Hot topics

Criteo : Page 1
November 23rd, 2011

Saul Klein’s List Of Europe’s Next Billion-Dollar Tech Companies

Where will the next billion-dollar startups come from? The tech world and most VCs tend to be parochial, looking at Silicon Valley, maybe New York, and a few other hot markets like China and Brazil. But what about the Old Country?

Yesterday, I was having coffee with Saul Klein, a partner at Index Ventures and co-founder of Seedcamp. He believes that in every major city across Europe, Russia, and Israel, there are “a legion of companies that are capable of achieving billion dollar valuations and in some cases are likely to be able to do close to a billion dollars in revenues over the next 3 to 5 years.”

I asked him to name five while I pointed my iPhone video camera at him, and he was able to give me a much longer laundry list (which I’ve added after the jump). → Read More

May 6th, 2010

Here Comes The French Invasion: Bessemer Puts $7 Million Into Ad Retargeting Startup Criteo

In the online advertising world, one of the hottest trends right now is what is known as ad retargeting. The idea is simple. When you visit a retailer’s or other advertiser’s Website, it drops a cookie on your browser and the next time it sees you pop up on another site it loads an ad from that retailer. You’ve already expressed interest in that advertiser by visiting their site, so they retarget you whenever they can. It may sound a bit stalkerish, but trust me, everyone is doing it.

One startup in particular claims to do it better than anyone else, a French company called Criteo. CEO JB Rudelle says Criteo is the dominant retargeting ad network in Europe, and now he wants to dominate the U.S. He’s already moved his corporate offices from Paris to Palo Alto, and now he just raised $7 million in a C round from Bessemer, which took the entire round. Bessemer partner Byron Deeter will join the board. The last time he raised money was from Index Ventures in 2008. This last round brings his total capital raised to $24 million. → Read More

February 25th, 2008

Blog Recommendation Startup Outbrain Raises $5 Million

Funding Monday continues. NY/Israeli startup Outbrain is announcing a $5 million series A financing, led by Gemini Israeli Funds and Lightspeed Venture Partners. GlenRock Israel also put money into the round. The company was founded by Yaron Galai, a co-founder of Quigo (recently sold to AOL for $340 million), and Ori Lahav, previously a technologist at Shopping.com. It raised a $1 million seed round last year from Lightspeed’s and Gemini’s joint Internet lab in Israel, LGiLab, which is managed by TechCrunch France editor Ouriel Ohayon. Outbrain is creating a ratings and recommendation platform for blogs and news feeds. So far it has developed a rating widget that can be placed at the end of every blog post or news feed item so that readers can rate each one. Outbrain wants to use these widgets to create a cross-blog/news recommendation system using collaborative filtering techniques similar to what you find on Amazon.com for products. “Readers like you also liked:” X. Nobody has to register. Outbrain makes its inferences anonymously based on cookies. Explains Galai: With every rating that’s cast to our system, we constantly tweak the ‘closeness’ of each reader to all other readers who ever rated anything. We then give your like-minded readers a higher weight when making recommendations for you. So the more items you rate (and rate honestly), the better your personalized recommendations should get. This is in contrast to the folks that do ‘related articles’ functionality which is based purely on the content of the post. Those by definition are one-size-fits-all recommendations which we do not believe are very effective. So while others try to target recommendations that are relevant to the content, we are trying to target recommendations that are relevant to the readers. Outbrain’s widget can be installed on most blogging and RSS platforms, including Blogger.com, TypePad, WordPress.org, Drupal, FeedFlare, and MoveableType. Bloggers can grab it here. It competes with other rating and recommendation widgets out there, including JS-Kit’s rating widget and Criteo’s Autoroll widget that creates reader-centric blogrolls. CrunchBase Information Outbrain Criteo JS Kit Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More

January 15th, 2008

Criteo Raises $10 Million From Index Ventures

French startup Criteo just raised $10.4 million (7 million Euros) in a B round from Index Ventures, reports TechCrunch France. This is on top of a 3-million-Euro round in April 2006 led by AGF Private Equity and Elaia Partners. Criteo sells recommendation-engine software to e-commerce and content sites. Competitors include Aggregate Knowledge, CleverSet, and ChoiceStream. Discovery is hot right now. For instance, Kleiner-backed Aggregate Knowledge has raised $25 million. It is good to see some competition stirring across from across the pond. Incidentally, Criteo is probably best known among bloggers in the U.S for its AutoRoll widget that generates a linkroll based on the reading habits of a blog’s readers. Any blog that has the AutoRoll widget on it will show the other top AutoRoll blogs that its readers have also visited. There are 12,000 blogs with the AutoRoll widget (I used to have one on my old blog, the Next Net). It is an interesting idea, but hasn’t quite reached critical mass yet. Good thing the AutoRoll is not Criteo’s main business driver. CrunchBase Information Aggregate Knowledge Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More

Got a Tip? Tell Us.

Real-Time
Crunchbase

All Activity
  • All Activity
  • Acquisitions
  • Funding Rounds
  • Investments
  • IPOs
  • Additions
Durham Graphene Science — Received £1.2M in Seed funding from IP Group Plc
2.13.2012
Durham Graphene Science — Company added to CrunchBase
2.13.2012
IP Group Plc — Invested in Durham Graphene Science.
2.13.2012
Cidade Internet — Acquired by Populis.
2.1.2012
Jive Software — Went public with stock symbol NASDAQ:JIVE.
2.3.2012
Cidade Internet — Acquired by Populis.
2.1.2012
Factory Media Limited — Acquired by Forward Internet Group.
2.1.2012
PointBridge Solutions — Acquired by Perficient.
2.9.2012
LetsBuy.com — Acquired by Flipkart.
2.9.2012
Cocoafish — Acquired by Appcelerator.
2.9.2012
Durham Graphene Science — Received £1.2M in Seed funding from IP Group Plc
2.13.2012
ClevrU — Received $550k in Unattributed funding
2.10.2012
OpenLabel — Received $80k in Seed funding from Peter Kirwan, Tim Drees, and Doug Taylor
2.10.2012
sneakpeeq — Received $2.67M in Unattributed funding from Bain Capital Ventures, Metamorphic Ventures, Keith Rabois, Tim Kendall, Mike Murphy, and Vikas Gupta
2.10.2012
Noble Biomaterials — Received $8M in Series B funding from Northwater Capital, TL Ventures, and DuPont Capital Management
2.10.2012
IP Group Plc — Invested in Durham Graphene Science.
2.13.2012
Peter Kirwan — Invested in OpenLabel.
2.10.2012
Doug Taylor — Invested in OpenLabel.
2.10.2012
Tim Drees — Invested in OpenLabel.
2.10.2012
Metamorphic Ventures — Invested in sneakpeeq.
2.10.2012
Jive Software — Went public with stock symbol NASDAQ:JIVE.
2.3.2012
Durham Graphene Science — Company added to CrunchBase
2.13.2012
ClevrU — Company added to CrunchBase
2.13.2012
OpenLabel — Company added to CrunchBase
2.13.2012
Bookt — Company added to CrunchBase
2.12.2012
Kigo.Net — Company added to CrunchBase
2.12.2012
Metier TAO - Time, Attendance Online with Leave Balance Tracking — Product added to CrunchBase
2.12.2012
Metier HR - Cloud Based HR Process Automation Suite — Product added to CrunchBase
2.12.2012
TweepsMap — Product added to CrunchBase
2.12.2012
Wupbox account — Product added to CrunchBase
2.11.2012
Pocketbook (Mobile app, coming soon) — Product added to CrunchBase
2.11.2012
CrunchBase