WorkLight Inc., a so-called Enterprise 2.0 firm that brings the look and feel of popular online consumer interfaces to business users, is announcing Wednesday that it has secured a $12 million Series B, led by Israel's Pitango Venture Capital. Also participating are the original backers who invested $5.1 million in the startup's Series A in the spring of 2006, including Genesis Partners, Index Ventures and individual investor Shlomo Kramer, the CEO of security software maker Imperva and the co-founder of Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.

"The vision behind WorkLight is that the kind of computing experience we have at home has become much stronger and more compelling than the kind of IT we have at work," WorkLight co-founder and CEO Shahar Kaminitz tells Tech Confidential. "It's not just a matter of feeling good about the software you're using, but it also inflates to hard dollars. The ability to collaborate and share knowledge and information with our friends on Facebook were completely missing in the workplace." 

Today, WorkLight, which has offices in Israel and Boston, supports more than a dozen Web services and technologies. For example, WorkLight's software lets customers' employees use Facebook as a social network for collaboration at work.

"We're building a company's intranet based on popular consumer technologies, rather than building it from the ground up using proprietary products," says Kaminitz. "We're a bridge between a company's information systems and security infrastructure and popular consumer tools."

Kaminitz's background includes creating a business unit at Amdocs [DOX] in 1996 to replace client-server applications with Web-based technologies.

WorkLight "has made significant progress in a nascent Enterprise 2.0 market, having proven its ability to execute on the technology side and on the sales side," Rona Segev, general partner at Pitango Venture Capital, tells Tech Confidential. "We are bullish on the market and on WorkLight's potential for a huge success in owning this space."

Kaminitz plans to use the funding to penetrate into new markets, such as Europe and Asia Pacific, and into mid-size companies. -- Mary Kathleen Flynn