Atomz.com, a developer of hosted applications for web developers, announced Tuesday it has raised $15 million in its second round of financing, led by prominent venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA).
Original investors Sofinnova Ventures in the United States, Sofinnova Partners in France and law firms Fenwick & West LLP and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, who invested a total of $4 million in Atomz.com in its first-round funding in July 1999, also participated in this round. Other investors include: Charlie Baxter, president and CEO of eTranslate, Hiroshi Mikitani, founder and CEO of Rakuten, and law firm Cooley Godward LLP. Chip Linehan, partner at NEA, will join the Atomz.com board of directors.
Atomz.com develops and delivers hosted applications targeting web developers. Its flagship product, Atomz.com Search, is the leading hosted site search engine on the market today. Atomz.com Search allows customers to add a search engine to any Web site with just a few lines of HTML.
“Our whole vision is to deliver website services,” Steve Kusmer, President and CEO of Atomz.com, told ASP News. “Search is just the beginning.” Kusmer hinted that new products and services would be released by the end of the year. “Everything we do helps people build and run a better website. In the coming months, you’ll see us tackle some of the tougher problems a web developer might have.”
Last month, over 11 million searches were performed across the 25,000 sites using Atomz.com Search, Kusmer said. “Inside of a year, we’ve become one of the top 500 most-visited sites in the world, and most of that’s been accrued by word-of-mouth.”
Kusmer said the quality of Atomz.com customers speaks to the quality of the service Atomz.com offers. “We’re the search engine for 3 of the 4 major Presidential campaigns. We’ve got very savvy web companies like O’Reilly and Webmonkey using our services.”
Kusmer hopes a new deal with Adobe Systems Inc. will add even more quality customers: Atomz.com also announced Tuesday an alliance with Adobe that includes the integration of Atomz.com Search within Adobe’s professional web authoring tool, GoLive 5.0.
The Atomz.com Search extension is available for both Windows and Macintosh platforms, and can be downloaded from Atomz.com’s site. Once installed, Atomz.com Search can be added to any website from within GoLive 5.0 from a menu or toolbar.
Atomz.com Search is the first example of a hosted service application that is seamlessly integrated and supported by Adobe GoLive 5.0, according to Adobe officials. “Here you have a packaged software product integrated with an ASP,” Kusmer said “I think you’ll see this more and more.”
Kusmer proclaims Atomz.com to be part of the “new software industry,” characterized by renting applications instead of buying them and getting instant software updates as opposed to waiting for the next version’s release. “In the past, you’d have an IT staff with a large payroll and pagers to alert them to problems 24-hours-a-day,” Kusmer said. “Now we’ve got the pagers.”