Kontera is an advertising company that places ads into the text of blog posts, news articles, and content for their clients. Yesterday, the company announced that they have raised $10.3 million in a second round of funding. The lead investor was Carmel Ventures and Sequoia Capital with Lehman Brothers participated. A General Partner of Carmel, Rina Shainski will be joining Kontera’s board.

“The field of In-Text Advertising is rapidly growing and enhancing the world of online advertising, which is eager for innovation. We believe that Kontera, with its unique offering and superior technology, is well-positioned to lead in this growing market,” stated Shainski.

The funding will be used for the purpose of scaling research and development along with marketing. Kontera’s advertising system seems to be rather successful in terms of click-through-rates (CTR’s). Sometimes Kontera sees CTR upwards at 10%.

“We at Kontera continue to deliver on our vision for the In-Text market by serving ads and information that best match the user’s intent as deduced from the content the user is browsing,” stated Yoav Shaham, the CEO and founder of Kontera. “With user intent driving the growth for online activities today, from social networking and widgets to blogging and product reviews, Kontera is the right choice to maximize value for publishers, advertisers and users alike.”

The Kontera blog is available at: http://blog.kontera.com/

References:
[1] Kontera Press Release (via Yahoo! Finance)

TheMarkets.com is a website that reports financial resources and estimations to institutional investors.  Today the company announced that it has “completed a $30 million Series S Rights Offering to its existing broker-owners^[1].”

“This investment is a tangible validation of our business model to provide value-added content and workflow solutions to the buy-side,” stated David Eisner, the CEO and President of TheMarkets.com. “Together with our already strong cash flow and balance sheet, this round of financing will propel our growth in the coming years. The funding will enable us to pursue strategic investments and acquisitions, as we continue to expand globally by leveraging our existing distribution platform and our unique relationships with the sell-side to introduce new products and services requested by our clients.”

Who owns TheMarkets.com?  The company was formed in 2000 by eleven of the top investment banks: Banc of America Securities, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Kleinwort, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, UBS Investment Bank.  The site also offers information regarding company financial filings and pending equity deals straight from the source.  TheMarkets.com is based in New York and also has offices in London.

TheMarkets.com serves over 1500 firms in 43 countries.  “TheMarkets.com has a proven management team and a sound business model,” stated Mark Steinert, a new Board Member of and also a Global Head of Research at UBS. “We view the Company as an ideal vehicle through which to develop new tools for the buy-side that uniquely leverage our services, and we were delighted to be a significant investor in the round.”

[1] TheMarkets.com Press release: TheMarkets.com Closes $30 Million to Fund Strategic Growth Plans

References:
[2] PaidContent: Online Financial Researcher TheMarkets.com Closes $30 Million Investment

“We have taken traditional consumer research to the next level. For the first time ever marketers can understand all aspects of consumer activity, including critical links between online and offline behavior,” stated Gian Fulgoni, Co-Founder of comScore.  comScore is an Internet information provider that monitors consumer behaviors and trends online.  comScore has a plethora of lucrative clients such as Verizon, T-Mobile, Viacom, AOL, iVillage, CareerBuilder, Microsoft, and Yahoo!.  All of these clients benefit from the human-computer interactions monitored by comScore.  It will be comScore, Inc. will be listed under NASDAQ: SCOR.

comScore was created in 1999 and had acquired assets from NetRatings during the dot-com bust.  About 12% of comScore’s 2006 $66 million in sales came from Microsoft.  The company is often times cited in the press for its statistical information.  In a recent Bloomberg article, comScore statistics were used for reporting how many more visitors were attracted to YouTube this year compared to last.  YouTube had 133.5 million visitors this past January and 9.5 million the January before that.  comScore also reported that 94.8 million visitors visited the website this past January and 38.9 million the year before.

A number of financial companies have stake in comScore.  Investors include JPMorgan Partners, Accel Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, Lehman Brothers, Adams Street Partners, Topspin Partners, Flatiron Partners, vSpring Capital, Devine InterVentures, and Rembrandt Venture Partners.  The number of shares expected to release during the IPO is not yet known.