Taboola, the company behind a popular discovery platform for Web content and online videos, has locked up a $117 million “E” financing round led by Fidelity management and Research, with help from existing investors Marker LLC and Steadfast Capital, and a batch of new investors that includes Advanced Publications, Comcast Ventures, Yahoo! Japan and Groupe Arnault, among others.
Taboola said the new round extends its total capital raised to $157 million, noting that it’s been growing revenue, mobile usage and profitability since its inception in 2007, when it first focused on personalized video recommendation technologies.
Taboola, which acquired programmatic ad tech firm PerfectMarket last summer, has since shifted into editorial and sponsored content recommendations. The company said a “significant portion” of revenues now comes from mobile devices.
Taboola, which claims to serve more than 200 billion content recommendations to north of 550 million users across sites run by USA Today, Business Insider, Fox Sports and The Weather Channel, intends to use the new round to continue growth and expand into more international markets.
"We started Taboola with a mission to build a search engine in reverse -- instead of people looking for information, information now looks for us,” Adam Singolda, Taboola’s CEO, said in a statement. “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."
