Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners participated in the round.
Sources inform ''Globes'' that Upsteed has completed its first financing round, raising $5 million from venture capital firms, Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners. Upsteed was founded last year and defines itself as a service, rather than a product company. It has developed an cellular advertising system designed to reduce costs to end users.
Upsteed CEO and co-founder Zohar Levkovitz confirmed the report about the round and said the company is developing a system for adding advertising content relating to a wide variety of products for cellular networks. “Our goal is to use advertising to reduce costs to users.” He added that the idea to form the company “grew out of the recognition of the anomaly that exists in the cellular world. Advertising constitutes an integral part of every medium we know, except for the cellular world. It is time that this situation changed, especially in light of the fact that there are more cellular handsets than PCs and televisions.”
Levkovitz was formerly chief technology officer at Comverse and was one of the developers of the multimedia messaging (MMS) and push technology. After he left Comverse he became vice president for product development at Hotbar.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes.co.il - on March 19, 2006
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