startupmania

It would seem that venture capital funds still have faith and invest in IT start-ups. StartUpMania heard that Genesis Partners, Vertex Venture Capital, Intel Capital, and Clal Industries have invested 6 million dollars in Aternity over the past 12 months. What’s notable about these investments is that all of these funds have already invested in the start-up in the past.

The respective representatives of these funds on Aternity’s board of directors are Yifat Oron of Vertex Venture Capital, Eddy Shalev, founder of Genesis Partners, and Assaf Topaz of Clal Industries. Aternity’s website does not state the name of Intel Capital’s (the global Intel VC fund) representative, but the man in charge of Intel Capital’s local investments, and tho one who, in the last few years, invested in Israeli Ceedo, Lucid, Jajah and many other Israeli start-ups, is Udi Arazi.

For Aternity, which specializes in performance evaluation of different software running on end-user computers in large organizations, and providing a detailed performance report for IT managers and the end-users themselves, this is a substantial fund raising which places the net income from fund raising at an estimate of $20 million. This is based on previous reports that state that the company has raised an estimate of $14 million from its inception to the beginning of 2008.

Aternity’s CEO is Trevor Matz, and the company’s founders are Eden Shochat, who is the current CTO, Orit Kislev and Amir Eldadd. Additionally, a founder who currently acts as chairman of the company is Amnon Yacoby, founder of Floware before it merged with BreezeCom and became Alvarion. Prior to founding Flower, Yacoby founded RAD Network Devices.

In an interview with StartUpMania, Matz announced that by the end of 2009 the start-up, which strives to monitor, analyze and point to the way to most efficiently improve the end-users experience and work flow using the existing organizational application, will serve “over 30 customers, including more than 20 Fortune 500 customers. Our customers in Israel include Amdocs, Clal Insurance, Israeli Police, Pelephone and Menora.”

Matz further added that “Our last round of investment was used to fuel continued product innovations in our market leading FPI (Frontline Performance Intelligence) Platform, and further scale our direct and channel sales/marketing teams.”

Although a “cutting costs” regime is currently regulated in megacorporations, a regime Aternity needs to overcome, Matz assures that the company, which currently employs about 50 people will,  “By the end of 2009 have over 50 employees. In addition, we work with about half a dozen contractors on a regular basis.”

If you happen to be a talented, Israeli software engineer, or a salesperson experienced with working along large-scale organization in the United States, then Matz’ claim that “From now until the end of Q1/10, we have till fill 3-4 R&D positions in Israel and 3 Sales & Sales Engineering positions in the US” should definitely pique your interest.