Sequoia Capital Funds Web Advertising Firm Kontera

April 25, 2006, Reuters

SAN FRANCISCO -  Kontera, a supplier of innovative technology that links advertisements to relevant words on Web pages, said on Tuesday it had received funding from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.
 
Kontera´s products allow Web publishers and advertisers to embed relevant advertising links in the text in Web pages, allowing a reader to view an advertisement simply by drawing his computer mouse over highlighted words on a page.

The terms of Sequoia´s investment were not disclosed. The funding will be used to expand product development as well as sales and marketing activity, the company said in a statement.
 
Officials of privately held Kontera Technologies Inc., based in Herziliya, Israel, were not available to comment. A spokesman for Sequoia Capital was not immediately available to comment.
 
The approach of Kontera, which also has offices in San Francisco, contrasts with conventional graphical display advertising and pay-per-click text advertising, for which Google Inc. is best known.
 
By delivering relevant advertising links inside the text of Web pages, it marks a challenge to the traditional separation of a Web site´s editorial content and advertising that typically is displayed inside adjoining frames on the page.
 
Kontera´s key product, called ContentLink, is based on contextual analysis software that looks to find relevant links in text using software that gets a sense of the meaning of words based on surrounding terms found on a Web page.
 
ContentLink promises to find relevant keywords instantly on a publisher´s Web page and match them to ads presented as sponsored keyword links in the body of Web page text.
 
A demonstration of how the technology works is available here.
 
Kontera also offers an automated bidding system for Web publishers to connect directly with online advertisers.
 
Separately, Kontera said it would offer a version of its ContentLink product designed for individual Web publishers such as bloggers or other user-generated content such as forums, product reviews and social networking sites.
 
The announcements came ahead of the Ad:Tech online advertising conference taking place in San Francisco starting on Wednesday.

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