This is a company that I’ve been tracking for some time since I first saw it on the Web. A Pittsburgh-based stealth startup, Rinera Networks has raised $9 million funding in a round A financing from existing angel investors that are New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Foundation Capital, according to this press release. The funds secured was known to be used in developing the unique technology that will help people to distribute the videos over the Internet in a less burden manner. What sets Rinera Networks apart is its company co-founders. The President Dr. Hui Zhang is a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Dr. Ion Stoica assumed a position as Associate Professor at University of California at Berkeley. Both aimed to develop a technology that would help people download videos through peer-to-peer (P2P) in a legal way. Moreover, the software that they’re developing will also help in identify P2P data, let Internet service providers (ISPs) decide how much of the data they are willing to carry, at what volume and price, and then deliver it as reliably as server-based content distribution systems, with the tracking feature that capable for use in accounting purposes, as reported by this article.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this news is the sort of technology that Rinera Networks was developing at this moment. What is peer-to-peer content distribution as perceived by Rinera Networks. We can get a glimpse of it through this article found at the link of Dr. Hui Zhang’s faculty page. If you like to read technology working paper, you can click here for the paper entitled, “Efficient Content Location Using Interest-Based Locality in Peer-to-Peer Systems. (PDF)”