"Globes" learns that start-up company MultiMate is raising $5 million in two stages. At the seed stage, in which venture capital funds Technorov and Cedar participated, it raised $1 million. In the further capital raising stage, which will be regarded as its first round, the two Israeli venture capital funds will participate to the tune of $0.5 million, with the balance being raised from US funds and strategic bodies.

It is assessed that the company’s value for the purpose of the first round of capital-raising is estimated at more than $20 million before money. The exercises were led by the Dekalo-Ben Yehuda investment bank.

MultiMate has developed and markets a software program enabling surfers in a particular site to hold a chat session between them. The software can be downloaded free of charge, from the company’s Internet site.

The application parallels that of Hypernix. Another Israeli company developing a parallel application is NovaWise.

MultiMate was founded in January 1999. Hypernix, too, was founded at that time, neither company being aware of the other’s existence. MultiMate was founded by Yoav Ilan, former sales manager at integration company Tactline, and Oren Gampel. Ilan serves as company president and Gampel is the general manager for development. Eli Efrat, a founder of start-up company Veon, is the company’s general manager.

MultiMate put its software on the market four days ago. The company reports 10,000 downloads to date.

The company has a staff of twelve. The Israeli branch, located in Ramat Hasharon, is in charge of development, and is registered as a subsidiary of the company’s US representative office, presently being set up in Silicon Valley.

The companies operating MultiMate's chat service include the site of the Rolling Stone magazine, the tunes.com music site, and The Source.com - a US black community site.

According to Efrat, the volume of the MultiMate software is smaller than that of the competition, and can be downloaded more quickly. The software also supports surfing on a number of browsers simultaneously, and surfers are not required to give details of their identity.