Funding News: AllCharge, knoa Software
By @NY Staff
Digital Payments Play AllCharge Gets $3.4 Million
AllCharge, which makes online payment technology for digital content sales, has closed a $3.4 million preferred funding investment.
The New York-based AllCharge plans to use the funds market its product, which enables merchants to sell digital content, such as music, information, or videos, by letting consumers choose how they want to pay. The product is built to handle billing for digital products: per click, per download, per time session or per bytes streamed, for example.
The company, founded in 2000, offers a back-end system that supports payment methods beyond a credit card, including smart cards and prepaid cards, ISP, telecom, and other monthly bills. In addition to Web sites, it also works with end-user devices beyond personal computers, such as PDAs, cell phones and interactive television, without requiring software downloads.
Taking a part in the stake were prior AllCharge investors. VAL Investment Group, an affiliate of Verticality Investment Group, LLC, led the round.
The company said it is focused on helping online content providers monetize their digital products by enabling merchants to price and sell any type of digital content, and consumers to purchase any amount of premium content, using their preferred payment channel.
In addition to its headquarters in New York, the company maintains research offices in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Training Software Maker knoa Gets $1 Million
Silicon Alley's knoa Corp., which makes software to help people wring more use out of sales force applications, has received $1 million from the New York State Small Business Technology Investment Fund (SBTIF).
The investment, provided through the Empire State Development Board, is the largest ever made by the fund, which was created by the state to help promote job creation in the tech sector.
The company has built a platform that provides information and guidance to companies that have adopted complex applications such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource management (ERM), sales force automation (SFA), and supply chain management (SCM).
The knoa software aims to help users get more out of the product by providing on-the-job training in order to help the enterprise reduce its support costs while boosting the use of the sales and service products.
The origins of knoa Corp trace to 1987 when it was then-known as Music-Pen Inc., then M-Pen. Since then, it has focused on interactive training systems.
