Israeli start-up Kontera Technologies Inc., which develops text analysis solutions for online advertising, has closed its first financing round in which it raised $7 million from Sequoia Capital and Lehman Brothers (NYSE: LEH). This is the first time Kontera has raised financing from a venture capital firm, despite being active in the market for several years.
Kontera’s product, ContentLink, is an In-Text ad unit, based on a 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 the company’s advertisers.
Kontera founder and CEO Yoav Shaham said, “The best way to figure out the user´s intent is to analyze the content he or she is consuming. The success of search advertising stems from ‘user intent” - the user is clearly interested in the subject they’ve typed into the search box and you target to that. Rich media and pay-per-click advertising, available real estate for serving additional ads has become increasingly scarce. We enable web publishers to monetize untapped and incremental ad revenue, while providing marketers with a better ROI than with other advertising vehicles.”
Shaham added that the company has developed algorithms to analyze the content in real-time, figure out the intent of the user on that page, and identify and serve immediately the best keyword-to-ad match available from within Kontera´s publisher and advertiser network.
A company advertising pens, for example, will be referred by Kontera’s technology only to those locations where the use of the word pen represents intention to purchase goods in the relevant category, rather than sites with a random reference to such products. It can also detect texts that indicate intention to buy such products, even if the absence of any specific mention. Kontera says it now works in cooperation with thousands of partner sides, among them Yahoo!
IVC was founded in 2004 and has offices in San Francisco and Herzliya. According to IVC Online, the company reportedly has not previously held a financing round, even from private from investors.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes.co.il - on July 6, 2006
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