A brand new peer-to-peer company called Oversi announced that it received funding from Cisco, totaling $8 million. Other investors include Carmel Ventures, StageOne Ventures and TempoPark Fund.

Now here’s the interesting thing: It’s impossible to know what Oversi is really doing. The press release talked about peer to peer streaming and caching. Their website was equally vague. The title bar on their website says “P2P Caching for ISPs”.

The ‘About Us” page says this:

Oversi offers innovative solutions for P2P networks in today’s fast-growing Internet TV and video age. Oversi’s solutions enable ISPs to optimize their network performance, ease P2P traffic pressure and save on bandwidth. The same Oversi platform also helps ISPs to increase revenues and enhance user stickiness through new value-added-services, such as premium content delivery and online storage.

The press release says that using Oversi’s P2P solutions, “service providers can deliver up to 20 times more bandwidth using their existing infrastructures, instead of investing billions of dollars in expensive upgrades.”

Lots of PR gobbledy-gook. For a better explanation, here’s what Light Reading had to say:

Here’s how it works: Oversi’s servers, or peers, form a grid in the operator’s network, catching and caching any video content that is transported in a P2P format (like BitTorrent). Every time a user downloads a P2P file, pieces of that file are stored at Oversi’s servers. When another user on the network requests the same file, it’s accessed from Oversi “peers” close by rather than from the far-away server where the file originated, which would eat more bandwidth and take longer.

Seems like Oversi is good at attracting investors, however. In December, the company had its second round funding for $6 million. That’s $14 million in just about 7 months.

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