American digital content company AOL has acquired video advertising platform provider Adap.tv for $405 million in cash ($322 million) and stock ($83 million in AOL shares).
AOL, Adap.tv, Amir Ashkenazi, Teg Grenager eBay, Bessemer Venture Partners, Gemini Israel Funds, Redpoint Ventures, Spark Capital, Adap.tv is an online video advertising company whose advertising technology platform provides advertisers and publishers the ability to buy and sell video advertising inventory across desktop, mobile, and connected TV platforms.
The acquisition is expected to enhance AOL offerings to publishers and advertisers. In 2012, Adap.tv supported more than 26,000 global ad campaigns, which ran on approximately 9,500 Web sites and was used by many top brand advertisers.
"At Adap.tv, we are focused on building the most important business within the most important category in digital advertising," said Amir Ashkenazi, CEO, Adap.tv. "We believe that most TV advertising will soon be traded programmatically on platforms like ours. The combination of AOL and Adap.tv accelerates our vision of efficient and effective TV and video advertising."
Adap.tv will operate independently as part of AOL's video organization which is led by Ran Harnevo, SVP, Video, and be included as part of the overall solution offered by AOL Networks to its publisher and advertiser partners.
Adap.tv was founded in 2007 by Ashkenazi and Teg Grenager, the company's chief product officer. Prior to founding Adap.tv, Ashkenazi was a founder and the CTO of Shopping.com, an ecommerce service, which was acquired by eBay in 2005. Before founding Adap.tv, Grenager studied natural language processing and computational linguistics at Stanford University, where he is a PhD candidate in computer science.
Adap.tv is a privately held company backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, Gemini Israel Funds, Redpoint Ventures and Spark Capital. Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Adap.tv has U.S. offices in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, and international offices in Australia, India and London.