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Wednesday July 26, 12:00 PM Limelight takes $130 mln from Goldman; eyes Akamai SAN FRANCISCO, July 25 (Reuters) - Limelight Networks Inc., an up-and-coming rival to market leader Akamai Technologies , said on Tuesday it had completed a $130 million equity financing round from Goldman Sachs Capital Partners. Akamai and Limelight are the leading players in the content delivery market -- specialized networks that media distributors count on to help them speed the delivery of digital files, music and movies to business and consumers over the Internet. The private equity deal, the first major external financing deal for Limelight, builds on what the founders invested when it was created five years ago, Michael Gordon, chief strategy officer and one of four co-founders, said in an interview. Since it started, Limelight has bet that increasingly powerful broadband networks will in turn fuel demand for faster Internet programming distribution networks, its specialty. "The vision has gotten crisper, better and sharper, but it has essentially been the same," Gordon said. Last year, Tempe, Arizona-based Limelight took $15 million in venture debt funding in a round led by Silicon Valley Bank. As part of the latest deal, representatives of Goldman Sachs , including Goldman vice president Pete Perrone, have joined Limelight's board of directors, the company said. Gordon said Limelight plans to use the financing to help double the number of locations where it concentrates computer farms that ensure data-intensive Web video and other programs are close to customers and free from network bottlenecks. Several centers have 1,000 machines or more. Limelight is expanding in Asia and Europe as well as the United States. The announcement of the Goldman-led deal appears timed to coincide with Akamai's second quarter financial report, due out on Wednesday. Analysts surveyed by Reuters Estimates predict Akamai will show a 47 percent jump in revenue to $95 million. Limelight last week reported quarterly revenue had grown more than 200 percent to $14 million. The privately held company said it has been profitable for 11 quarters running. Akamai has what technology researcher IDC estimates is better than a 50 percent share of the content delivery market. Its 2,000 customers includes Apple Computer's iTunes. Limelight ranks as a distant second with an estimated 7 percent of the market. But its focus on the explosively growing media market has won it hot-shot clients such as MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and Microsoft's XBox Live unit. IDC analyst Rona Shuchat said Limelight has pulled away from a variety of competitors to emerge as the prime challenger to Akamai, especially in the media distribution market. Limelight's strategy is to offer far more concentrated capacity than Akamai typically does and focus on serving up more of the digital entertainment and other media content that broadband customers are craving. "It's revenue appears to be accelerating faster than other rivals of Akamai," she said. Reflecting the growing rivalry, Akamai filed a patent infringement suit on June 23 against Limelight in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. The lawsuit parallels patent infringement cases filed by Akamai in 2000 against Digital Island Inc., now part of Cable & Wireless , and Speedera Inc., in 2002, which Akamai ultimately agreed to acquire last year, ending that dispute. "The lawsuit is without merit," a Limelight spokeswoman said. "Limelight does not infringe Akamai's patents."