Gemini’s new investment - Outbrain

Today we announced our new investment – Outbrain, founded by Yaron Galai and Ori Lahav. Yaron founded it last year right after selling Quigo to AOL for $350M+. What is the company about? First of all, off their official blog: 

"We love reading blogs, but the signal-to-noise ratio makes it impossible to find the good content anymore. We're looking to build the standard platform for discovery of high-quality, personalized blog content on the web. We want to give readers their personalized recommendations at all those places where they are already consuming content - blogs, news sites and RSS aggregators. There are quite a few companies doing different flavors of collaborative filtering on the web, but we're focused on doing one thing and doing it very well - making the best personalized recommendations of blog and news content."

If you have been checking this blog in the past, you are probably familiar already with the Outbrain widget. It's the simple rating widget at the bottom of each post. I love this widget for 3 important reasons:

1. It provides real value for my readers. They can give feedback in addition to comments, and they can leverage the ratings across various blogs to discover relevant new content.
2. It's easy to install, and it has a very "minimal" implementation. In other words, it's very easy to use, in the spirit of "do no evil".
   
3. It provides real value to me as a blogger, simply because I get a better feeling about what works and what doesn't. In addition, I get more traffic to my site, since Outbrain recommends blog posts that are part of the Outbrain recommendation network.
   

With a great product and a great entrepreneur, this investment is a no (out)brainer. I can also add that there is a lot more coming from Outbrain that will reveal the amazing potential of this company.

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Finally, this new investment is exciting for us as it is the first company that successfully graduates from the LgiLAB, the Lightspeed Gemini Internet Lab headed by Ouriel Ohayon. In addition, I can definitely say that there many other exciting projects growing in the lab.