Carambola (Company)
Carambola is an online advertising company specializing in video content enrichment. The company enriches videos by creating an interactive layer exposed to individual users who choose to engage with the content. Carambola partnered with AOL to launch their product in the U.S. in 2013, introducing, what AOL called, "the world's first automated video enrichment platform."
Product
Carambola is an automated video enrichment platform offering video publishers a new advertising space to monetize on.
Carambola uses semantic analysis in order to understand video content and aggregate relevant information for each video - both from the web (i.e., articles, social links, e-commerce) and from Carambola's original content library.
As a "Content-Technology" company, Carambola's aggregation and optimization engines aim to suit different enrichments for every video vertical (i.e., food, travel, entertainment, fashion, lifestyle, etc.) and for each individual user (using behavioral targeting).
Funding
In July of 2013 Carambola executives announced that they had completed their $1 million seed round of fundraising. The initial investors were Singapore VC Rutledge, micro investment firm 2B-Angels, Plus Ventures and Israeli incubator Explore.
In December of that same year, Carambola announced that it had closed its Round A fundraising, raising $4 million. The round was led by one of Israel's largest Venture capital firms, Pitango.