Outbrain's Ratings Service Banks $5 Million A Round

With its technology team in Israel, NY-based Outbrain has raised $5 million in Series A funding. The VC firms participating in the round are: Gemini Israel Funds and Lightspeed Venture Partners. GlenRock Israel, which backed Outbrain since its inception, also participated in the round. The company raised $1 million in seed funding last year.

Outbrain provides a rating and recommendation widget that can be embedded into a blog or Web site. Outbrain has also partnered with several RSS readers to incorporate ratings directly into the reader. The recommendations can be set to only the current site or can be open to a network of sites. We've been testing the Outbrain functionality on CN over the past 10 days and will have some insights and a review after our test concludes later today.

Outbrain notes that following the investment, Daniel Cohen from Gemini, Yoni Cheifetz from Lightspeed and Ziv Kop from GlenRock, will be joining Outbrain's board of directors.

Check out our discussion with Outbrain from last year. Other players in the ratings space include SezWho, Disqus and JS-Kit.

Update: Om wonders what their business model is. In my discussion with Outbrain last year, sponsored recommendations was their business revenue model at that time.

Here is an example of the widget on CN with a story from yesterday: