Outbrain Ltd. has raised $5 million in its first financing round. Gemini Israel Funds and Lightspeed Ventures led the round, joined an existing investor, GlenRock Israel.
Outbrain was co-founded in early 2007 by Yaron Galai, the founder of Quigo Technologies Inc., which was acquired by AOL for $300 million last year. Sigma PCM Investments (1992) Ltd. was a seed investor; one of its managers is Dan Galai, Yaron's father. Outbrain's other co-founder, Ori Lahav, was previously a team leader at Shopping.com. Galai was already preparing to found Outbrain while he was in talks for the sale of Quigo.
Outbrain provides a platform for readers' rating of Internet content, and blogs on online news sites and RSS feeds. Bloggers download the company's widget to obtain blogs and news sites that are most relevant to them on a personal basis. The widget software supports most leading blog platforms.
The company blog says, "We love reading blogs, but the signal-to-noise ratio makes it impossible to find the good content anymore. We're looking to build the standard platform for discovery of high-quality, personalized blog content on the web.
"Globes": How do the recommendations work?
Galai: "We use algorithms that collate readers' responses and personalize them for other online readers. Website owners have to download our widget, which is transparent to the readers."
How do you make money from this?
"After we achieve a critical mass of users and dominate this market, we can develop the business platform, which will probably be based on advertising and content marketing personalized for users."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on February 26, 2008
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