Taboola, Rising Star In Video Recommendation, Completes $10M C-Round Funding Led by Marker LLC/Lantern

NEW YORK, June 26, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Taboola.com Inc., the world's leading video recommendation provider, announced today that it has completed a $10 million Series C Round of funding led by New York-based Marker LLC. Also participating in the funding were return Taboola investors, including Evergreen Venture Partners and WGI Group, an early stage venture capital firm funded by Michael Walrath, the founder and CEO of Right Media, acquired by Yahoo! in 2007.

According to Adam Singolda, founder and CEO of Taboola, proceeds from the round will be used to implement the company's international growth strategy and invest in its product range for Taboola's top tier digital publisher partners. 

Taboola's groundbreaking recommendation platform, Taboola EngageRank™, creates 500 million recommendations daily served to more than 130 million users per month. EngageRank is used by many of the most innovative online publishers, including the primary online editions of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNN, The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard.com, Bonnier, Bloomberg, BusinessWeek, Boston.com, Fox Television, Hearst, Gannet, USA Today and others.

Marker LLC was founded by Rick Scanlon and Thomas Pompidou. Marker's investment in Taboola was made via the Lantern Portfolio, an early stage investment vehicle focused on disruptive companies with high growth potential. Lantern is jointly managed by Marker, Ohad Finkelstein and Yuval Shahar.

"We believe that Taboola's ability to empower people around the world to instantly discover and engage with the video content they want to see, regardless of hardware or software platform, is extremely exciting," said Mr. Finkelstein. "Taboola's extraordinary growth and the use of Taboola EngageRank by many of the top publishers in the world is a direct validation of technology and its position as a leader in the video discovery and recommendation space."

Mr. Finkelstein, who will be joining Taboola's Board of Directors, was previously a partner at Venrock and brings with him many years of experience in digital media.  He was on the board of China-based Tudou, a leading video portal. Prior to that, he held senior positions at Interoute Telecom Group (including CEO and Chairman) and VocalTec as Senior Vice President.

"2011 and 2012 to-date have been remarkable for the whole Taboola team, and I'm excited to be working with Mr. Finkelstein and our funding partners," said Mr. Singolda. "Our world-class engineers have created a technology platform that is years ahead of the market, and we're continually reaching new milestones – such as launching our Mobile API for Xbox, iOS and Android and adding advanced analytics and controls for our publishers.

"We've also achieved our initial goal of international expansion into essential markets including Germany, England, Israel, Brazil, Mexico, France and Poland."

About Taboola
Headquartered in New York City with R&D in Israel, Taboola is widely recognized as the fastest growing video discovery and distribution platform on the Web. Taboola solutions are being used to generate video recommendations across a network of top-tier publishers in the U.S. and around the world.

Read more about Taboola on: http://www.taboola.com

See Taboola's blog at: http://www.taboola.com/blog/

Follow Taboola on Twitter on: @taboola

To join the Taboola publishers network, click here or email: info@Taboola.com

To participate in Taboola's Sourced Content Network, click here or email: info@taboola.com

Contact: Adam Singolda, +1-646-924-1676,  adam.s@taboola.com