| [January 24, 2005] |
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NextNine Closes $5 Million Financing Round; Finance Round Led by Ascend Technology Ventures and Infinity Venture Capital Fund, Joined by Existing Shareholders, Will Accelerate Company Growth
TEL AVIV, Israel & RIVERDALE, N.Y. --(Business Wire)-- Jan. 24, 2005 -- NextNine, the world's leading provider of technical service automation solutions for mission critical systems and applications, today announced it has raised a total of $5 million in a finance round that was led by Ascend Technology Ventures and Infinity Venture Capital Fund, and included existing investors Ofer Hi-Tech, Yozma Venture Capital and Redwood Venture Capital.
NextNine is a clear leader in support automation solutions for mission critical systems in the Telecom, CATV, Healthcare, Medical, Financial and other industries. NextNine enables vendors of mission critical system to make the strategic shift from reactive, manual, technical support to a proactive, automated services paradigm, providing their customers unparalleled service and support.
"Support Automation is a market poised to grow," said Moshe Bar-Niv, General Partner at Ascend Technology Ventures. "NextNine is providing a solution to a problem that most technology vendors are facing. Talking to the NextNine customers, we found tier-1 vendors basing their customer service strategy on NextNine, and enthusiastic about the results that significantly improved their service level while decreasing their service costs. We believe that Support Automation is the answer, and that NextNine has the right team, the right product and the track record to become a leading player in this fast growing market."
"NextNine has demonstrated the ability to adapt to the new market and perform well under extreme market conditions," said Avishai Silvershatz, Managing Partner at Infinity Venture Capital Fund. "We see NextNine as a company positioned to succeed in a new evolving market."
"NextNine is excited with this vote of confidence from our new and existing investors, world-class venture capital funds," said Adi Dulberg, CEO of NextNine. "NextNine has gone a long way in establishing it's product and market leadership in it's market, and is going to use this fund raising to accelerate our growth and increase our span and dominance of the market."
Moshe Bar-Niv, General Partner at Ascend Technology Partners, and Avishay Silvershatz, Managing Partner at Infinity Venture Capital Fund, will join NextNine's board of directors.
About NextNine
NextNine (www.NextNine.com) is revolutionizing the way mission-critical systems are supported and serviced. NextNine is introducing the Virtual Support Engineer, a new paradigm of automated remote customer support and adaptive service solutions for large-scale, mission-critical systems deployed in enterprises. NextNine Service Automation (NSA) is a distributed software solution that maximizes the availability and performance of business-critical systems. NextNine customers include global leaders such as Motorola Broadband (NYSE:MOT), Comverse (NASDAQ: CMVT), LogicaCMG (LSE: LOG); (Euronext: LOG) and airwide solutions. NSA provides remote automation of service and support processes, including proactive monitoring, preventive maintenance, installed base inventory tracking, software distribution, system audit and best-practice analysis, enabling any type of technology or system provider to deliver better, proactive service at a lower cost, maximizing customer satisfaction, return on investment and fueling new sources of service revenue.
About Ascend Technology Ventures
Ascend Technology Ventures (www.ascendvc.com) manages $100 Million for Israeli related high-tech investments in the fields of Communication, IT and Life sciences. Ascend Technology Ventures had two exits lately, when Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) acquired P-Cube for $200M & Software AG bought Sabratec. In the last months Ascend made new investments in Columbus, BitBand, Glucon & WideMed. Other major investments by Ascend Technology Ventures include Combox (Acquired by Terayon (NSADAQ:TERN)), SintecMedia, Decru & Provigent.
About Infinity Venture Capital Fund
Infinity Venture Capital Fund (www.infinity-vc.com) manages $200 million in funds for investment. Infinity was founded in 1997, to continue the activities of the Nitzanim Fund (1993). The principal investors are the Rind/Butler Group, Clal Industries, GE Asset Management, the American investment bank Friedman Billings Ramsey (FBR) and Banque Nationale de Paris. The fund is managed by Amir Gal-Or, Avishai Silvershatz and Robert Bash. To date Infinity has invested in around 40 technology companies including Shopping.com, which went public during 2004, Shellcase, Galil Medical, Proneuron, Scitex Vision, Orsus, Nanomotion, Native Networks, Red Bend, VisionCare and BrainsGate. Since the beginning of 2003, Infinity manages 25 of the technological portfolio companies of Clal Industries and IDB, including Saifun Semiconductors, Identify Software and Power Paper. IDB and Infinity have recently established the first venture capital fund located in China in purpose to invest and support in Israeli related companies.
(C) 2005 NextNine. All rights reserved. NextNine, the NextNine logo and NextNine Service Automation are trademarks of NextNine.
Note to the editors - Please use the full name of "Ascend Technology Ventures" and 'Infinity Venture Capital Fund' not to be confused with similar name investment groups.
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