Few start-ups are talking about getting funding these days, much less going public. Web site analysis tool vendor Watchfire Corp. is a happy exception.

Having raised $25 million in venture capital financing in January, Watchfire is "pushing ahead full-steam" to become profitable by the end of the year and go public at about the same time, says Michael Weider, founder, president and CEO of the Kanata, Ontario-based company.

Why so optimistic? Because in a slowdown, the Global 2,000 companies that make up more than 80% of Watchfire's revenue are concerned with getting the most out of their existing Web sites, according to Weider.

"The last five years, the focus has been on building the infrastructure," he says. "Now the focus is on, how do we make it work?"

Working the Web

Watchfire offers two main products. Its Enterprise Solution lets administrators create "spiders" that constantly crawl through Web sites searching for more than 50 types of content problems, such as broken links between pages and forms that don't work.

The Enterprise Solution comprises the Linkbot Enterprise Server, which stores data about Web site performance and delivers it in customized reports; the Linkbot Developer Edition, which makes the scanned data available to developers who can troubleshoot and fix the problems; and the Macrobot, Watchbot and Linkbot tools, which scan Web sites looking for broken links.

Watchfire's Metadata Management System helps Web administrators analyze and manage metadata about their sites, making it easier to organize and search Web sites. It's currently running on Web sites with as many as 5 million pages and 5,000 servers, says Weider.

Several customers praise Watchfire's ease of use, flexibility and scalability. Yack.com Inc., an online guide to Web-based events such as chat sessions and celebrity appearances,

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