Expand Marketing And Advertising Business, LinkedIn Acquires This Startup

LinkedIn expanded its business by acquiring Oribi. (photo: doc. unsplash)

JAKARTA - LinkedIn has just expanded its business by acquiring Oribi, a startup from Tel Aviv that is engaged in marketing technology. The deal will see LinkedIn set up its first office in Israel.

This acquisition certainly demonstrates the ambitions of Microsoft's networking platform, providing more analytics and insights across the wider internet.

LinkedIn is a social network for people who want to connect with others in their professional field and looking for work with more than 810 million users.

The company has actually had a longstanding business in marketing and advertising on its own platform. Even so, the terms of the deal were not disclosed by the company, but a source confirmed that LinkedIn paid between $80 million and $90 million for Oribi.

According to PitchBook data, as a start-up, Oribi has raised under $28 million from investors that include Sequoia, TLV Partners, Ibex and others, including taking a small amount of funding from Google as part of a local accelerator run by the search engine giant. .

This deal is really quite interesting, and is a signal for LinkedIn to continue investing in its marketing and advertising services, a fast-growing area for the company.

The acquisition of Oribi in particular represents a major shift in what LinkedIn will be doing in marketing. Oribi's mission is to democratize web analytics. In other words, it makes it easier for small companies to build and run customized analytics to measure their marketing strategy.

This is the second acquisition LinkedIn has made in recent years to expand that part of the business, the other being to acquire Drawbridge in 2019.

LinkedIn has yet to determine how many employees from Oribi are joining unless several members of the Oribi team, including founder and veteran entrepreneur, Iris Shoor, are expected to join the larger company and work in LinkedIn's new Tel Aviv office.