Israel s Taboola heads to NASDAQ with $2 6b valuation after merger approved haaretz.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from haaretz.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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Jun. 3, 2021 2:03 PM
Hasan Abasi has a doctorate in computer science from the prestigious Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and has worked at Intel, IBM and Google. But the critical moment of his career came when he tried to order takeout food to his house.
This was in 2018, when Abasi was living in the Arab town Umm al-Fahm. “Until then, I had been living in Haifa and Switzerland, so it was my first experience ordering a meal to Umm al-Fahm,” he said, “I discovered that it was really difficult. The Facebook page of the restaurant didn’t have a menu or pictures of the food. It took me 15 minutes to explain to the delivery boy how to get to my place because it has no street name or number. I was upset: I’m developing autonomous vehicles at Google and I can’t order food home. That was when the penny dropped.”
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May. 3, 2021 2:15 PM
Israeli firm Taboola revealed in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing over the weekend that it and other companies in the digital advertising industry are under investigation for antitrust violations by the U.S. Department of Justice.
The criminal investigations involves hiring practices in the industry, which focuses on the recommendations the company makes for other online stories to read.
Taboola only found out about the investigation last week, a few months after the decision on the SPAC merger was made.
A SPAC is a listed shell company without operations that raises money from investors with the goal of merging with a private company and taking it public.
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Taboola reports strong Q1 data ahead of SPAC merger
Taboola s revenue in the first quarter of 2021 was in the range of $300 million to $303 million, beating the prior projection of $286 million.
Israeli content recommendation company Taboola today announced strong preliminary results for the first quarter of 2021 ahead of its SPAC merger with ION Acquisition Corp. 1 (NYSE: IACA), (led by Jonathan Kolber and Gilad Shani), which will see it list on Wall Street, at a company valuation of $2.6 billion.
Taboola s revenue in the first quarter of 2021 was in the range of $300 million to $303 million, beating the prior projection of $286 million, and 8% higher than the $279 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2020. Gross profit was in the range of $87 million to $90 million, higher than the prior projection of $78 million.