Celvibe Announces Additional Funding

Celvibe (www.celvibe.com) announced that it has received $2 million in investments from a leading Far Eastern-based organization - China Development Industrial Bank (CDIB) of Taiwan - and a strategic Asian investor. Celvibe is a relatively new Israeli company that is pitching itself to the market as a provider of transcoding servers that will allow television to reach wireless devices.

Celvibe's Celfeed technology transcodes MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 technologies into MPEG-4. Celvibe is concentrating on the backend deployment of servers throughout wireless networks, and is betting on cell phone manufacturers to choose standards and embed MPEG-4 players within devices.

Celvibe states that these investments - $1 million from each organization - are additional installments to the company's second round of $12 million that is being lead by the Challenge Fund. The $10.5 million that has been raised so far is made up of $8 million from the Challenge Fund, Poalim Capital Markets Technologies, Ophir Technologies and Eurofund Israel 2000, and a half-million dollars from tecc-IS, which is affiliated with investment houses in Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, Israel, South America and China.

"The new Asian-based investments represent the continuation of Celvibe's strategic focus of expanding into new markets including the Far East," said Oded Peretz, CEO and president, Celvibe. "We are focusing our efforts on expanding our reach into markets around the world and this support in the Far Eastern marketplace will give us significant reach into this important region."