Taboola Israeli startup

Taboola Raised $9 million in Series B for Video Recommendations

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 Israeli startupBloomberg, 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.

Taboola in player video recommendations
The widget is embedded in the player and activates wherever your player operates – on your home page, on your videos page, on Facebook, Twitter or a blog.
Taboola in page video recommendations bloomberg example
Taboola analyzes what type of videos and content engage users on home pages, category pages and article pages and then generates user-specific recommendation lists in real time – based on semantics, user behavior and publisher goals.

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:

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Co Founder and Managing Partner at Remagine Ventures
Eze Vidra is the founder of VC Cafe and the co-founder and managing partner of Remagine Ventures, a pre-seed fund investing in ambitious founders at the intersection of AI, technology, entertainment, gaming, and commerce with a spotlight on Israel.

He is a former General Partner at Google Ventures (GV) in Europe, former head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe, and founding head of Campus London, Google's first startup hub. Eze writes on Israeli tech, venture capital, artificial intelligence, and founder strategy.

He is also the founder of Techbikers, a nonprofit that brings together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read.
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