Best of luck to Outbrain, says the company’s founder and CEO Adam Singolda, but we have no immediate plans for an IPO.

Photo Credit: Taboola 

In late December, Geektime reported that content recommendation engine Taboola was in the final stages of a $100 million funding round, ahead of a likely IPO this year.

Today Taboola made it official, announcing it raised a $117 million funding round led by Fidelity Management and Research Company, the investment adviser to Fidelity’s family of mutual funds. The new Series E funding brings Taboola’s total capital raised to $157 million. The company earned $200 million in 2014 and its valuation has been estimated at $1 billion.

Speaking with Geektime by phone from New York, the company’s Israeli founder and CEO Adam Singolda denied any immediate plans for an IPO.

“We’ve decided at this stage not to go public because we think it’s not the right thing for us at this stage, but that doesn’t mean we’re ruling it out in the future when the conditions are ripe.”

If Taboola is not planning an IPO, why would they raise so much money?

“Our company is highly tech-based and the latest funding round is intended to help us improve our technology,” said Singolda, “whether by expanding our R&D or by acquiring companies and technologies that complement ours and can give us added value. In addition, we plan to use the money to expand globally and enter new markets.”

What does Taboola do?

Taboola is a content recommendation platform that pairs advertisers with publishers, for instance the Atlantic Monthly. Say a reader clicks on an Atlantic Monthly article entitled “The Death of the Artist—And the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur,” and at the bottom of the page gets recommendations like “12 Simple Ways to Be More Attractive,” or “10 Millionaires That Went Totally Broke.” These articles are from advertisers and more specifically, are embedded in a Taboola widget that personalizes advertising content according to the article.

When a reader clicks on a link within the widget, Taboola earns money from the advertiser, which it splits with the Atlantic Monthly. If, in turn, the Atlantic wishes to promote its content on other publishers’ sites, it can pay Taboola and its own articles will be recommended elsewhere on the web.

Taboola delivers more than 200 billion content recommendations to over 550 million users every month. Its publisher sites include the Atlantic Monthly, BBC, USA Today, Business Insider, the Chicago Tribune, FOX Sports, and the Weather Channel.

Taboola Founder and CEO Adam Singolda. Photo Credit: PR

Founded in 2007 by CEO Adam Singolda in Israel, the company started out as an engine for personalized video recommendations and later moved into editorial and sponsored content recommendations. A significant portion of Taboola’s current revenue comes from mobile devices.

Good luck, Outbrain

Taboola’s closest competitor is another Israeli startup, Outbrain, which has raised $99 million in six rounds and is rumored to have filed for an IPO this past November.

“If Outbrain is really about to go public, I wish them the best,” Singolda told Geektime, “and I think it merely proves that the market is hot.”

Singolda said that Taboola was looking to acquire companies or technologies that could increase user engagement or monetization of content. He also said he was looking for solutions that would help brands better target their potential customers.

The company is certainly doing something right. Digital analytics firm comScore recently said that Taboola was reaching 86 percent of American desktop users, higher than Facebook, YouTube and Outbrain, according to comScore.

The company has offices in New York, London, Pasadena, Bangkok and Tel Aviv. When asked whether the company would stay tied to its roots in Israel, Singolda replied, “Half of our employees are based in Tel Aviv and we’re very proud of this fact. Our product’s ability to predict what people want to read and the ability to help content sites profit from their content came from [our R&D center] in Israel.”

“One of the three reasons we raised so much funding was to invest in our technology and from my point of view, that means investing in our R&D center in Israel, which can be expected to expand considerably in the near future.”

Also participating in the funding 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.