Taboola, a provider of digital advertising space that often appears at the bottom of websites, is reaching the stock exchange. The company announced Monday that it will do so through the preferred public offering vehicle of our time: a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).
Taboola’s current business will be stationed at SPAC, an existing stock called ION Acquisition Corp 1 Ltd. (NYSE: IACA), thus becoming a publicly traded company.
The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter, Taboola said. The resulting entity will do business under the current name and its stock symbol must change to TBLA.
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Taboola said his merger with ION would result in a total revenue of $ 545 million, between funds held in custody by ION and third party investments. According to Taboola, this values the merged entity at around US $ 2.6 billion. The company said it would allocate more than $ 100 million to research and develop growth opportunities. It did not provide details about other spending targets.
As a private company, Taboola does not provide many details about its finances. In the IPO on his website, he said his revenue, excluding traffic acquisition costs, was $ 379 million in 2020. Operating profit was $ 34 million and adjusted EBITDA (earnings before revenue, taxes , depreciation and amortization) exceeded US $ 100 million. A final figure was not provided.
In his words, Taboola “allows digital property owners to take advantage of the value of AI-based recommendations and offers advertisers a way to effectively access users on the open web”.
She estimates the scope of what she describes as “the highly fragmented market for open web advertising” was about $ 64 billion last year.