Macrovision, British Telecom and Spinnaker Ventures among New Investors
Fremont, Calif., Oct. 16, 2001— Digital Fountain, which has developed a revolutionary technology to deliver critical data and rich media reliably and cost-effectively to a single recipient or a television-scale audience, has raised $20 million in its fourth round of financing. The Series D round includes new investments from Macrovision, the world leader in video and software content protection and digital rights management, British Telecom and Spinnaker Ventures. Digital Fountain strategic partner NRI also contributed to the Series D round, as did current investors Sony Corp., Cisco Systems, Matrix Partners, Granite Ventures, Adobe, Inc. and Texas Instruments. Digital Fountain has now raised $47.5 million in four rounds of private financing.
“As a company in the business of securing content for delivery, we understand the pitfalls of traditional methods of moving large amounts of data,” said Brian Dunn, senior vice president of business development for Macrovision. “With its highly efficient and predictable content-delivery products, Digital Fountain is ushering in the era of the reliable network. We believe the 2,500 ISVs that currently use Macrovision’s FLEXlm® and SAFECAST™ electronic licensing and digital rights management products, as well as our film, music and interactive games customers, will be extremely interested in Digital Fountain’s products.”
Traditional methods of content delivery sacrifice time and bandwidth to ensure exact delivery of data and rich media. Digital Fountain’s approach guarantees that data is transported without any of the usual concerns for loss, delay or misdelivery, offering vast improvements in network throughput and server capacity. The benefits of the Digital Fountain technology include unprecedented scalability for the server and the network, guaranteed delivery regardless of congestion or concurrent demand, significantly reduced distribution costs and a richer consumer experience. Digital Fountain announced availability of its Fountain server products in June and will shortly announce a series of significant customer wins and partnerships with some of the world’s leading technology companies.
“Spinnaker invests in companies that are primarily focused on a domestic market and gives them counsel on international expansion, when the time is appropriate, “ said Gregorio Schneider of Spinnaker Ventures. “Digital Fountain has introduced an amazing data transport technology in Asia and the EMEA markets, and we feel we will be able to help jump-start partnerships and customer introductions in Latin America, where we have extensive relationships and expertise.”
“These new investments are a powerful validation of Digital Fountain’s approach to solving longstanding problems in data transport and distribution,” said Cliff Meltzer, CEO of Digital Fountain. “We are committed to finding new applications for our technology that will help our customers reduce their expenses and increase profitability.”
About Digital Fountain
Digital Fountain is the leading innovator in the delivery of high-volume, mission-critical data and media-rich files over IP networks. Unlike standard servers, the family of Fountain Servers™ uses Meta-Content™ technology, which encodes data into a series of equations from which an unlimited number of users can reconstruct a perfect copy of the original content. Meta-Content technology eliminates the need for retransmissions or receipt acknowledgement and makes data loss irrelevant. As a result, Fountain Servers deliver data faster and more reliably than any other data transport technology or product. For more information please call 510-284-1400, send a fax to 510-284-1499 or send e-mail to press@digitalfountain.com. Company information is also available at www.digitalfountain.com
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