Taboola buys Israeli startup Commerce Sciences

Taboola, an Israeli content discovery and recommendation company, announced plans to acquire web personalization and on-site optimization startup Commerce Sciences. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Taboola said that Commerce Sciences' staff will join Taboola's Tel Aviv workforce.

Commerce Sciences was founded in 2012, also in Israel, and is backed by Genesis Partners, KGC Capital, Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors, and other angel investors.

The startup's personalization technology analyzes the implied characteristics of website visitors as they relate to a particular time and context, meaning that the same person may be more likely to interact with different on-site content depending the time of day.

Taboola, which competes directly with another Israeli company named Outbrain, says the acquisition furthers its personalization strategy and technology portfolio. Taboola's main product generates recommended content typically found at the bottom of articles on a bevy of websites. Taboola says it serves more than 360 billion recommendations to over 1 billion unique visitors every month on websites such as USA TODAY, Huffington Post, MSN, Business Insider, Chicago Tribune and The Weather Channel.

"These are important times to understand the value of data and the user experience, as the web has become very fragmented," Taboola founder and CEO Adam Singolda said in prepared remarks. "The notion of personalization based on user demographics is old school. It's evolving into the context in which users are consuming the web; we all have multiple personas as we come from social, search, our phone, and more - imagine if every site had a version tailored to each one of those personas."

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