Valued at $2.6 billion, Taboola is going public

Ad-Tech firm, Taboola has announced that it is going public by merging with an Israeli blank-check firm ION Acquisition Corp. 1 Ltd., a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). ION Acquisition Corp. is already listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Valued at $2.6 billion, Taboola raised a total of $545 million with $259 million in trust coming from ION, along with another $285 million in PIPE financing from investors including Fidelity, Baron Capital, Comcast and others.

Taboola intends to invest approximately $100M in research and development, expanding into fields such as artificial intelligence and e-commerce.

After the merger with ION, Taboola will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker TBLA.

Founded in 2007 by Adam Singolda, Taboola is a discovery & native advertising platform that helps people explore what’s interesting and new in the moment of next. It provides advertisements such as “Around the Web” and “Recommended For You” boxes at the bottom of many online news articles.

Adam says Taboola now delivers recommendations to more than 500M people every day and has paid over $2B to its publisher partners over the last three years.

He adds that the “company intends to continue investing in the open web and expand in these two areas:

1. Powering recommendations for anything. Over time, you should expect Taboola to recommend eCommerce products, applications, games, and much more. 
2. Powering relevant recommendations anywhere. Over time, we want to be anywhere people spend their time, every device, connected TV, automobile and more. “

The company had previously planned to merge with competitor Outbrain before the deal was canceled last fall, with sources pointing to the market impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, a “challenging culture fit” and regulatory issues to explain the deal’s end.

With over 1.4 billion users in a month, Taboola works with more than 13,000 advertisers and 9,000 digital properties

The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter fo 2021