NewsGator Technologies, a developer of RSS software for consumers and corporate users, has snared a $12 million funding round led by new investor Vista Ventures, the company said Thursday.

Also taking part in the funding round were prior investors Mobius Venture Capital and Masthead Venture Partners.

The company, which released a news aggregator for Microsoft Outlook in 2003 and initially was known for its consumer applications, began moving its business toward the enterprise market in 2005.

"We started out and are best known for our consumer applications," said J.B. Holston, president and chief executive. "But we've migrated the business almost exclusively to focus on businesses. We have 12 of the Fortune 100 as customers for our server software."

The Denver-based company plans to use the funding to bulk up its sales and marketing in Europe, Japan, and Southeast Asia.

Brad Feld, managing director at Mobius and a NewsGator board member, said businesses have begun to recognize the power of RSS, an acronym for really simple syndication.

"Adoption of RSS is happening very rapidly n the enterprise," he said. "We saw a lot of activity in 2007, and what we've seen for 2008 is large companies writing large line items into their budgets. The catch phrase is Enterprise 2.0."

NewsGator competes in the consumer market against Google, which bought RSS syndicator Mobius-backed Feedburner for a reported $100 million in May.

All told, NewsGator has landed $30 million in venture funding including the latest round.

Mr. Holston, a former president of Ziff Davis International, said the latest round, the company's third, is expected to push NewsGator's finances to breakeven.

NewsGator has about 50 corporate clients such as banks and pharmaceutical companies that license its software to deliver tailored news to its employees. The company also provides software-as-a-service to media companies such as USAToday and CBS News. Those customers of NewsGator's online products harvest metadata to deliver advertisements targeted to their audience.

"The interest in metadata is about relevance," Mr. Holston said. "If you're an advertiser or a media company, it matters because if you can map that ad, the chances that they're going to buy something from that ad is higher."

A growing part of the business is the creation of RSS widgets that bring media brands to social-networking sites.

"It's still pretty early," Mr. Holston said. "Companies are still trying to figure out: 'What does it mean to have my brand on Facebook?'"   

Mr. Feld likened the development of RSS to the e-mail market in which players such as cc:Mail were acquired by such large companies as Lotus Development, which in turn was acquired by IBM.