Ottawa's Celtic House Venture Partners has co-led a syndicate that put in $15 million of second round financing into Waterloo, Ont.'s Avvassi Inc., which is trying to develop software that enables mobile network providers to measure, improve and monetize mobile video. The other co-leader was Tech Capital Partners, also of Waterloo. Among the investors is the provincial Ontario Emerging Technologies Fund. The money will help accelerate Avvasi's product development, said company CEO Mate Prgin in a news release. No date for the release of the product was announced.
The press release noted that Avvasi's founders are well-known to Celtic House, as they were previously part of the engineering team at Waterloo-based PixStream Inc., a Celtic House Fund I portfolio company. PixStream, which made video distribution hardware and software, was acquired by Cisco Systems Inc. in 2000 for US$369 million, which at the time was good for PixStream founders. Unfortunately, the dot-com implosion forced Cisco to focus on its core business, so less than a year later it gave the Pixstream division the axe. That hasn't stopped Cisco from talking up the opportunities for video since then.
[Editor's note: An earlier version of this blog indicated that Celtic House was controlled by entrepreneur Terry Matthews. That was true up until 2002, when several partners bought him out.]
