Acquisitions are nothing new for Outbrain Inc. founder and CEO Yaron Galai. Two companies which he co-founded Ad4ever and Quigo have been acquired: Ad4ever by aQuantive (now part of Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq: MSFT); and Quigo by AOL in 2007. Outbrain, too, is making acquisitions. The first was the acquisition of AOL division Surphace in early 2011, and yesterday came the second: Atlanta-based Scribit, which offers a solution for managing and storing digital content. Galai announced the acquisition on his blog at the company.
Outbrain was founded by Galai and CTO Ori Lahav in 2007. It has raised $64 million to date, mostly from Carmel Ventures, Lightspeed Ventures, GlenRock Israel, and private investors. The company developed a recommendations engine for relevant content of interest to Internet users. "Adding a content curation platform to our product portfolio will help brands develop more robust content marketing strategies and provide an additional revenue stream for our publishing partners," wrote Galai in his blog.
Outbrain's recommendations engine is already installed at many publications, including "Newsweek", Boston.com, "Slate" magazine, TMZ, "The Chicago Tribune", "The Daily Beast", and "USA Today". Most large Israeli publications also use Outbrain.
Although the acquisition of Scribit brings Outbrain a supplementary product, its previous acquisition, Surphace, was basically a competitor that also developed a recommendations engine. Surphace brought an impressive clients list, which included AOL, "AllThingsD", "Lonely Planet", and "The Los Angeles Times". The acquisition of Surphace was for a very low, albeit undisclosed price, and Outbrain probably did not pay a lot for Scribit either, although the company has substantial resources for making acquisitions - tens of millions of dollars - especially after raising $35 million a year ago.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on December 12, 2012
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