DoubleVerify Inc. has decided to close its Israeli R&D center. The verification monitoring, blocking and compliance solutions start-up, founded by CEO Oren Netzer and CTO Alex Liverant four years ago has 50 employees at its offices in Tel Aviv's Ramat Hahayal, its fourth premises in as many years.
35 of DoubleVerify's employees in Israel will move to its branch in New York as part of the company's relocation, and the other 15 employees will be fired. It is not yet known whether the layoff procedures will begin this week or when the closing of the Israeli R&D center is finalized in a few weeks. SVP engineering Gil Wasserman, who handles the company's Israeli operations, will leave the company.
DoubleVerify says that it is closing its Israeli operations in order to consolidate its various teams in a single location. The company's sales staff are based in New York, near the advertising industry, and the company wants its R&D staff to join them. The company also has offices on the US West Coast and in London.
DoubleVerify has developed online ad verification technology. The idea is to verify whether online ads are positioned correctly on a webpage, and if they fit the context of the site. Ads often appear at irrelevant locations, for example ads for deli meats on vegetarian websites, or ads by retail chains targeting consumers in countries where they do not operate. Another example, which Liverant pointed to when the company was getting started, is that 40-50% of online ads appear at the bottom of sites' homepages, even though the advertisers paid for banner ads.
The establishment of DoubleVerify created a new sector in the ad industry - ad verification - which now has a turnover of tens of millions of dollars a year. DoubleVerify controls 75-80% of this market.
In August 2011, DoubleVerify raised $33 million at an estimated company value of $200 million. It has raised $46 million to date from JMI Equity, Blumberg Capital, Institutional Venture Partners, and the investment arm of Comcast Corporation (Nasdaq: CMCSA), Genacast Ventures, and First Round Partners.
DoubleVerify's has tens of millions of dollars in sales to 300 customers, including The Coca-Cola Company (NYSE: KO), CBS, AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T), and its workforce rose from 5 employees in 2008 to 170 employees worldwide in 2011.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on July 18, 2012
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