Israel’s Taboola To Aquire Gravity R&D, Improve Content Recommendations

Israeli-based content recommendation platform Taboola, announced on Thursday that it has entered an agreement to acquire Hungarian-based IT vendor and recommendation engine company Gravity R&D, to advance AI, SmartBid, and eCommerce personalization and recommendations. 

The financial details of the transaction have yet to be disclosed.

The acquisition falls in line with Taboola’s stated goal of investing $100 million annually into R&D services. 

Taboola will establish and invest in a new research and development hub in Gravity R&D’s Budapest headquarters pending the completion of the acquisition. 

Gravity R&D’s core offering is a recommendation engine called Yusp, which is used by companies involved in retail, e-commerce, and digital media to provide personalized offers to their customers for purposes that range from driving sales to maintaining customer satisfaction. The technology powering Yusp is based on proprietary deep learning algorithms that combine contextual data and brands’ first part data to generate recommendations that are most suited to the user, shopper, and customer. In 2009, two years after the company was founded, Gravity R&D tied for the Netflix Prize, a public competition to find a group most suited to improve the streaming service’s recommendation technology. Its customers currently span more than 20 countries and power over 35 billion monthly recommendations. 

Founded in 2006, Taboola’s platform drives monetization, and user engagement, and helps people discover the things they like on the open web through its own AI-powered recommendations. The company has long-term partnerships with prominent digital properties including CNBC, BBC, NBC News, Business Insider, The Independent, and El Mundo. Over 15,000 advertisers to date actively use Taboola’s services. With the company’s prior acquisition of retail network Connexity, its e-commerce recommendations have spurred more than 1 million monthly transactions with leading brands such as Walmart, Macy’s, Wayfair, Skechers, and eBay.

“Our investments in technology, both in team and products behind it, are what continue to give Taboola a strategic advantage,” said Adam Singolda, CEO and founder of Taboola. “Welcoming the Gravity R&D to our family means Taboola grows its ability to make more sophisticated recommendations and do more in areas like dynamic creative optimization and personalization, to drive better outcomes for advertisers–especially those in retail and e-commerce. With a highly-skilled team that has spent years perfecting this technology, there was no company better suited to help us succeed in this area.”

“The competitive battlefield for customers in the retail, e-commerce, and connected TV arenas continues to revolve around customer experience and personalization,” said Domonkos Tikk, CEO of Gravity R&D. “We’ve spent the past 12 years developing the technology to make brands’ lives easier and with Taboola, we’re excited to bring that technology to a massive new customer base.”