Oversi, a company based in Petah Tikva that specializes in peer-to-peer (P2P) caching and content delivery solutions, has announced that it has received funding from Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) as part of an extended second round of funding, totaling $8 million. The funding round was led by Carmel Ventures together with StageOne Ventures and TempoPark Fund, which was advised by smac partners. The company announced in December 2006 that it had raised $6 million in its second round from these investors.
Oversi says that the additional investment funds will be used to expand its sales and distribution channels and global operations, and will help fund the development of new P2P streaming and delivery products.
Oversi chairman and CEO Joav Avtalion said: "We see Cisco's investment as an exciting milestone for our company, helping us to grow our business in line with the fast-evolving world of online video and P2P content distribution. With so much video and TV on the Internet, bandwidth is becoming the key issue.
"Using our P2P solutions, service providers can deliver up to 20 times more bandwidth using their existing infrastructures, instead of investing billions of dollars in expensive upgrades. We look forward to a fruitful and continued collaboration with our investment partners."
Carmel Ventures general partner Avi Zeevi said, “The addition of Cisco to the existing investors of Oversi reinforces the importance of the market for clearing P2P traffic congestion on service provider networks.”
Oversi was founded in 2004 by CTO Ofer Wald and VP marketing and business development Eitan Efron in the Lab-One Innovations incubator. According to IVC, the company has raised $7.3 million up to now, so that the current investment brings the total raised to $9.3 million.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes.co.il - on June 11, 2007
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