$5 million invested in Cerylion for personal wireless

WOBURN, Mass. -- Cerylion, Inc. has secured $5 million in series B convertible preferred funding with an investment was led by Boston-based Chestnut Partners, Inc., a private merchant bank serving corporate clients throughout the United States with investment banking services. Cerylion will use the funding to continue development of its wireless offering and to expand the company's sales efforts.

"We see Cerylion correcting certain fundamental flaws in the way the mobile Internet works," said Chestnut Partners Founder Albert A. Holman, III. "The company's technology solves a number of problems when it comes to prioritizing content and data. In these financial times, we're extremely diligent in researching companies and technologies before making investment decisions."

Cerylion is scheduled to launch its suite of personalized mobile network applications in this month, providing technology, infrastructure and services to network service providers (NSPs), who can in turn offer subscribers personal, customized network services, enabling contextual links and associations from diverse information resources across desktops and mobile devices. Using Cerylion technology, NSPs will realize increased data usage and reduce customer churn from mobile Internet users, thereby gaining greater return on investment from their already significant infrastructure expenditures.

Content and actions

"Wireless subscribers want to access content and actions based on their own context," said Cerylion CEO Ilan Rozenblat. "There's a huge market demand for technologies that can perform in this manner. Chestnut Partners has recognized that Cerylion will be a key player when it comes to solving the problems people experience trying to organize information across their desktops and wireless devices."

Cerylion's personalized mobile network applications use link management technology that is based on an associative database. The company describes this technology as enabling both desktop and wireless data users to logically, quickly and easily access content and services from a variety of sources in any context. 

Cerylion's technology allows for the creation of "threads" of associated information, and enables users to organize content and actions based on lifestyle, personal preferences, work criteria and social needs. The user creates personalized activity books "chained" together by specific content and actions. For example, an end-user booking an airline flight to New York City could trigger a series of actions: hotel and car reservations, emails notifying specific individuals of flight changes and meeting times.

Personalized information

"The ability to extract relevant, personalized information from the Internet is becoming more and more important to today's fast-moving end-user," said META Group Vice President Carl Lehmann. "Wireless service providers must meet the demand for higher levels of personalization, functionality and more efficient delivery of information to the growing base of mobile end-users."

Founded in 1995, Chestnut Partners specializes in providing financial advice relating to start-up consulting, private debt and equity capital formation, mergers and acquisitions, initial public offering advisory services, financial consulting and merchant banking activities. Since December 1995, the firm has acted as financial advisor for its clients in raising more than $300 million. 

Founded in 1999, Cerylion is headquartered in Woburn, Massachusetts, and operates an advanced research and development center in Jerusalem, Israel.