Israel Digital News

In-Text Advertising solutions provider Kontera has closed a $15.5 million round of financing. Sequoia Capital led the financing round, with participation from Tenaya Capital and Carmel Ventures.

“Kontera has opened up the vast, uncharted territory of the internet – the detailed content of web pages,” said Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital. “Thanks to Kontera’s semantic analysis of the contents and meaning of a web page, users can now find information that previously lay buried and advertisements can be positioned with far greater precision.”

Kontera delivers relevant information and ads directly within web text and Web page contents. Reaching more than 100 million unique users per month, Kontera’s ad network features over 15,000 premium and niche publishers. Founded in 2003, Kontera has offices in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta and Herzliya.

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Web semantic advertising startup Peer39 has raised $10.5 million in a third fund-raising round led by Evergreen. Existing investors, Canaan Partners, Silicon Valley Bank, JP Morgan, and Dawntreader Ventures, joining this round, bringing the total financing raised by the company to over $22 million to date.

"With this financial commitment, we will expand our US sales presence and continue to develop our proprietary technology, thus helping publishers get higher returns from their online content while enabling advertisers to confidently protect their brands," said Amiad Solomon, CEO of Peer39.

Founded in 2006, Peer39 is creating online advertising and content monetization platform, based on natural language processing and machine learning. Headquartered in New York City, Peer39 maintains a research and development center in Israel.

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In-text advertising provider Kontera has secured $10.3 million in their second round of funding from Carmel Ventures with participation by Sequoia Capital and Lehman Brothers. The round of funding will be used to scale the company sales, marketing and R&D operations to meet client and market growth, according to Kontera CEO, Yoav Shaham.

"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.

Kontera is a provider of In-text advertising solutions, based on patent-pending contextual analysis technology that increases revenue and ROI for both web publishers and advertisers. The company, currently targeting the UK and US markets, is hoping to expand its business thanks to the strong growth of social networking and user-generated content websites.

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Online sports portal ESPN.com will deploy ESPN-branded version of AdSonar, Quigo targeted advertising platform, in order to offer its own auction-based, pay-per-click advertising program featuring content-targeted sponsored links. ESPN.com, the web division of the American cable television network ESPN, is currently using Yahoo platform for sponsored link advertising.

"Making advertising relevant to sports fans is extremely important to ESPN.com and our advertisers," said John Kosner, senior vice president and general manager, ESPN New Media. "Quigo's ESPN-branded approach and the technological resources they bring to the table will advance the marketing benefits that we offer advertisers, and deliver the most useful advertising to sports fans online."

The online advertising market is expected to grow at a 34% CAGR between 2005 and 2010, reaching over $55 billion, according to US Bancorp Piper Jaffray. The local online advertising market is expected to grow at a 64% CAGR between the same periods to reach nearly $5 billion.

Founded in 2000, by Oded Itzhak and Yaron Galai, Quigo provides innovative, performance-based marketing solutions for premium-branded websites and advertisers, like ABC News, Martha Stewart, Homestore.com, Lonely Planet, New York Times, and USA Today. Quigo's AdSonar offers advertisers multiple targeting options for their pay-per-click campaigns including national and local targeting by vertical category, site, individual page, topic, and/or keyword.

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In-Text advertising solutions provider, Kontera, has secured a $7 million in their first round of funding from Sequoia Capital and Lehman Brothers. This investment will be used to accelerate the company´s rapid growth, enhance product development and expand sales and marketing efforts. The company is also launching several affiliate and market-specific In-Text Advertising solutions in the coming months.

Kontera’s flagship product, ContentLink, 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.

“After our analysis of the media sector, we became aware of two major industry trends - the inventory scarcity problem in online publishing and the explosive growth of user-generated content,” said Thomas Banahan, Managing Director, Lehman Brothers Venture Partners. “We invested in Kontera because they have a proven service that offers online publishers an actionable and profitable solution to the problem of inventory scarcity. In addition, because Kontera´s content analysis technology works in real-time, it is the monetization solution for the burgeoning user-generated content market."

Trying to sell a technology that competes with Google, Kontera In-Text Advertising technology is analyzing web content and serves contextually relevant keyword links in real-time. Kontera’s solution is positioned to generate revenue for publishers vis-a-vis the growing user-generated content market including forums, product reviews, blogs and social networking websites.

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