Deals

DFJ puts $3.1m into CastTV

US venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson has led a first round of funding for CastTV, a video search engine company that has various internet business luminaries on its board.

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Draper Fisher Jurvetson has led a $3.1 million (€1.55 million) first round investment into US-based video search engine CastTV.

As part of the deal, Draper Fisher Jurvetson managing director Warren Packard has joined the board of the internet company. He joins Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway and Rajeev Motwani, three other industry veterans.

Andreessen was co-founder of Netscape and Mosaic, two leading web companies, while Conway and Motwani played key roles at search engine firm Google. Motwani was the firm’s strategic advisor and Conway was an early stage investor.

CastTV has also signed a two-year deal with an undisclosed major media corporation to provide its online video search technology for the company’s website.

The company’s technology attempts to bypass the problems faced by traditional search engines when video streaming software, such as Flash, Javascript and media player plug-ins, hides the content of videos. CastTV’s technology is able to look through the indices and data of videos hidden behind such programmes.

CastTV was founded by husband-and-wife team Edwin Ong and Alex Vikati. The two Stanford University alumni also set up FileFish, which was acquired by Oracle in 2003.

Draper Fisher Jurvetson has more than $4.5 billion under management and is raising its ninth fund, with a $600 million target. Its previous investments include internet telephone company Skype, which was acquired by eBay, and online directory company Four11 which was acquired by Yahoo.