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Enterprise Software - Friday, December 10, 2004

Kontiki - Profile

HQ: Sunnyvale, CA

Founded: January 2001

Management: Company was founded by Netscape alum and Valley big-shot Mike Homer, who was originally the CEO and is now chairman (we suspect he got bored with the whole thing). Current CEO is Bryan Plug, who previously ran Kintana, which was acquired by Mercury Interactive. He was also CEO of the huge flamout spawned by SAP and Intel called Pandesic.

Investors: Konitiki raised $8.6M in December 2004 led by MK Capital with Adobe Ventures, Barksdale Group and Benchmark Capital. Company raised an $18M Series A way back in August 2001 from Barksdale, Benchmark and big name angels like Marc Andreesen, Jeff Berg, Stratton Sclavos, and Larry Sonsini. Then Kontiki did a $16M Series B in late 2002.

Business Model: Kontiki sells technology that allows companies to deliver high bandwidth assets, in particular video. They claim to have 11M users. Perhaps their biggest installation is with CNET's Download.com

Competitors: Akamai, Chaincast.

Dirt: What happened? All the money, connections, and technolgy couldn't buy success. We chalk it up to poor market timing. They came in after Akamai had already risen and currently there isn't a big enough market for Kontiki, Akamai, and others. This will surely change as videoconferencing over the Net becomes commonplace. The latest round of funding was, we are certain, a big loss for previous investors. Latest lead investor, MK Capital, is schooled in the world of "The Grave Dancer" Sam Zell.