Sources inform “Globes” that start-up Zend Technologies is completing its expanded third financing round, with a $4 million investment from a leading US West Coast venture capital fund. When the agreement is signed, expected in a few days, Zend will close the $10 million financing round. Zend had set itself a target of $8 million for the round. Including the present round, Zend will have raised $16 million to date.
Zend Technologies president and CEO Doron Gerstel declined to comment on the report.
The first stage of the round, amounting to $6 million, closed two months ago, was led by US fund Index Ventures. Previous investors in Zend, Shrem Fudim Kelner Technologies (TASE:SFKT) and Walden Israel also participated in the round.
Index Ventures has also invested in Israeli companies FilesX, BeamExpress and VCON Telecommunications (Nouveau Marche:VCON ).
Gerstel, CTO Zeev Suraski and VP technology Andi Gutmans founded Zend in 2000. The company develops PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) crypting language services and components. Two Zend founders helped write PHP, which is used for software applications for Linux open source code environments and Apache Digital Linux servers.
Two months ago, Gerstel told "Globes" that the backbone of PHP was a Zend engine, which had been installed on over 12 million sites and Internet applications. He said at the time that the financing round would help Zend support a large number of potential customers in the US.
Sources close to the company confirmed Zend's rapid growth. They estimated its revenue at a few million dollars in 2003, which brought it to profitability.
Published by Globes [online] - www.globes.co.il - on May 13, 2004