Digital advertising company Taboola says it plans to go public through a merger with ION Acquisition Corp, a special acquisition company.
The company places content boxes on Internet sites with headlines like “8 celebrities who have serious illnesses” or “See who goes broke in America”, generating revenue for the publisher. The company says it is used by more than 13,000 advertisers to reach more than 500 million daily active users.
The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter, and the combined company will operate under the name Taboola and will be traded on the NYSE under the symbol “TBLA”. The deal gives Taboola a pro forma valuation of about $ 2.6 billion.
“The open web is really important, even essential, because it’s free and diverse and doesn’t belong to any giant company. Think of every website you love – every game, app on a mobile device or connected TV that lives outside the walled gardens “wrote the CEO and founder of Taboola, Adam Singolda, in a blog post on Monday.
“But open web companies rely on walled gardens that compete with them with more data, more technology and more relationships with advertisers, while advertisers have no choice but to turn to walled gardens to access users effectively at scale.”
He added in the post that the company plans to provide recommendations for “anything” – ecommerce products, apps, games and more – and that the company wants them to be available “anywhere” on “all devices, Connected TV, cars and more. ”
Taboola and competitor Outbrain in October 2019 said they would merge in the hope of becoming a bigger competitor to digital advertising giants like Google and Facebook. But almost a year later, the merger negotiations ended after the companies failed to agree on the revised terms of the deal.
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