Commentary

John Foley
Editor, InformationWeek  

Four Companies Secure $143 Million In Funding

Business loans may be hard to come by, but in the past three days, four emerging companies have revealed that they're receiving a total of $143 million in investment funding. Here's how Connectiva, Digg, MOD Systems, and OpTier plan to spend the money.

Business loans may be hard to come by, but in the past three days, four emerging companies have revealed that they're receiving a total of $143 million in investment funding. Here's how Connectiva, Digg, MOD Systems, and OpTier plan to spend the money.On Sept. 23, Connectiva Systems, which makes revenue and risk management software for telecom companies, disclosed that it has secured $17 million in funding from a group of investors that includes SAP Ventures. It plans to use the money for R&D, sales and marketing, and to scale its operations. Connectiva's software helps telecom companies stop "revenue leakage" through fraud management, credit risk analysis, and other analytics.

Connectiva (founded in 2000) has one foot in the United States and the other in India. Headquartered in New York, the company's development center is in Kolkata, India. Likewise, one of its investors, VC firm NEA-IndoUS Ventures, has offices in Bangalore and Santa Clara, Calif.


More SMB Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

OpTier, which specializes in business transaction management software, disclosed on Sept. 23 that it has secured $47.5 million in fourth-round funding, plus a $15 million credit line. Morgan Stanley is among its new investors. The company says it will use the money to fuel growth -- both organic and through acquisition -- and to support sales and marketing.

OpTier (founded 2002) introduced its flagship product, CoreFirst, in 2005. The software prioritizes IT transactions based on business needs. Headquartered in New York, OpTier's R&D center is in Israel.

On Sept. 24, user-submitted news site Digg.com (founded 2004) announced a $28.7 million investment led by Highland Capital Partners. Digg CEO Jay Adelson, in a blog post, explained that the money will go toward infrastructure, international expansion, hiring, and site development, including personalization, an enhanced recommendation system, and more ways to discover and organize content.

On Sept. 25, MOD Systems (founded 2005) said it has negotiated a $35 million investment from Toshiba, NCR, and others. MOD's platform is a kiosk-like distribution system for movies, TV shows, music, and other content.

Toshiba and NCR aren't just investors, but partners. Under the agreement, users will be able to download content to Secure Digital cards, cell phones, and other mobile devices through kiosks managed by NCR in retail stores, airports, and restaurants. Toshiba will develop set-top boxes and SD cards for the system.

What does this all add up to? The four companies serve different niches, but they're high-potential niches -- risk management, transaction management, user-generated content, and mobile media, respectively.


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links