outbrain

A-round investment in outbrain

Today we're announcing a $5M investment in outbrain by 3 great firms - Lightspeed Venture Partners (http://www.lightspeedvp.com/), Gemini Israel Funds (www.gemini.co.il) and GlenRock Israel (www.grg.co.il). Yoni Cheifetz, Danny Cohen and Ziv Kop from those three firms (respectively) have joined our Board of Directors.

The full PR is below. More coverage on TechCrunch, CenterNetworks, CNET, VentureBeat, VC Cafe, GigaOm and The Industry Standard. Hebrew coverage - Globes and TheMarker.

We'll be using the funds to establish outbrain as the #1 platform on the web for ratings & recommendations of blog, RSS and news content.

We love reading blogs, but the signal-to-noise ratio makes it impossible to find the good content anymore. Since our inception, we've been looking to build the standard platform for discovery of high-quality, personalized blog content on the web. We want to give readers their personalized recommendations at all those places where they are already consuming content - blogs, news sites and RSS aggregators.

There are quite a few companies doing different flavors of collaborative filtering on the web, but we're focused on doing one thing and doing it very well - making the best personalized recommendations of blog and news content.

We're excited to have found three excellent firms - Gemini, Lightspeed and GlenRock - who understand this space so well, and truly believe in our vision and strategy for becoming the #1 discovery platform for blog/news content.

This is a great opportunity to thank all of our partners and especially bloggers who have installed the outbrain widget and gave us so much love. With this new investment you should be seeing lots more good stuff coming from us in the near future!

If you'd like to post about us, we've setup a page with screenshots, logos and texts that you may find helpful.

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Outbrain Closes $5M A-Round by Gemini, Lightspeed and GlenRock

NEW YORK, NY – February 25th, 2008 – Outbrain Inc. today announced the closing of a $5M A-round investment led by Gemini Israel Funds (www.gemini.co.il) and Lightspeed Venture Partners (http://www.lightspeedvp.com/). GlenRock Israel (www.grg.co.il), Leon Recanati's investment company which backed Outbrain since its inception, also participated in the round.
Outbrain is a platform for ratings and recommendations of blog, news and RSS content. Bloggers and publishers can use Outbrain's free widget or API to provide readers with rating functionality and personalized reading recommendations. The widget can be installed with one click, and most leading blogging/RSS platforms are supported – Blogger.com, TypePad, WordPress.org, Drupal, FeedFlare, MoveableType, etc. Thousands of websites have already installed the Outbrain widget, and millions of ratings and recommendations are being served by Outbrain daily.
Outbrain was founded by Yaron Galai, Co-Founder of Quigo which was recently acquired by AOL, and Ori Lahav who previously headed R&D teams at Shopping.com. Outbrain was one of the first companies to be backed by the Lightsped/Gemini Internet Lab (LGiLab - www.lgilab.com), which is dedicated to making seed investments in early-stage, Israel-related internet startups. Following the investment, Daniel Cohen from Gemini, Yoni Cheifetz from Lightspeed and Ziv Kop from GlenRock, will be joining Outbrain's board of directors. Outbrain is headquartered in New York City, with its R&D based in Israel.
From the Outbrain blog (http://blog.outbrain.com) - "We love reading blogs, but the signal-to-noise ratio makes it impossible to find the good content anymore. We're looking to build the standard platform for discovery of high-quality, personalized blog content on the web. We want to give readers their personalized recommendations at all those places where they are already consuming content - blogs, news sites and RSS aggregators. There are quite a few companies doing different flavors of collaborative filtering on the web, but we're focused on doing one thing and doing it very well - making the best personalized recommendations of blog and news content. We're excited to have found three excellent firms - Gemini, Lightspeed and GlenRock - who understand this space so well, and truly believe in our vision and strategy for becoming the #1 discovery platform for blog/news content."
To get the outbrain widget on your blog, go to www.outbrain.com/get/
Screenshots, logos and other materials you can use are available here - http://www.outbrain.com/new/pages/writeaboutus.html 
 

About Gemini
A pioneer in Israel's venture capital industry, Gemini Israel Funds has grown to be the leading Israeli seed and early stage fund in the Information Technology arena. The firm, founded in 1993, manages more than $700 million in five funds. Investments are focused on the areas of Communications and Wireless Technologies, Enterprise Software, Internet, Consumer Electronics and Semiconductors, and more recently in Greentech. Through offices in Israel and Silicon Valley, Gemini offers portfolio companies access to top-tier U.S. based investors and a global network of corporate partners. As investment professionals, Gemini's key contributions include an ability to make daring investment decisions and the capability to utilize past operational experience in assisting portfolio companies. Past successes include: Allot, Mellanox, Saifun, Precise, Traiana, Butterfly, Commtouch, Ornet, Verisity, Jacada, Ceragon, Riverhead, nLayers, Itemfield and others.
www.gemini.co.il

About Lightspeed
The partners of Lightspeed have invested over $800M in more than 100 technology companies over the past two decades and invests across the U.S., China, India and Israel. Lightspeed has contributed strong operational and sector expertise to market leaders such as Blue Nile, Brocade, Ciena, eHealthinsurance, Galileo Technology, Informatica, Kiva Software, Metasolv, Phone.com, Quantum Effect Devices, Riverbed, Sirocco, Virsa Systems and Waveset, working closely with these companies throughout the early stages of their business development lifecycles.
www.lightspeedvp.com 
 
About GlenRock
Founded by Leon Recanati in 2003, the GlenRock Group leverages a unique combination of private equity, multidisciplinary in-house expertise, unmatched access to quality dealflow, and a focused but flexible investment strategy to achieve maximum returns. With a global presence and ready access to the most prominent names in Israeli business, academia, and science, GlenRock is experienced at identifying Life Sciences and advanced technology opportunities - and leading them to realization of their true market potential. GlenRock takes an active and long-term role in the development and growth of portfolio companies – ensuring that extraordinary ideas evolve into business success stories.
www.grg.co.il
 
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Contact:
Yaron Galai, CEO
Outbrain Inc.
212-905-6241
galai [at] outbrain [dot] com
 
 

Picking the Outbrain of Awasu's founder

Instead of the usual new client announcement we thought it would be interesting to interview one of the newest partners to integrate the Outbrain rating system into their rss reader.  Introducing Taka from Awasu!  Taka is the man behind Awasu, which is widely heralded as a powerful rss reader for serious information brokers.  Get to know the man, the mission and his reader!

Q: Why Did You Build Awasu?
To scratch an itch :-) It was inspired by another project I had just finished at the time. We actually hadn't even heard of RSS when we started and it was originally a generalized, scriptable information-gathering engine. Finding out about RSS was such a revelation since it fit in perfectly with what we were doing.

Q: Biggest Challenges Facing RSS Readers Today?
The same challenges as yesterday :-| Persuading people of the value of RSS and making it easy for them to use. It's a chicken-and-egg problem: most people don't realize how useful it is until they actually start using it but it's still too difficult for your average Joe to figure it all out.  Which reader to use, finding feeds on a website (if they're there at all), RSS or Atom, how to subscribe. And so on...

Q: Where is RSS Going in the future?
RSS needs to be in the background and out of sight. The real benefit of this technology is not monitoring blogs but computer-to-computer interaction, especially when you hook it up with some of the key ideas behind the Semantic Web. Feed readers embedded in the browser are a good start to making the technology more widely accessible but once you start to collect more than a few feeds, it starts to get a bit unwieldy. There will always be a place for programs like Awasu for larger-scale, serious information management.

Q: What's Ahead for Awasu in 08?
Computer-to-computer interaction is the fundamental principle;
that Awasu was built upon. We've built a solid base of a feed reader and will be focusing on adding more advanced features to manage, analyze and respond to the incoming information.

Q: Craziest Support Question?
I think I've become completely inured to crazy support questions - nothing comes to mind.

Q: Your Must Read Blogs & Why?
Not your traditional techie stuff.

Global Voices Online is one of my favorites. I spend a lot of time in developing nations, often semi-offline, and it never ceases to amaze me how unimportant most of what happens in the technical world is.  This feed keeps reminding me of that when I'm back at my desk and there's so much stuff coming in, I can't possibly keep up.

Ethan Zuckerman also gives a good insight into what's happening in the developing world.

As a musician, Raven 'n' Blues is my favorite podcast, a blues show hosted by the inimitable Dave Raven.

Q: Thoughts on the APML movement, OpenID and OpenSocial for RSS readers?
I'm yet to be convinced of a wider usefulness for APML. I can understand why some hardcore information junkies are calling out for it but I don't see most people having much use for it. Advertisers and marketers, however, are surely drooling over access to such information. NewsGator recently making their feed readers free in "exchange" for monitoring what you're reading is a case in point. It's not a deal I find particularly appealing.  OpenID and OpenSocial don't have much direct impact on RSS but as I said above, these will be the foundational components used to build the next generation of systems, out of sight from the user but providing the core underlying services.

Q: The last movie you thought was great?
"American Gangster" was excellent, although ultimately a little disappointing. "Stardust" was a hoot :-)

Q: The last book you read that was great?
A friend recently recommended F. Sionil Jose, probably the foremost Filipino writing in English. I've just started "Viajero", a history of the Filipino diaspora, and it's shaping up to be pretty good.