Company Profile / Advertising Technology
The Roll-Up That Refused to Choke, and Bet It All on One Platform
The Israeli adtech company spent a decade buying its way across every screen. Now, after Microsoft pulled the rug on its search business, Perion is betting the whole company on one AI platform - and on the screens Google can't own.
In advertising technology, the deadliest risk rarely shows up on a balance sheet. It arrives as an email. For Perion Network, that email came from Microsoft in 2024, quietly rewriting the rules of the Bing search marketplace that fed one of the company's biggest revenue lines. Within a year, Perion's search advertising revenue had fallen roughly 76 percent. A lesser company would have spent the following quarters explaining the decline. Perion spent them proving it had already built a way out.
The way out had a name by early 2025: Perion One, a unified, AI-driven platform that folded the company's tangle of acquired brands and technologies into a single system for planning, buying, optimizing and measuring ads. The pivot was not improvised. It was the payoff of a decade of deals, and of a stubborn refusal to depend on any one screen, or any one partner, for survival.
What it isAn adtech company that lives on every screen
Perion Network Ltd. is a publicly traded advertising-technology company, listed on both NASDAQ and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange under the ticker PERI. Its job is to sit in the middle of the digital-ad economy - connecting advertisers, agencies, retailers and publishers with the consumers they want to reach across search, display, video, connected TV (CTV), digital out-of-home (DOOH) and retail media. In plainer terms: whether an ad shows up in a search result, inside a streaming show, on a gas-pump screen or beside a product listing, Perion wants to be the technology that put it there.
The company is headquartered in Tel Aviv, with a US base in New York and offices across Europe, and employs roughly 520 people. Its customers are the brands and media buyers who need reach, the retailers building their own ad networks, and the publishers trying to squeeze more value from their inventory.
The originFrom animated email to programmatic billboards
The origin story is the fun part. Perion did not begin as an adtech company at all. In 1999, cousins Yaron and Ofer Adler founded a business called IncrediMail, which made animated email and greeting-card software - the kind of program that turned a message to your aunt into a small fireworks display. The company went public on NASDAQ in 2006, and in 2011 rebranded as Perion Network, pivoting toward data-driven advertising.
What followed was a long shopping list. In 2015, Perion paid about $180 million for Undertone, a specialist in high-impact, cross-screen creative advertising. In 2023 it added Hivestack, a full-stack programmatic DOOH platform, in a deal worth roughly $100 million plus performance payments, and Vidazoo, a video-monetization platform. In 2025 it acquired Greenbids, an AI-powered media-buying optimizer. Each purchase added a channel. The trouble with buying channels, though, is that you end up with a drawer full of logos and no single product.
- 1999
IncrediMail is founded
Cousins Yaron and Ofer Adler launch animated email and greeting-card software.
- 2006
IPO on NASDAQ
The company goes public.
- 2011
Rebrand to Perion
A pivot toward data-driven advertising begins.
- 2015
Undertone, ~$180M
Entry into premium high-impact display and video.
- 2023
Hivestack + Vidazoo
Programmatic billboards and publisher video join the stack.
- 2024
Search shock + Anyplace TV
Bing changes hit search; Perion pushes deeper into DOOH.
- 2025
Perion One launches
Brands and technologies unify under one AI platform.
The reckoningWhen one customer is your whole business
For years, a large slice of Perion's revenue flowed through a single search-distribution partnership with Microsoft Bing. It was lucrative, and it was concentrated - the kind of arrangement that looks like a strength right up until the day it doesn't. In 2024, Microsoft changed the pricing and mechanics of its search marketplace and removed a number of publishers from distribution. Perion warned investors that search revenue from the Bing agreement would fall to less than 5 percent of its total in the second half of the year.
The deadliest risk in adtech is the customer you can't afford to lose - and can't control.The concentration problem, in one line
The numbers told the story bluntly. Full-year 2025 revenue came in at $439.9 million, down 12 percent from $498.3 million the year before, with search revenue off about 76 percent. But the same report carried a second, more useful number: the parts of the business Perion actually controlled were growing.
The pivotThe screens Google can't own
Perion's growth in 2025 came from the un-obvious corners of advertising. Connected TV revenue rose 42 percent year over year. Digital out-of-home - the world of programmatic billboards, transit screens and public displays that Hivestack specializes in - rose 36 percent, with the company citing DOOH growth as high as 80 percent in an early-2025 update. Retail media, where retailers turn their own sites into ad networks, rounded out the growth engines.
The strategic logic is worth sitting with. Search and social are the most crowded, most fought-over inventory in advertising, dominated by Google, Meta and Amazon. Perion's answer was to lean into places the walled gardens don't fully own: the billboard at the pump, the pause screen on a streaming app, the departure board at the airport. Its Anyplace TV product, launched in late 2024, does exactly that - it takes a CTV or video campaign and extends it into programmatic DOOH environments, turning one-to-one video reach into one-to-many public screens.
The productsWhat Perion actually sells
Underneath the Perion One umbrella sits a small family of products, most of them arriving through acquisition and now stitched together:
One product deserves a second look. SORT - short for Smart Optimization of Responsive Traits - is Undertone's cookieless targeting technology. Instead of following a person around the web with third-party cookies, it reads real-time context to decide which ad fits. Perion built it before Chrome's long saga over killing the third-party cookie made cookieless targeting a boardroom topic, which is a quietly useful position to be in.
Cookies were never the point. Targeting was.The idea behind SORT
The business modelTwo revenue lines, deliberately rebalanced
Perion makes money in two broad ways. The first is Advertising Solutions - display, video, CTV, DOOH, retail media and social - sold to advertisers, agencies, retailers and publishers on programmatic and managed-service terms. The second is Search Advertising, the line historically tied to Microsoft Bing. In 2025 Advertising Solutions accounted for roughly 79 percent of revenue and search about 22 percent, a near-inversion of the company's older, search-heavy shape. Increasingly, Perion also monetizes proprietary AI optimization and its own DOOH and CTV inventory, rather than simply passing spend through to someone else's platform.
The competitionAn independent in a walled-garden world
Perion competes on several fronts at once. On publisher monetization and programmatic supply, it runs up against Magnite and PubMatic. In retail and commerce media, Criteo looms, along with the ad arms of Amazon and Walmart. Across identity, measurement and demand, The Trade Desk, Taboola and Microsoft's Xandr are all in the mix - and behind all of them sit the giants, Google, Amazon and Meta, that own the biggest pools of data and demand. Perion's pitch is the classic independent's pitch: it is not a walled garden, so it can plan and buy across channels the giants would rather keep separate.
The peopleWho is steering the pivot
Chief executive Tal Jacobson has led the company since 2023, having joined in 2018 as a general manager after earlier roles at Similarweb, McCann Erickson and AOL. On the marketing side, Erin McCallion took over as Chief Marketing Officer in 2024 - stepping in, notably, at the exact moment the company had to sell a growth story built on its expanding channels while the market fixated on its shrinking one. Both inherited the harder half of a roll-up: not buying the pieces, but making them add up.
Perion One represents a significant transformation for our company, which will unify our diversified brands and advanced technologies into one leading platform.Tal Jacobson, CEO
Where it fitsA mid-sized bet on the un-crowded screens
In a global adtech market measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars, Perion is not a giant, and it does not pretend to be. Its position is more specific and, arguably, more defensible: a mid-sized independent that has chosen to grow in CTV, DOOH and retail media rather than fight for scraps in search and social. The company that started by animating your email now runs ads across the billboard, the television, the phone and, still, the search bar - and after a decade of assembling those pieces, it has finally welded them into one.