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Another Israeli homegrown high tech company has been bought out by a more established Asian Firm.
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Amobee Technologies, the Israeli digital advertising subsidiary of Singapore Telecommunications Ltd, or Singtel, has purchased fellow Israeli company Kontera Ltd for $150 million. This is less than the $160 million figure reported earlier this month.
At the same time Amobee also took two units of cross channel digital advertising company Adconian Media Group Ltd. — Adconion Direct North America and Adconion Australia — for $235 million (or $209 million net of debt). Amobee was itself acquired by Singtel for $340 million in 2012
According to Amobee, the acquisitions will strengthen its position as the leading provider of mobile-led digital marketing technology and solutions across all channels and screens for global brands. The newly combined capabilities of the companies, it is hoped, will better position them to capitalize on the fast growing global digital advertising market.
Founded in 2000 by CEO Yoav Shaham and COO Assaf Henkin, Kontera was named by Israel’s business newspaper Globes as one of Israel’s most promising startups that year.
The San Francisco based company has its development center in Herzliya Pituach, Israel. Kontera helps websites increase ad revenues by offering an advertisement platform that hyperlinks words to external content. Users of the technology generate revenue through fees charged to the other websites for the links.
While this may sound like Google’s AdSense, it differs in that the ads are not paced above or on the side of the text but within it. Visitors to a website simply click on a word, phrase or name and are sent to the other site.
Kontera’s annual estimated revenue was $50 million in 2011 and the company has raised more than $36 million from investors to date including Sequoia Capital, Carmel Ventures, Globespan Capital Partners LLC and Tenaya Capital Inc.
Amobee’s CEO Mark Strecker said in a statement, “We are excited to join forces with Adconion and Kontera, two companies that have led the industry with innovative marketing solutions and cutting edge technology to achieve outstanding returns for Fortune 500 companies. Amobee offers the most advanced mobile advertising technology and solutions to large advertisers and publishers on a global scale. The digital advertising business is about scale and capitalizing on the market opportunities with technology as a core differentiator. With these two acquisitions announced today, we have extended our product offerings, increased our sales footprint and reinforced Amobee’s leadership position in the fast growing digital advertising market.”
Yoav Shaham added, “Data has become the essential ingredient to successfully reach the right customers with the right message at the right time. Being a part of Amobee, we can more fully leverage our real-time content analysis platform across the entire digital ecosystem, enabling CMOs to measure and evaluate the success of their brand in ways never possible before.”
Amobee was founded in 2005 by Saul Rurka, Gil Shulman and Harry Dewhirst. The company is officially headquartered in Redwood City, California, but it is an Israeli concern with most of its operations conducted in Herzliya. They also have offices in Europe, Asia, Australia and Latin America.
They offer comprehensive, end-to-end mobile advertising solutions and services for advertisers, publishers and operators. Amobee’s advanced, proprietary digital advertising technology delivers all forms of digital advertising, from a simple text message to a rich media or 3D experience, and supports the many different types of connected devices in the marketplace.
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