Baidu, China’s Leading Search Engine, Makes Strategic Investment In Content Recommendation Platform Taboola –

▤ Summary

The companies declined to name the exact amount of the deal, but said that it is in the “multi-millions.” Taboola serves up the links in the “Around The Web” and “Recommended For You” sections you see at the bottom of articles on sites such as The Atlantic, Business Insider, and Mail Online. Baidu’s stake is a follow-on to the $117 million Series E round led by Fidelity Management that Taboola (which competes with Outbrain) announced in February at a reported valuation of almost $1 billion. At that time, chief executive officer Singolda told TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden that the company’s top priorities include expanding into more international markets. Baidu can use Taboola’s tech to build its knowledge graph, while the deal represents a way for Taboola to break into the growing Chinese market, which now has an Internet penetration rate of 47.9 percent. In a prepared statement, Taboola founder and chief executive officer Adam Singolda said “we believe that discovery has massive growth potential in both existing and untapped markets around the world, and we plan to grow this new category even further with Baidu to help change the way people in China discover content they may like and never knew existed.” While Taboola is headquartered in New York, its research and development team is based in Tel Aviv.

▦ Linked Companies

Taboola

$1B+