Yahoo gobbles up another ad startup, ClarityRay

By now, being acquired by Yahoo is a whole separate exit category for startups, and the latest to go that route is ClarityRay, an Israeli startup that helps publishers identify fraudulent ads.

From the company’s homepage:

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Our vision has always been making the eco-system safe, compliant and sustainable for consumers, publishers and advertisers. We helped the online advertising industry take a big step towards that direction by identifying, measuring, and solving many of its unseen hurdles inhibiting that. We brought traffic clarity to an amazing roster of clients, with our findings becoming an industry standard.

Joining Yahoo now will allow us to make use of that momentum and take the next steps (or rather, leaps) towards that vision, and we couldn’t be more excited. This once-in-a-lifetime opportunity enables the mass scaling of our technology, impact and ideas to the absolute forefront of our field, while working with an amazing team who shares our passion. We’re proud to call Yahoo ‘home’.

The company originally provided two solutions, one for Internet surfers and one for publishers. For Internet surfers, ClarityRay provides an ad-blocker, and for publishers, a product that lets them provide subscriptions to their sites without ads, although users of the ad-blocker will still see an ad if they visit one of ClarityRay’s publisher customers. However, it seems that its focus has moved into ad fraud and security.

Terms of the deal are not disclosed.

The company was founded in 2012 by Ido Yablonka, Vadim Zak, and Guy Pitelko and is based in Tel Aviv. It raised $500,000 in May 2012 from Saar Wilf.