Photo Credit: Shutterstock
Outbrain, the Israeli startup specializing in web and mobile content discovery and promotion, announced today (Wednesday) the closing of its Series E round valuing in at $35M. The round was led by HarbourVest Partners with participation from Vintage Partners and existing investors Carmel Ventures, Index Ventures, Gemini Israel Funds, GlenRock Israel, Rhodium, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. This latest investment comes after a report that Outbrain has already begun the process of filing for an IPO at a rumored valuation of $1B and an expected capital raising sitting between $200-250M.
Billions of discoveries
Outbrain functions as a 3-way marketplace for content consumers, content publishers and media buyers, with their two products – Outbrain Engage and Outbrain Amplify – facilitating relevant engagement and leveraging between all three parties. Publishers use Engage to keep their visitors, well, engaged on their site with continuous targeted followup content while buyers use Amplify to get in front of new and relevant audiences currently visiting other sites, for the chance to lead them back to their own content.
Outbrain has steadily grown as a company over the years now employing over 260 people and operating 13 satellite offices across the globe. The current funding round brings Outbrains total investment to date to $99M large with backers including Index Ventures, Carmel Ventures, Gemini Israel Funds, GlenRock Israel, Rhodium and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Along with their internal growth, Outbrain’s publishing distribution channels have matched pace coming to include top names in the content publishing industry such as CNN, Fox News, Hachette Filipacchi Media, Mashable, MSNBC and Slate. Equally impressive are their media buyers leveraging these prime distribution channels, which include tier-1 companies such as Starcom, Digitas, Mindshare, American Express, P&G, Colgate-Palmolive, General Mills and Exxon. With all things told Outbrain manages to rack up numbers of more than 3.5 billion content recommendation viewed each month, generating over 200 million monthly clicks. Not too shabby.
Well, are you or aren’t you
With its last funding Outbrain announced the addition of Dominique Vidal, partner at Index Ventures, to its Board of Directors (former CEO of Yahoo! Europe) and most recently the company added its very first CFO to their roster by recruiting Jeff Davison (former CFO of Right now, acquired by Oracle). These people bring a wealth of experience with managing a startup-turned-publicly-traded-hi-tech-giant type company, something that may come in handy for a company preparing itself for an IPO.
However, diluting current investor/owner shares by another $35M calls into question exactly how soon such an IPO will take place – if ever. In the mean time, mums the word on that topic with Outbrain spokesmen being about as vague in answering the IPO question as their promo video is in answering the question of ‘What is Outbrain?’
Video: What is Outbrain?
Photo Credit: Shutterstock/ brain with sunglasses