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The talkbacks you write are worth a lot of money, at least if you look at the new recruitment round of the Israeli startup company OpenWeb, formerly Spot.im. Today (Thursday) the company announced that it raised 170 million dollars based on a valuation of 1.5 billion dollars – almost a year since its previous giant fundraising, which was 150 million dollars and was done based on a value of 1.15 billion dollars. The company’s current fundraising round – E – was led by the Canadian investment fund Georgian Partners, which also participated in the company’s previous round in November 2021.
Ofen Web develops a comment system that also displays advertisements and articles – similar to the Israeli content sharing companies Taboola and Outbrain, and it shares the revenue from the advertisements with the hosting sites. According to the company’s data, its system has been implemented in more than 1,000 content sites including Fox News, Yahoo, TechCrunch, Salon, AOL, The Times.
The hiring comes several months after the company laid off about 10 percent of its workforce, downsized the company’s research and development center in Israel, moved operations to the United States, switched to a shortened work week and cut the wages of development workers accordingly. Earlier in 2021, the company acquired two media companies: the American Hive Media Group and AdYouLike from France.
OpenWeb, founded by Nadav Shuval in 2012, has so far raised $390 million, and it employs about 100 people in Israel, and more in New York and Kyiv. According to the company’s data, it enjoys over 100 million monthly active users.