TechCrunch
Israeli video adtech startup, Carambola has closed a $4 million Series A round, led by Pitango Venture Capital. Existing investors, 2B Angels, Plus Ventures and Rutledge Vine Capital, also participated in the round.
Carambola, which was founded back in 2011 and raised a $1 million seed this July, has built a platform to automate the process of making online video content interactive — by scanning the video and using proprietary algorithms to determine contextually relevant additional content to serve up for users to interact with.
The platform does away with the need to manually enter interactive content into the ad unit, making it easier to augment videos with additional content designed to encourage users to spend more time eyeballing the video — such as contextual quizzes, recommendations for recipes, ecommerce offers, information about the host of the show and so on. The idea being that this sort of interactive content is stickier and more engaging for video viewers than traditional video ads (such as pre-roll or interstitials)…