Israeli video ad developer Innovid has announced that it has raised $30 million in pre-IPO funding from Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing group. The company has raised $82.5 million to date and previous investors include New Spring Capital, Sequoia Capital, Genesis partners, Cisco Venture and T-ventures.
Innovid was founded in 2007 by CEO Zvika Netter, Tal Chalozin and Zack Zigdon. The company is headquartered in New York and has its development office in Ramat Gan and also has offices in Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, London, Sydney and Singapore. Innovid has 220 employees, 75 of them in Israel.
Netter told "Globes," "After the last financing round, we decided to take the company to profitability and in 2017-18 the company was already profitable. The plan at the time was that that would be the last financing round but over the past year, we decided to have another round, because we saw that there was an opportunity for a swifter breakthrough if we invested more in our two main area."
"One area is an area of global growth - the company was focused mainly on the US and over the past year more of our global customers asked us to replace the product that competes with Google, Double Click, in everything related to video in the rest of the world. This requires us to make more proactive investments like opening new offices around the world. For example, we are at the moment opening an office in Japan and we also need to hire people for our existing offices."
"The second thing is much bigger and it's our activities in the smart television field. In the ad broadcasting sector on TV screens Innovid has grown twofold over the past year and this activity, which was relatively marginal has become 30% of our revenue. We have been operating in this sector for five years and today we lead in this field but it will grow and attract more players and competitors and we want to ensure that we continue leading it."
Innovid was one of the first to enter the smart TV ad market five years ago wth interactive ads and ad campaigns for live TV broadcasts over the Internet. Innovid currently makes ads for 340 large customers such as L'Oreal, Disney, Red Bull, Toyota, Bank of America, McDonalds and Campbell's and broadcasts them to 75 million homes in the US. Innovid also works closely with leading content producers including Hulu, Xbox Roku, Playstation and Fox broadcasting ads on their applications.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on January 7, 2019
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