Taboola, which started in Israel and is now headquartered in New York, is profitable, according to Singolda, who said he raised a projected gross revenue of $ 1.2 billion last year – $ 379 million in net revenue, excluding payments to publishers.
At the end of 2019, Taboola saw a path to even greater growth in a merger with Outbrain, his arch-rival chumbox. That October, in a long-awaited agreement, the two announced plans to unite under the name Taboola.
But in one year, the financial situation of both companies has changed. Antitrust regulators in Britain and Israel are still investigating the deal. The pandemic attracted more online viewers, but it also forced sites to reevaluate their spending and become “much leaner and more petty,” said Singolda.
The merger collapsed in September.
But soon afterwards, Gilad Shany, an Israeli financier, raised nearly $ 259 million for ION Acquisition Corp 1, a SPAC that intended to buy another Israeli company “to build a global player”.
He and Singolda discussed a combination that would make Taboola public, essentially giving it the ION stock symbol. It is a faster and safer way to bring companies to the public market, which has helped to make SPACs one of the biggest obsessions in the financial sector.
Singolda said that going public would give Taboola greater financial resources, particularly the ability to sell publicly traded shares – which could help it make more acquisitions. (In addition to the money from the ION fund, Taboola raised $ 285 million from Fidelity, BlackRock and others.)
“We think this could be five times the size of today,” said Shany, who will join the Taboola board. “You don’t have to think that far to think that big.”