Clearleap, a video technology startup that remains  in semi-stealth mode, on Monday said it has closed a $9 million Series A round of funding. The investment was led by Trinity Ventures and Noro-Moseley Partners. Although Clearleap was incorporated last July, this is its first outside funding.

Clearleap co-founder and CEO Braxton Jarratt (left), who promises to identify customers and provide more details later in the year, tells Tech Confidential that the company is developing technology that enables cable and satellite TV networks to deliver Internet video to television sets. The technology handles video processing, including making online videos look good on TV, encoding and delivery to networks that provide broadcast and video-on-demand services.

How is Clearleap different from other video firms? Whereas Joost Operations SA and JumpTV Inc. deliver TV content to PCs and mobile devices, Clearleap is doing the reverse, bringing Web video to TVs. And while other companies aiming to give TV viewers access to online video--notably Apple [APPL] Inc.'s Apple TV--require a new set-top box, Clearleap will work with existing set-top boxes, Jarratt says.

Jarratt and Clearleap's four other co-founders are veteran video infrastructure developers. They worked together at N2Broadband, which built the video-on-demand system widely used today and which was sold to Tandberg Televsion (an Ericsson company) for $120 Million in 2005. Jarratt left Tandberg last June.

For investors, Clearleap, headquartered in Atlanta, chose local VC Noro-Moseley and Silicon Valley's Trinity Partners. Jarratt was particularly interested in Trinity because the VC firm boasts several successful exits with related companies, including Speedera Networks, a content delivery network sold to Akamai Technologies, and Modulus Video, sold to Motorola Inc. [MOT]. Clearleap is Trinity's first investment in Atlanta. - Mary Kathleen Flynn