Digital Fountain Builds Momentum With $20 Million Round of Financing, Moves Toward Solving Internet Content Brown Out

Business Wire, Oct 30, 2000

Business Editors and High Tech Writers

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 30, 2000

Matrix Partners' Andrew Verhalen Named Newest Member of Digital

Fountain Board of Directors

Digital Fountain, the leading innovator in delivering high-demand rich content to television-scale Internet audiences, today announced the completion of its third round of financing, a $20 million investment led by Waltham, Mass.-based Matrix Partners. Matrix joins Granite Ventures, Texas Instruments, Adobe Inc., Sony Corp., and Cisco Systems as investors in Digital Fountain, originator of the revolutionary "meta-content" approach to solving content brown-out on the Internet. Digital Fountain has now raised $27.5 million in three rounds of private financing.

Congestion on the Internet's backbone contributes to frequent "content brown-out", denying users access to popular content and translating into lost revenue for e-businesses. Delivery of rich content with audiovisual elements has become all but impossible on today's Internet for large, concurrent audiences. Existing content delivery solutions enable random user access to cached content, which works well for small amounts of data and small audiences. However, when concurrent access and content size increase, additional servers are required to satisfy user demand. Digital Fountain's meta-content approach enables delivery of rich content to virtually limitless audiences utilizing existing infrastructures, without significant additional hardware expenditure for service providers and enterprises.

"Simple static caching cannot meet the demands that dynamic rich media content places on an Internet network. Service providers and enterprises alike are searching for robust technologies to help them deliver high quality video and audio content," said Michael Hoch, research analyst for Aberdeen Group. "Digital Fountain's technology is a novel approach to the problem of on-demand access to rich content over the Internet to large audiences, and can help transform the Internet into a viable broadcast medium."

Digital Fountain also announced Andrew Verhalen as the newest member to its board of directors. Andrew brings a wealth of technology management experience to the Digital Fountain board. In addition to his current service as director for a number of leading Internet infrastructure companies in Silicon Valley, Mr. Verhalen previously served as a divisional vice president of 3Com Corp. and managed marketing and strategic planning in the Microprocessor Group at Intel Corp.

"Digital Fountain has made a breakthrough in content delivery technology with a unique approach to solving content congestion that enables the Internet to serve as a broadcast medium" said Andrew Verhalen, general partner at Matrix. "Matrix has consistently recognized network technology innovators, and we're pleased to contribute to Digital Fountain's advances in content delivery on the Internet."

About Matrix Partners

Since its inception in 1977, Matrix Partners has been dedicated to helping outstanding entrepreneurs build industry leading technology companies. Matrix is focused on companies that provide products and services that drive the Net Economy with a particular emphasis on e-business solutions, Internet commerce and the communications infrastructure. With offices in the two major technology centers - Boston and Silicon Valley - Matrix has developed an exceptionally strong network of contacts and entrepreneurial know-how.

Companies that have gone public out of the Matrix portfolio in the last 18 months and that Matrix played a founding role in have generated more than $85 billion of market value. These include ArrowPoint Communications (recently acquired by Cisco), Alteon Web Systems (Nasdaq: ATON), Blue Martini Software (Nasdaq: BLUE), BeFree (Nasdaq: BFRE), OnDisplay (recently acquired by Vignette), Phone.com (Nasdaq: PHCM), SilverStream Software (Nasdaq: SSSW), Sonus Networks (Nasdaq: SONS) and Sycamore Networks (Nasdaq: SCMR).

About Digital Fountain(www.digitalfountain.com)

Digital Fountain is a leading innovator in content delivery with its patent-pending technology that dramatically reduces system resources by transforming original media into a unique meta-content structure. This technology enables Digital Fountain content and streaming servers to support any user-base regardless of its size or concurrency while utilizing system loads that can be orders of magnitude less that other techniques. Digital Fountain servers further optimize existing enterprise or service provider infrastructures by making all requesters appear as a single virtual user and thus enable unconditional user concurrency, maximized resources and complete system predictability.

Additional information may be obtained by calling Digital Fountain at 415/401-2100, sending a fax to 415/401-2199, or sending e-mail to info@digitalfountain.com. Company information is also available on the web at www.digitalfountain.com.