Tenaya Capital led a $12 million C round in Israeli start up Cotendo, joined by current investors Sequoia Capital and Benchmark Capital. Cotendo wants to help websites provide a faster surfing experience by shedding “unnecessary weight”. The key to increasing performance is a suite of tools including CDN (Content Delivery Networks), real time reporting, DNS services and Dynamic site acceleration (DSA) that promises to deliver content ten times faster than the content provider’s own servers.
Michael Moritz, a partner at Sequoia Capital sees speed as the main benefit Cotendo brings to content providers:
“Vessels run faster after the barnacles have been scraped from the side of their hulls. The same is true for websites. With Cotendo, website operators can peel away the crustaceous encroachments of the last decade and massively speed up the delivery of their content”
The growth of cloud-based product usage will drive the importance of network performance, said Jim Davis, Senior Analyst with Tier1 Research. According to industry reports, the CDN market is expected to ride on that trend and hit the $2 billion mark in 2012. Cotendo hopes to ride on that wave, by offering solutions to high-volume transactional enterprises, online retailers, financial services companies, advertising networks, professional news and social media sites.
The proceeds of this round will be used to fuel Cotendo’s international expansion and continued product development. Ronni Zehavi, Cotendo’s co-founder and CEO, is a seasoned salesman after previously serving as as VP Sales & Business Development at Commtouch. In the official press release, Zehavi said:
“This investment round is another strong validation for our unique innovation and the business momentum we have experienced since launching our CDN and site acceleration suite. We look forward to using this new capital infusion to drive further rapid growth.”
Founded in 2008, Cotendo is already servicing customers in the US including Digg, Meebo, Payoneer and Adbrite. To has recently opened an office in Europe.
He is a former General Partner at Google Ventures (GV) in Europe, former head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe, and founding head of Campus London, Google's first startup hub. Eze writes on Israeli tech, venture capital, artificial intelligence, and founder strategy.
He is also the founder of Techbikers, a nonprofit that brings together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read.
