Taboola's Shares Debut After SPAC Merger, Susquehanna Analyst Sees 130% Upside

Digital ad company Taboola.com Ltd TBLA share saw its first day of trading following its special acquisition corporation (SPAC) merger with ION Acquisition Corp 1 Ltd IACA.
The transaction will generate $526 million upon closing. The shares will begin trading on the Nasdaq today under the ticker “TBLA,” CNBC reports.
Taboola places content recommendation boxes on the websites of publishers. Those boxes recommend pieces of content from a publisher’s site along with promoted slots that advertisers pay. Taboola earns when advertisers pay. Taboola shares that revenue back with the publisher.
Taboola reported the first quarter FY21 revenue of $303 million and net income of $18.6 million. Over 13,000 advertisers use its network to reach over 500 million daily active users on the sites of more than 9,000 publishers.
Taboola sees its opportunity in the tens of billions of dollars spent advertising on the internet on sites outside Alphabet Inc GOOG GOOGL, Google, or Facebook Inc’s FB “walled gardens.”
Taboola provides users with recommendations for content and things they might like but just never knew existed, CEO Adam Singolda said. The future of Taboola will be about recommendation engines for items beyond articles, like e-commerce items, videos, games, or apps.
Singolda remained bullish over the prospects of recommendation engines on the open web moving.
Taboola also sought to place recommendations on more devices, like cars and connected TVs.
In Oct. 2019, Taboola and competitor Outbrain planned to merge to beat digital advertising giants like Google and Facebook. However, they disagreed on revised deal terms. Outbrain filed for an initial public offering on Tuesday.
Susquehanna analyst Shyam Patil initiated coverage on Tabola.com with a Positive rating and a price target of $23, implying 130% upside.