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NBT Technology

Talk about gluttons for punishment. Seven years and one Internet bubble later, two former top executives of Inktomi Corp. (Nasdaq: INKT) are back -- only this time, their eyes are trained on the storage market.

Back in the halcyon days of 1996, Jerry M. Kennelly and Dr. Steve McCanne spotted the need for Web caching to accelerate performance of the Internet, so they made this Inktomi's objective. Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) bought Inktomi just last month, in a deal worth $235 million (see Yahoo to Buy Inktomi).

Now they want to do the same for file acceleration in the corporate world. Kennelly and McCanne's new company, NBT Technology Inc., has closed $6.6 million in a first round of funding, five months after it was founded. The San Francisco-based company currently has 12 employees (see NBT Technology Raises $6.6M).

Accel Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners invested in the startup, with Jim Swartz of Accel and Christopher Schaepe of Lightspeed taking seats on the company's board. [Disclosure: Lightspeed Venture Partners is an investor in Light Reading Inc., publisher of Byte and Switch.]

So who are Kennelly and McCanne, and what are they up to?

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