of the technology, and understanding what the changing market needs," said Av-Ron.
Kontera has about 32 employees and offices in Herzelia, Israel, and San Francisco.
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