The round for the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based startup was led by Menlo Park, Calif., venture capital firm Benchmark Capital, with general partner Michael Eisenberg joining the board of directors.

While toolbar companies have proliferated around the Web, Conduit's CEO Ronen Shilo pointed out an important factor that makes his startup unique from the others. Instead of making toolbars for themselves, they make toolbars for others.

"Conduit is not a toolbar company," Shilo said, "because we don't provide a toolbar of our own; we provide publishers with a new way to create their own community toolbar using a hosted solution."

Aimed at small and medium organizations, Conduit's toolbars are used by Deutsche Lufthansa AG, Major League Baseball, Greenpeace, TechCrunch and Softonic International SL.

"Our publishers can access the Web site and create a software product without dealing with software, which is unique," Shilo said.

"We don't have to convince people to download the toolbar, because the toolbar [the brands] create is already strongly associated with their offerings," Shilo continued. "Greenpeace is using it as an alert system; Lufthansa incorporated their entire booking system into the toolbar."

The company's business model consists primarily of giving content producers an easy way to make toolbars -- for free. Web publishers who become part of the Conduit network can then syndicate their content to all existing subscribers by allowing them to add it directly to a browser using an RSS feed. Conduit itself makes money through ad-revenue sharing with Google Inc., which is the search engine embedded in the toolbars. Thus far the model has worked well, bringing the company to cash-flow-positive in less than two years. Although Shilo declined to comment on the companies top lines, published reports in mid-2007 put the company's revenue at an estimated $10 million annually.

"Once we signed with Google a year ago, we became a profitable company, and we're growing fast. Since we signed the term sheet with Benchmark, we've almost doubled our [user] numbers, which leads me to think maybe it wasn't such a deal," Shilo said jokingly.

Over the last six quarters the company has doubled the number of users, searches and number of publishers every quarter.

Shilo said that since Conduit is cash-flow-positive, the decision to go with Benchmark wasn't for the money. Instead "we felt that we needed to partner with a very strong entity to maximize our opportunity."

"We had offers from all the Tier-1 VCs, but I was in touch with Benchmark only a short time after I started the company," Shilo continued. "I knew Michael Eisenberg, and he tried to get into the company a bit more than two years ago. Since then we kept in touch. A lot of it had to do with chemistry; Michael and I see the same things in the same way, and also the terms were quite good."

Conduit received a much higher valuation for its Series B, and the founders still hold a majority stake in the company. Founded in 2005 with seed money from Shilo and Conduit's CTO Dror Erez, the company later raised $1.5 million in first round funding from Israeli venture firm Yozma Group.

Now that it has laid a solid foundation, Shilo plans to expand the 35-employee startup even faster.

"As a company that has been totally engineering based, I believe it will allow us to expand our marketing department, business development and come up with more solutions," he said, "plus there's the safety of money in the bank."