
Taboola and Outbrain: going public… via separate ways
Competing Israeli content-recommendation advertising companies Taboola and Outbrain will meet at the stock exchange in New York. After earlier plans for a merger of the two companies failed, Taboola on June 30 started trading at the Nasdaq, the same day as Outbrain presented its IPO prospect to go public.
Taboola chose the so-called SPAC route by merging with special acquisition company ION Acquisition Corp and completed its offering at a value of USD 2.6 billion.
Outbrain is going the traditional IPO route at a value estimated to be more or less the same as for Taboola.
In 2019, Outbrain and rival Taboola announced that they were merging as Taboolabrain in a bid to challenge Google and Facebook’s advertising duopoly but dropped the idea last September. As part of the deal, Taboola was set to pay $250M for 30% of Outbrain’s shares and a 70% stake in the merged entity.
After long months though, the merging deal went south and the two companies, both founded by Israeli men and started out of Tel-Aviv, went their separate ways.
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