Cisco joins financing round in P2P technologies startup Oversi

Petah-Tikva based Oversi today announced that Cisco Systems has joined its second financing round, in which it's raising $8 million.

In December 2006, it brought in $6 million, in a round led by Carmel ventures, with TempoPark Fund and StageOne Ventures.

Oversi, which specializes in peer-to-peer (P2P) caching and content delivery solutions, says it will be using the additional investment funds to expand its sales and distribution channels, and global operations.

Some of the funding will be used to develop new products for P2P streaming and delivery, Oversi said.

The company's technology addresses a burning problem among Internet service providers: some 70% to 90% of the traffic originates with P2P communications - in a word, surfers sharing files are jamming the Net.

Oversi offers the ISPs proxy traffic management servers to relieve the traffic overload created by end users sharing files.

Cisco is the queen of enterprise networks, but its investment in Oversi could bring it more tools to resolve content and load management problems. At present it offers Cisco Service Control Technology.

Another Israeli company in Oversi's sphere, of relieving traffic congestion created by rampant file sharing, is PeerApp. Then there's the American company CacheLogic.

Joav Avtalion, chairman and CEO of Oversi, commented that Cisco's investment is a milestone for the company.

"With so much video and TV on the Internet, bandwidth is becoming the key issue. Using our P2P solutions, service providers can deliver up to 20 times more bandwidth using their existing infrastructures, instead of investing billions of dollars in expensive upgrades," Avtalion said.

Oversi was founded in 2004 and grew up in the StageOne technology incubator.