Taboola and Outbrains, two companies into Adtech have decided to merge into a single unit. Both companies founded out of Israel and headquartered in New York will be combined into Taboola, with Taboola’s founder Adam Singolda presiding over the CEO duties.
Taboola will pay $250 million to Outbrain, which will receive 30% of the merged content recommendation company. The merger is creating a company that will be valued at $2 billion, bringing the transaction value of the deal to $850 million.
There were reports in 2017 that Taboola and Outbrain were in talks about a merger but the two companies were unable to overcome differences. Taboola was founded in 2006 by Singolda and has raised $180 million since then. Its major investors include Catalyst Fund, Fidelity, Pitango, Marker and Eyal Gura.
“Definitely the pressure of Google and Facebook, and the opportunity to give them a proper fight by increasing our reach was important to us,” Singolda said.
Between Taboola and Outbrain, the companies now contains ties to a list of the biggest online media units which includes with CNBC, NBC News, USA TODAY, BILD, Huffington Post, Microsoft, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Business Insider, The Independent, CNN, BBC and Sky News.
Outbrain was also founded in 2006 by Yaron Galai and Ori Lahav and has raised $150 million to date. Outbrain. According to the company it reached 1.2 billion users each month.
Taboola provides advertisements such as the “Around the Web” and “Recommended For You” boxes at the bottom of many online news articles. The company was founded in 2007. By 2015, it had raised more than $157 million in funding.
India sent most content removal requests to tech giants: Study
