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Liverail, a Romanian startup, acquired by Facebook

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Facebook just acquired Liverail, the leading publisher monetization platform for video, in a transaction valued around 400-500 million dollars.

Liverail was founded in 2007 by three people:
Mark Trefgarne (CEO, English)
Andrei Dunca (CTO, Romanian)
Sergiu Biris (Romanian)

Andrei Dunca and Sergiu Biris were also associated previously with founding Trilulilu.ro, the Youtube of Romania, a site which is the leading service provider in the Romanian online entertainment.

The company, Liverail, has 170 employees and 50 from among them are located in the city of Cluj-Napoca in Romania (most probably the technical arm of the startup). The main office is in San Francisco with secondary offices in New York, Paris and London.

Liverail-founders

Liverail connects marketers to publishers in realtime and was on track to serve 7 billion ads a month and on a pace of 200 million dollars in gross revenue this year (thus, the amount Facebook supposedly paid for the company is credible).

Some of the big customers Liverail has are ABC Family, Major League Baseball, A&E Networks, Gannett, Dailymotion.

“When we started talking to the team at Facebook about how we could work together, it quickly became clear that we shared a vision for the future of digital advertising. They believed, as we do, that publishers deserve a new generation of audience-aware advertising technology. We realized that by joining forces we’d be able to draw upon our respective strengths to move even faster towards our shared vision of creating the advertising platform of the future.”, said Mark Trefgarne, Liverail CEO.

 

“We believe that LiveRail, Facebook and the premium publishers it serves have an opportunity to make video ads better and more relevant for the hundreds of millions of people who watch digital video every month. More relevant ads will be more interesting and engaging to people watching online video, and more effective for marketers too. Publishers will benefit as well because more relevant ads will help them make the most out of every opportunity they have to show an ad.” mentions Brian Boland, Vice-President of Ads Product Marketing and Atlas at Facebook.

Facebook is already experimenting with video ads (those 15 seconds auto-starting videos in the newsfeed) and it will probably use the tehnology of Liverail to improve the targetting of those video ads (Liverail will remain autonomous, just like Instagram and Whatsapp remained after Facebook acquired them too).

Congratulations to the founders and yet another example of the talent which is flourishing in technology in Romania!

Now, if only more investors will turn to this country and invest in its startups (that’s what Romania lacks so far).
RomanianStartups.com is here to help!

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