Announcing Outbrain’s C-Round Funding

Today we’re happy to announce our third round of funding of $11M (AdAge covered it here). Our previous investors – Carmel Ventures, Gemini Israeli Fund, GlenRock, Rhodium, and Lightspeed Venture Partners – have all participated in this round.Our mission at Outbrain is to provide readers with the most interesting content links possible. The amount of articles and blog posts being published on the web daily is unprecedented. And within that huge pile of content that’s being produced, there are a great number of wonderful articles. But as passionate readers, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find the good content within all this noise. The experience of consuming news/blog/magazine content on the web is simply too overwhelming.

To help readers on publisher sites discover the most interesting links, we constantly invest in 2 areas:

1. Better algorithms – Our research team has developed some of the world’s most advanced algorithms for making content recommendations, at scale, and at lightning speed. The algorithms we’ve developed span contextual, collaborative filtering, personalization, analysis of sharing patterns, and others. We believe this is the tip of the iceberg of what’s possible algorithmically, and intend to keep doubling-down our investment on this front.
2. Scalable infrastructure – We invest heavily in creating a massively scalable infrastructure to support the needs of our publishers. We currently serve our links from 3 data centers and hundreds of servers. Our engineering and ops teams have engineered our platform to ensure that recommendations we serve show up on the page within milliseconds, and that code doesn’t slow down sites using our services, such as USA Today, Slate, etc.

With this new round of funding we are furthering our commitment to creating the world’s best content recommendation engine for publishers, and for their readers. We’ll continue investing in building the best research & development team, and in the scale needed to support some of the biggest publishers in the world. In addition, we’ll be using this investment to expand geographically, opening offices in Los Angeles and London.We are grateful for our investors and their continued support in our mission.

More coverage on PaidContent, Vator, and in Hebrew – TheMarker, Globes & Calcalist.