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OpenWeb
OpenWeb moderates comment sections for Hearst, Yahoo, and Penske Media, turning toxic UGC into registered communities. Valued at $1.5 billion.
OpenWeb
Founded in Tel Aviv during 2015 by Nadav Shoval and Roee Goldberg, OpenWeb began as a tool to help publishers reclaim audience conversation from social media platforms. The company incorporated in the United States and later moved its operational headquarters to New York, reflecting the concentration of its early American media partnerships. Its original operating name was Spot.IM, a direct reference to turning any site into a community hub. OpenWeb provides an audience-relationship platform that combines community moderation, first-party data collection, and advertising tools. Its core technology structures on-site comments, live blogs, and “conversation spaces,” applying natural language processing to filter toxicity while encouraging user registration directly on the publisher’s domain. Publishers using the system report up to a 30 percent increase in time spent on site and a significant lift in user logins, creating privacy-compliant datasets they can monetize. Major clients span digital and traditional media, including Hearst, Penske Media, Yahoo, News Corp, and Univision. The company has raised approximately $393 million in venture funding across rounds led by Insight Partners, Georgian, and The New York Times. In November 2022, it secured a secondary investment from Valor Equity Partners, lifting its valuation to $1.5 billion (per the firm, November 2022). A previous $150 million Series E round in October 2021 valued the company at $1.1 billion. The firm maintains dual engineering and commercial hubs split between Tel Aviv and New York. OpenWeb is structurally distinct within ad-tech because it operates a rare hybrid model. Instead of merely aggregating third-party audiences, it licenses infrastructure to premium publishers, letting them own the user relationship and the resulting data. This architecture means OpenWeb is neither a traffic-arbitrage platform, like Outbrain, nor a standalone consumer network. Publishers integrate its conversation layer as native infrastructure, making the company’s growth tightly coupled to its clients’ ability to convert anonymous readers into known community members.
General information
Firm type
Asset Manager
Year founded
2015
AUM
Undisclosed
Location
Region
Middle East
Country
United States
City
New York
Corporate office
New York, NY, United States
Additional offices
Tel Aviv, Israel
Principals
Nadav Shoval
Co-Founder & CEO
Roee Goldberg
Co-Founder & COO
Sector focus
Frequently asked questions
Who runs investment and strategic decisions at OpenWeb?
Co-founder and CEO Nadav Shoval leads corporate strategy, including capital allocation and major partnership decisions. Co-founder Roee Goldberg serves as COO and oversees day-to-day operations. The company is backed by institutional investors, principally Insight Partners and Georgian, and has not disclosed a chief investment officer or dedicated family-office investment committee.
Does OpenWeb sell its own advertising, or is it purely a SaaS tool?
OpenWeb operates a dual revenue model. It licenses its conversation and identity software to publishers on a SaaS basis, and it also facilitates programmatic advertising within the community units it powers. This hybrid approach aligns OpenWeb’s fees with the publisher’s own monetization lift, making it fundamentally different from a standalone comment-plugin vendor.
How does OpenWeb differentiate its data collection from third-party ad networks?
OpenWeb’s architecture keeps user registration and behavioral data inside the publisher’s owned ecosystem. The publisher controls the data asset directly and uses OpenWeb’s tools to activate it for advertising and subscription conversions. This contrasts with systems like Google’s AMP or Facebook’s embedded commenting, which extract user data to another platform.
What media sectors does OpenWeb avoid?
OpenWeb has stated internally and in press that it avoids working with sites that actively promote hate speech, disinformation, or violent extremism, and its automated moderation is designed to flag such content. It generally focuses on scaled, brand-safe environments — major newspapers, sports publishers, and entertainment media — rather than fringe or anonymous message boards.
Is OpenWeb profitable, and what is its known revenue scale?
OpenWeb has not publicly disclosed profitability or exact revenue figures. In 2022 it indicated it was approaching $100 million in annual recurring revenue, though this number has not been independently verified. The company was valued at $1.5 billion following a secondary investment by Valor Equity Partners in November 2022.
Profile maintained by Altss using OSINT (open-source intelligence), regulatory filings, licensed data partners, and verified direct submissions. Read the methodology. Last updated: . Continuous refresh with full update cycles at least every 30 days.
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