What slow trickle of venture capital dollars into the Ocean State appears to be flowing more freely. Providence-based Context Media, a start-up that specializes in bringing television images to your computer screen, reports receiving $11 million in private funding to develop and market its “rich media solutions.”
Context Media, according to its Web site, “helps content companies manage, share and produce their content in a way that delivers more meaningful rich media experiences to the user based on context.” Context Media operates in the business-to-business market. It is counting on the advent of broadband access – and an ensuing demand for more rich content.
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The company is the brainchild of Dan Harple, a University of Rhode Island graduate who founded InSoft before selling it to Netscape in 1996. He served as a senior vice president at Netscape. Harple spent a year-and-half living in Silicon Valley before returning to Rhode Island recently.
On March 21, the company reported its launch – backed by $11 million in first-round funding from leading venture capital firms including Macromedia Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and Adams Capital Management, as well as from private investors including Silicon Valley Bank.
“We’ve set out to create a fundamentally different way to matrix and share content between sites, and enable a new form of content commerce – one where sites can become their own hubs of syndication and create content relationships based on context,” said Harple, in a prepared statement.
The content media industry, according to Context Media, will range from $7 billion to $20 billion by 2002.
Andries van Dam, a professor of computer science at Brown University and chairman of Context Media’s Advisory Board, sees the work being done by the company as “an important step in the evolution of the Web.”
“Rich content embedded in a meaningful context is really the Holy Grail of Web experiences,” said van Dam. “It can mean many things, but primarily what it delivers is flexibility.”
Context Media’s success in attracting venture capital investment comes on the heels of other recent investments in burgeoning high technology companies based in Rhode Island.
For example, a biotechnology company called Spherics has just attracted $4 million in venture capital funds. Spherics started in 1997 with $200,000 in grants and loans from the state’s Center for Cellular Medicine.
The venture capital investment in Spherics comes at the same time that tradesafe.com, another Providence-based company, received $10 million from IQ Capital, a German venture capital firm. Tradesafe.com is an online payment processor for party-to-party transactions on the Internet.
Spherics received $3.25 million from Zero Stage Capital and $750,000 from CB Health Ventures of Boston. It marks the second Rhode Island venture funding that Zero Stage has become involved in since January, and the third in a year. In January, Zero Stage invested $3.6 million in BlueStreak.com, a Newport-based Internet marketing company, and last May invested $900,000 in another unidentified Newport-based company.
