CCBN.com Announces $24.8 Million in Equity Funding in Tight Venture Capital Market.

Business/Technology Editors

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 20, 2000

Goldman Sachs, HarbourVest Partners and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter 

Invest in Leading Online Investor Relations Company

CCBN.com (www.CCBN.com), the leading provider of Internet-based corporate-investor communications, announced today that it has raised $24.8 million in equity financing. This latest round of funding was led by Goldman, Sachs & Co. (NYSE: GS), HarbourVest Partners, LLC and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter (NYSE: MWD) with America Online (NYSE: AOL) and Trident Capital continuing to support CCBN with additional investments.

Despite the tight nature of today's public and private capital markets, this round of financing represents a substantial increase in valuation over CCBN's most recent round of funding that closed in December 1999. "The tremendous interest in this round of equity financing is a loud endorsement of our business and will allow CCBN to further accelerate investments in our technology infrastructure to provide leading edge products and world-class service to our clients," said Jeff Parker, chairman and CEO of CCBN.com. "Specifically, this new infusion of capital will be used to augment major investments in new products, technology infrastructure, research and development and to continue to recruit and retain extraordinary employees."

"CCBN is uniquely positioned to serve three distinct, yet inter-related audiences: public companies, institutional investors, and leading retail investment portals," said Philip A. Cooper, managing director of Goldman, Sachs & Co.'s Private Equity Group. "CCBN's business model allows them to fill a specific need of each audience and to secure solid revenue streams from each."

"In this environment, we are particularly enthusiastic about backing a company such as CCBN that has a scalable business model with solid revenue growth, established market shares in each of its core business segments and a seasoned management team with solid experience in building successful enterprises," said Michael W. Taylor, vice president, HarbourVest Partners, LLC.

In the institutional arena, CCBN's StreetEvents service is rapidly becoming the industry standard in online investment-related event information. This password-protected site, (www.streetevents.com), is the leading repository of investment-related event information in the institutional investment community. StreetEvents is provided on a monthly subscription basis to thousands of analysts and portfolio managers as well as on a firm-wide data-feed basis to several of the leading buy- and sell-side institutions.

In the corporate Investor Relations (IR) space, CCBN holds a dominant market position in each of its three core service areas. First, CCBN has leveraged its first-mover advantage to garner a leading share of outsourced IR Web sites, building, managing and hosting the IR sites of more than 1,500 public companies including companies such as Sears, (NYSE: S), Akamai Technologies, (Nasdaq: AKAM) and more than 25% of the S&P 500.

The second core service area in the corporate IR space in which CCBN holds a leadership position is in the rapidly growing webcast arena. CCBN is the leading provider of earnings-related conference call webcasts facilitating more than 3,000 events so far this year alone.

Finally, CCBN is uniquely positioned to distribute a company's financial event information, multi-media presentations and webcasts onto a vast and powerful distribution network of institutional and retail investors. CCBN enables companies to publish their information simultaneously onto their IR Web site, onto the desktops of portfolio managers and analysts at more than 350 leading Wall Street institutions through StreetEvents and onto CCBN's powerful network of retail investment portals such as America Online, Telescan, The Motley Fool, Raging Bull, S&P Personal Wealth and many others.

About CCBN.com

Founded in 1997 by Jeffrey P. Parker, creator of First Call, CCBN.com is the global leader in enabling direct communications between public companies and the investment community over the Internet. CCBN builds, manages and hosts the investor relations sections of Web sites for more than 1,500 public companies, providing detailed shareholder information through interactive, multi-media solutions. Through its StreetEvents institutional event management database (www.streetevents.com) and partnerships with leading retail financial portals, CCBN has created a revolutionary investor distribution network that delivers an unprecedented body of direct corporate information to one of the largest collective audiences of institutional and individual investors in cyberspace.

Headquartered in Boston, MA, CCBN has offices in San Francisco, Atlanta and London.