We Have Only Just Begun: A Message from Our SVP of Research & Development

*Excerpt from email originally sent by Aviv Sinai to Taboola’s R&D team

There have been so many new, exciting changes happening at Taboola. We became a public company, a huge milestone for Taboolars everywhere. We also announced our plans to acquire Connexity, bringing eCommerce recommendations to the open web. And this is just the beginning.

I’ve been getting messages from friends, family, and colleagues wishing me congratulations, echoing that this must be amazing closure for almost 14 years of work.

By definition, closure (the end) couldn’t be further from what I feel. For me, this is just the start of something grander.

In 2004 Google went public with fewer than 2,000 employees. I bet Larry Page and Sergey Brin, CEO and president of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, respectively, didn’t feel closure when they IPOed, as they were so far from realizing their vision. We all know what Google has accomplished since then!

For all the years I’ve been at Taboola, I can’t think of another time when we’ve had so many opportunities (and challenges) in front of us, while also

kicking-off numerous initiatives, projects, products, and technology advancements.

We are reinventing how we think about our current products while considering the need for specialization. We are adding new advertising sources, from new verticals to new customer segments.

We are working on new user touch points on publisher sites, apps and mobile devices.

We are revamping our algorithmic and AI stack, focusing on making both more scalable and safe while changing the basic concepts on how we train, serve and model our algorithms.

And that’s not all.

Taboola has completely new web platforms, including Taboola Ads. Our team will continue to innovate and build new Ad Formats and UI Innovations.

We have built our own NLU stack and content lake infrastructure.

We’ve completely changed how we conduct experiments at scale, and how we create infrastructure to build, deploy and test the software and models we build. For example, we’re building our next generation front-end generation engine, with new tools and infrastructures that would increase our scale and performance of all systems.

We’re reimagining what we can do with Taboola Newsroom and insights, revamping our bidder to become a platform used by many products, and rearchitecting our core advertising platform and stack.

We’re reequipping our already state-of-the-art data platform to support our needs internally, our users’ needs, and our new systems. This, and more, will allow us to succeed in our previously mentioned goals and many other new beginnings that we predict are just around the corner.

I don’t feel closure, because our products, technology, and platforms are just the foundation of what they could be for our users and our partners. Looking at the hard work we’ve already mastered – now is the time to take our creations to the next level.

While being mindful of the amount of (cool) work ahead of us, it is an excellent time to think about what we have accomplished, and to me, the proudest and most unique achievement at Taboola is our team. Together, we’ve built a strong Research & Development (R&D) team that comprises hundreds of engineers, working from around the world: Israel, US, Taiwan, Ukraine and Greece.

Writing code is the easy part. This is the basic undertaking which is expected of us, engineers. However, this is not enough. If one wants to build a strong team that can accomplish anything, the most important thing is one’s culture.

We’ve built a team with one of a kind culture: a culture based on collaboration and helping one another, owning our tasks end to end, knowing our business while accomplishing our to-do list with amazing craftsmanship and professionalism.

Having Taboola’s R&D team gives me the ability to know that we can do anything.

I look forward to working on all these new beginnings, and I look forward to seeing how our products continue to improve and grow.

But mostly, I look forward to working with my team.

Celebrate each and every day, as tomorrow will continue to bring even more exciting beginnings.

If you’re interested in a career at Taboola, we’re hiring internationally! Please visit our website to check out our open positions.

Disclaimer – Forward-Looking Statements

Taboola (the “Company”) may, in this communication, make certain statements that are not historical facts and relate to analysis or other information which are based on forecasts or future or results. Examples of such forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding future prospects, product development and business strategies and our projections for future periods. Words such as “expect,” “estimate,” “project,” “budget,” “forecast,” “anticipate,” “intend,” “plan,” “may,” “will,” “could,” “should,” “believes,” “predicts,” “potential,” “continue,” and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements but are not the exclusive means for identifying such statements. By their very nature, forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties, both general and specific, and there are risks that the predictions, forecasts, projections and other forward-looking statements will not be achieved. You should understand that a number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from the plans, objectives, expectations, estimates and intentions expressed in such forward-looking statements, including the risks set forth under “Risk Factors” in our Registration Statement on Form F-4 and our other SEC filings. The Company cautions readers not to place undue reliance upon any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made. The Company does not undertake or accept any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect any change in its expectations or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement is based.