Outbrain, a news recommendation widget, raises $5M

Venture Beat — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 10:00:05 -0800

Outbrain is a new start-up that gives blog readers a way to rate and recommend news items, by using a recommendation engine that is similar to Amazon’s feature that offers up other items that people like you have already enjoyed.

While there are many recommendation engines such as Amazon’s on the market, there isn’t a service that has focused solely on news. Outbrain offers site-owners a widget (see screenshot below) that lets readers rate each news article according a five-star system. That way, Outbrain can track what stories you like, and recommend similar stories going forward. Other people making similar choices as you have in the past will also see which ones you’ve ranked higher or lower.

The New York company was launched by Yaron Galia, the co-founder of Quigo, which recently was acquired by AOL for a reported $350 million (not bad, given that Quigo took only $40 million in capital).

Galia told me he was tired of wasting his time, reading over articles that he didn’t like, just because they were posted at a favorite Web site.

The company has just raised $5 million in a first round of capital from Gemini Israel Funds and Lightspeed Venture Partners. GlenRock Israel, which seeded the company early on, also participated.

Galia said thousands of websites have already installed the Outbrain widget, which can be gotten here. More information about how it works is here.