Israel Digital News

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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3D animated avatars provider Gizmoz has secured $6.3 million Series A investment from Benchmark Capital and Columbia Capital. The Israeli company also unveiled today new free tools that allow consumers to showcase their customized characters.

Gizmoz new online digital identity service allows consumers to create animated, talking characters for use across their digital communications. The 3D talking characters can be used to generate video clips and other forms of original content and can be posted to any blog or social networking profile, sent via email to family and friends, or uploaded to video sites.

"With an expertise in global communications and media, we recognize the importance consumers place on personalization and self-expression," said Arun Gupta, partner at Columbia Capital. "As consumers spend more time online and on the go, they are looking for more creative, interactive ways to communicate and share with others. Gizmoz provides the ultimate in digital identity personalization, and we believe its disruptive technology holds tremendous global opportunities going forward."

Gizmos offers consumers a new generation of character-based visual expression for use across their digital lives. Gizmos, formerly known as Zapa Digital Arts, was Founded in 1996 by Eyal Gever, the company current CEO. The company has offices in Menlo Park, CA and Ramat Gan, Israel.

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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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