Bloomberg, New York Times, CNN, USA Today… these are just a subset of Taboola’s customers. Israeli startup Taboola has announced a $9 million series B round led by Crescent Point Group, with participation by Evergreen Venture Partners. Taboola raised approximately $15 million to date, since its inception in 2007. Previous seed investors include Argonaut, Zohar Gilon and Avigdor Vilnetz.
The proceeds of this round will be dedicated to scale the business – both in data centers and engineering and marketing, according Adam Singolda, founder and CEO of Taboola in a recent interview:
“The funding will mostly be targeted at supporting the company’s growth, from hiring even more engineers and mathematicians in Tel-Aviv, Israel, as well as growing our marketing, sales, and client services teams in New York. In addition, we plan on opening more data centers in the U.S.,”
Taboola is a video recommendation service, which provides related video content on publisher websites. Taboola’s business grew significantly when it started showing related video content on any content page, reaching 250 million recommendations a day.
EngageRank, a proprietary technology developed by Taboola, analyzes each video and makes personalized recommendations to the users which lead to a higher click through rate. Recommendations can be done in-page or in-player, as the images below illustrate. The solution is player agnostic, and publishers can insert the videos through the inclusion of tags.
Integrated with Brightcove, Kaltura and other video platforms, Taboola gets paid a revenue share from the amount of uplift they are able to generate through their recommendations service. Taboola has made a few key hires this year (including a chief revenue officer and a VP of R&D), and is planning to introduce its video recommendation services to mobile platforms, including iOS later this year. The company has 26 employees, in offices in New York and Israel.
Watch this video to understand Taboola’s value to publishers:
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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