Mercora Raises $5 Million Venture Round from Norwest Venture Partners.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Serial Entrepreneurs Partner with Leading Venture Capital Firm to Bring to Market the Next Generation of Legal Music Search and Discovery -- IM Radio

Mercora, the Internet's largest and fastest growing music search and discovery network, today announced that it has raised over $5 million in Series B funding from leading venture capital firm Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), representing the first influx of venture capital since the company's founding in May 2003. As part of the financing, NVP venture partner, Jim Lussier, and NVP managing partner, George Still, have been appointed to Mercora's board of directors.

Mercora IM Radio (IM -- Individual Modulation) has rapidly become the world's largest radio network that is powered by people from all over the world. The company has created a groundbreaking solution that enables users to search, find and legally listen to music from hundreds of genres and thousands of artists provided by individual webcasters on the Mercora IM Radio Network. Mercora has more than 300,000 registered users and a growing repertoire of over 15 million user-contributed tracks on the network, offering the single largest collection of music available on any radio network or legal music service. Mercora IM Radio delivers music programming in near CD-quality sound, providing a listening experience far superior to AM, FM and even satellite radio. Mercora plans to use this round of funding to expand its team and enhance its service offerings.

"The consumer appetite for digital music is exploding, and Mercora is playing a major role in accelerating this market," said Jim Lussier, venture partner, NVP. "By offering unrivaled music selection, engaging community features and superb quality sound, Mercora has created a unique and compelling user experience that hasn't been possible until now. Mercora also harnesses the enthusiasm surrounding peer-to-peer networks in a manner that abides by the letter and spirit of copyright law, ensuring that artists and labels are paid while giving music lovers complete confidence and control in the unlimited discovery and enjoyment of music."

The founders of Mercora have established their roots in Internet innovation and information security, having been instrumental in bringing to market successful companies such as McAfee.com and Netscape. Mercora's experienced executive and founding team includes Srivats Sampath, McAfee.com founder and former CEO; Atri Chatterjee, former McAfee.com vice president of marketing; Shahid Ali, former senior architect at McAfee.com; and Michael Stokes, developer and architect of Gnutella2 -- the next generation peer-to-peer file sharing protocol.

"We are very excited to partner with Norwest Venture Partners on this incredible opportunity. NVP brings a lot of the traits we were looking for in an investor -- high intellectual bandwidth, high integrity and a track record of success in helping build great companies," said Srivats Sampath, founder, president & CEO, Mercora. "We look forward to working with NVP in building the next generation of music search and discovery -- IM Radio."

About Norwest Venture Partners

For more than 40 years, Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) has actively partnered with entrepreneurs to build large businesses. NVP focuses on early stage investments in software and communications technologies. The firm currently manages more than $1.8 billion in venture capital out of its office in Palo Alto, California.

NVP has funded over 350 companies since inception including such market leaders as Actel Corporation, Brocade Communications, Cerent (acquired by Cisco Systems), Documentum, Extreme Networks, Forte Software (acquired by Sun Microsystems), PeopleSoft and Tivoli Systems (acquired by IBM). Recent NVP transactions include Resonext Communications (acquired by RF Micro Devices), Spinnaker Networks (acquired by Network Appliance) and Winphoria Networks (acquired by Motorola).

As a result of these and other investments, Managing Partner Promod Haque was recently named the #1 venture capitalist on the annual Forbes Midas List for 2004 based on performance over the past 10 years. Additional information on Norwest Venture Partners is available at www.nvp.com.

About Mercora, Inc.

Mercora's mission is to catalog and organize the world's music currently resident on people's computers and make it universally searchable and legally listenable. The Mercora IM Radio Network and Mercora IM Radio together constitute the Internet's largest legal and licensed distributed music search and discovery service. Mercora (www.mercora.com) is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA.