Venture Capital Firms

VC Firm, Sequoia Capital Leads $15.5 Million in Private Funding for Kontera

Based in San Francisco, California, the leader in In-Text advertising, Kontera announced that it had secured $15.5 million in a private round of funding with Sequoia Capital leading the funding.

Kontera offers a unique platform that brings relevant in-text advertising and other similar information solutions online. Kontera’s platform is based on a technology that performs real time semantic analysis of content and other information related to the content and incorporates into hyperlinks throughout the text. The platform that Kontera uses also enhances the user’s experience by using a higher grade of phrase relevance, generating increased user interaction, and increasing the publisher’s profitability. Furthermore, the success of Kontera’s technology is quite evident in the fact that it had attracted over 100 million unique users per month.

Proceeds from this funding will go to accelerate the company’s network growth, scale the next generation of real time semantic analysis solutions, and expand the company’s presence into new markets worldwide.

According to Michael Moritz, partner at Sequoia Capital, Kontera has ventured into new territories in the internet with its real-time content relevant text advertising. Along with the content relevant text platform that is the proprietary technology of Kontera, and the content on the website, users are now able to find information that was once hidden from view. Mr. Moritz further added that Kontera has made new leads and incredible headway with its platform and this is the compelling reason for Sequoia Capital to support Kontera.

In 2008, Kontera had an exceptional year and already well into 2009, the company continues to gain momentum. Furthermore, in May of this year, ComScore reported that Kontera had become the fifth fastest growing internet advertising company with an audience that has increased up to 40% within the past twelve months.

According to the CEO and Kontera’s cofounder, Yoav Shaham, in order to have success in this new market, it is crucial for you to have a sophisticated semantic analysis solution. Furthermore, the only way that in-text advertising can work is if the content of the entire text body and all of its nuances are clearly understood and the advertising is relevant to the content of the text. In the case of Kontera, the company also uses algorithms and predictive real-time analysis to figure out the user’s intent.

Sequoia Capital is a global vc firm which is based in Menlo Park, California and also has international offices in China, Israel, and India. Sequoia Capital is a vc firm that is founded by some of the world’s top entrepreneurs to help other entrepreneurs succeed. Some of the best known entrepreneurs who are partners at Sequoia include Apple’s Steve Jobbs, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, and Yahoo’s Jerry Yang and David Filo to name a few. Some other companies in Sequoia’s portfolio include online shoes and clothing retailer, Zappos.com; Peak Sport, ThinkCash, AdBrite, DropBox, and others.

For more information about Kontera, click here.

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