Taboola Completes $117 Million Financing Round to Drive Global Expansion and Next Generation Personalization For Users, Publishers and Marketers
Fidelity Management and Research Co. leads the round joined by Advance Publications (parent of Condé Nast and Advance Digital), Comcast Ventures, Mr. Carlo De Benedetti (Chairman of the Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso), Groupe Arnault (the controlling shareholder of LVMH), Yahoo! JAPAN, and additional strategic investors
NEW YORK, February 4, 2015 – Taboola, the leading content discovery platform, today announced that it has completed a $117 million financing round led by Fidelity Management and Research Company, the investment adviser to Fidelity’s family of mutual funds. Also participating in the round are existing investors Marker LLC and Steadfast Capital, as well as new strategic investors including Advance Publications (parent of Condé Nast and Advance Digital), Comcast Ventures, Mr. Carlo De Benedetti (chairman of the Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso), Groupe Arnault (the controlling shareholder of LVMH), Yahoo! JAPAN, and others. The new Series E funding brings Taboola’s total capital raised to $157 million.
Taboola has been experiencing massive growth in revenue, mobile usage, and profitability since its inception in 2007, focusing first on cracking the code of personalized video recommendations and later moving into editorial and sponsored content recommendations. A significant portion of Taboola’s current revenue comes from mobile devices.
A key driver of Taboola’s rapid growth has been their focus on providing value to consumers as well as measurable ROI for both publishers and marketers. Taboola has also been expanding globally, achieving success overseas with offices now located in New York, London, Pasadena, Bangkok, and Tel Aviv. Last summer, Taboola launched a strategic partnership with Yahoo Japan (now an investor), and soon after acquired programmatic advertising technology company Perfect Market.
More recently, Taboola hit a landmark achievement when comScore, a global leader in digital measurement and analytics, published reports showing the company ahead of Facebook, Yahoo, and AOL with Taboola now reaching 86 percent of American desktop users.
The financing will be used by Taboola to continue its growth in the discovery market, focusing on technological innovations, expanding globally, and full-page personalization.
“It’s extremely humbling to have such prestigious investors, both existing and new, join the Taboola family because they believe in our team and vision,” said Adam Singolda, founder and CEO of Taboola. “We started Taboola with a mission to build a search engine in reverse — instead of people looking for information, information now looks for us. As a company, we focus on culture, technology and tangible assets that our partners appreciate and can measure. This round will help us fuel growth, and launch next generation personalization technology to further connect consumers with information they may like and never knew existed.”
Taboola serves more than 200 billion content recommendations to over 550 million users every month across some of the Web’s most innovative publisher sites including USA Today, Business Insider, Chicago Tribune, FOX Sports, and The Weather Channel.
Credit Suisse acted as the exclusive private placement agent to Taboola.
About Taboola
Taboola is the leading discovery platform, serving over 200 billion recommendations to over 550 million unique visitors every month on some of the Web’s most innovative publisher sites, including USA TODAY, NBC News, Business Insider, Chicago Tribune, FOX Sports, and The Weather Channel. Headquartered in New York City, Taboola also has offices in Tel Aviv, Pasadena, London, and Bangkok. Publishers, marketers, and agencies leverage Taboola to retain users on their sites, monetize their traffic, and distribute their content to drive high-quality audiences. Learn more at www.taboola.com and follow @taboola on Twitter.
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