Unfortunately, due to the economic climate and the sharp decline in VC investments, I have not been getting any alerts from FundingSleuth for a long time. The last one was sent to me on 12/24/2008 and did not bring good news at all. It was when Eyeblaster, a company co-founded by my friend Ofer Zadikario, withdrawn the S-1 form and canceled its IPO.

But last Tuesday, 2/3/2009, I received an alert from FundingSleuth about Outbrain, makers of the blog ratings & recommendations widget that I use on this blog (readers – please use it and give me feedback) and like the fact it is starting to act as a traffic acquisition tool too. A quick look at the SEC website showed that the company filed form D on 2/2/2009. I was curious to know the details about this round and so I sent Yaron, Outbrain’s CEO, this short email:

From: Jay Meydad
Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2009 6:01 PM
To: Yaron Galai
Subject: Do you deserve a MAZAL TOV?

http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001454938&owner=include&count=40

From his response, I could tell he was surprised, very surprised:

On 2/4/09 7:10 AM, “Yaron Galai” wrote:

Wow – you are good!… do you actually go over all these filings, or did it show up on a Google Alert?…

Well – confidentially – yes, we do deserve a mazal tov… Details soon. Please don’t spread the word though yet… Thanks.

I did not say or post a thing of course, but was very happy to:

1. Hear that a company I like its product & team raise money during this tough climate
2. See that FundingSleuth can provide some positive news for a change
3. Be the first to find out about this scoop
4. All of the above

A week passed and yesterday Yaron sent me another email with the Round B announcement press release:

On 2/10/09 1:46 PM, “Yaron Galai” wrote:

Jay – FYI – as you were the first one to catch this, here’s the press release we’re doing tomorrow. Thanks again for not publishing it so far!

Now, I am sure some of the news sites and bloggers covering start-up companies and have a much bigger readership than my blog are more suitable to scoop a story about Outbrain’s $12M round B. I am also pretty sure they will fight to be the first to report and post the story exactly when the embargo expires (10am EST). I won’t try to take it from them. It is important they will do their job and break exciting stories like this one. So, I will follow and this is the reason I scheduled this post to go live 20 minutes after the embargo expires.

Bottom line, Mazal Tov Yaron & the team for closing such an impressive round at times like these. I am sure you will use this wisely to keep growing Outbrain and enhancing the product.

Update: The Smart Player was causing script errors whenever the page loads and I had to remove the embedded player. To view the clip, Click here.

Technorati Tags: Viral Marketing, 5min, Venture Capital