Outbrain Raises $12 Million Series B; Massive $18 Million Total Funding To-Date

Last year NY-based Outbrain raised a $5 million Series A round of funding. Today the company is announcing a new Series B round of funding to the tune of $12 million. Including a $1 million angel funding, this brings the total funding for Outbrain to $18 million dollars. Previous investors Gemini Israel Funds, Lightspeed Venture Partners and GlenRock Israel all returned for the round and the round included new investors Zohar Gilon and Rhodium.

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 using the widget for about a year now and have provided feedback to the Outbrain team on ways to improve the service. In December Outbrain launched the link zapper which allows their partner sites to remove a recommendation when it doesn’t fit the article content.

The Outbrain service is available as a widget for most blogging and CMS platforms. There’s also an API for developers to leverage.

I can only guess that this type of warchest is to hunker down to be able to have funding to last through the current economic environment. To be completely honest, the first time I read their release I thought they raised $1.2 not $12 million dollars. In my conversations with the Outbrain team, it’s easy to tell that they are very well educated about the Web and are passionate about content discovery. It will be interesting to see where the monies are allocated going forward.

Update: Yaron Samid of TechAviv has some thoughts on why Outbrain got so much cash.

Update 2: Yovav "Jay" Meydad of Snap found out about the funding earlier but held back in posting. Very well done – he made sure that Outbrain got as much buzz as they could from the story. I do this as well and I wish more blogs/news outlets would as well.