Outbrain has secured a total of $45 million in funds, as announced in a blog post by the company’s co-founder and chief executive, Yaron Galai.

The investment will allow the company to further develop its content recommendation solutions and also help web users find content in different ways. It follows the generation of $50 million in a separate funding round in July of last year, bringing the group’s total funding up to nearly $200 million.

Outbrain is an Israel-based content recommendation platform behind many of the sponsored links found at the bottom of online news articles. Its tailored recommendations reach 557 million people globally every month, and  the company has partnered with publishers and marketers in over 55 countries.

Its current client roster lists well-known sites such as The Telegraph, CNN, Sky News and New York Post.

“Outbrain created the market for content discovery and leads in content marketing, continuing to innovate for quality performance, driving results for publishers and brands,” added Galai.

Innovation and profitability

The platform had a strong start to the year and some of its projects have seen plenty of momentum in Q1.

Although Galai, also one of the investors, did not specify what exactly the round of investment will go towards, the company is planning to use it to continue working on product innovation , potentially through acquisitions as well as with its existing tech.

In March, Outbrain acquired Los Angeles-based software firm Reeve to launch Automatic Yield, a product informing publishers how much each article generates in revenue in real time.

The idea has been praised for innovation in bringing programmatic technology to content and allowing publishers to preserve their own business.

In April, when teaming up with CNN, Outbrain also developed the first two-way chatbot to power content recommendations through chat and messaging platforms.

Revealed at Facebook’s F8 developer conference, the feature powered by Outbrain for Chat will enable users to directly message CNN to get personalised stories and breaking news.

To show for the company’s busy start to the year, Galai also mentioned the company was profitable in Q1, which tends to be “the weakest” quarter in the space.

“As they say – hot market or cold, it’s never a bad time for great companies to raise capital,” he added.