Israeli content recommendation company Taboola receive a multi-million dollar strategic investment partnership with the popular search engine Baidu Inc. (Nasdaq:BIDU), the “China’s Google”.
Taboola CEO and founder Adam Singolda would not confirm the exact amount Baidu has invested in his company.
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The partnership brings together two cutting-edge technology companies that are re-defining the “search” and “discovery” categories across the world’s biggest markets. Together, Taboola and Baidu plan to bring the product to penetrate the Chinese market, where mobile is the number one way people go online.
The investment from Baidu is a follow-on to the $117 million Series E round of financing announced by Taboola this past February.
Baidu receiving tens of billions of search queries every day, about 75 percent of China’s combined PC and mobile search market share.
Taboola has experienced massive growth since its inception in 2007, rising from less than $10 million annual revenue in 2012 to over $200 million in 2014. The Series E round in February was led by Fidelity Management and Research Company, and included existing investors Marker LLC and Steadfast Capital, as well as new strategic investors Advance Publications (parent of Condé Nast and Advance Digital), Comcast Ventures, Mr. Carlo De Benedetti (chairman of the Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso), Groupe Arnault (the controlling shareholder of LVMH), Yahoo! JAPAN, and others.
“Though our roots are in China, Baidu actively seeks out innovative technology companies abroad to partner and invest with, ” said Peter Fang, senior director of Corporate Development at Baidu. “Taboola’s remarkable vision and growth over the past few years captured the admiration of our executive team, and we’re very excited about the potential of the discovery market worldwide.”
Taboola serves more than 200 billion monthly content recommendations to over 550 million users across some of the Web’s most innovative publisher sites in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Thailand, India, Japan and Israel.
Last year Taboola announced a strategic partnership with Yahoo! JAPAN to launch “Yahoo! Content Discovery, ” introducing content recommendations onto hundreds of premium partner sites across the Yahoo! Japan News network.
Taboola currently has 270 employees worldwide and an annual revenue run-rate of more than $300 million.
