Ori Lahav — Co-Founder & General Manager, Israel at Outbrain

Ori Lahav serves as Co-Founder and General Manager of Israel at Outbrain, one of the world's leading open web discovery and native advertising platforms. As a co-founder, Lahav has been instrumental in building Outbrain from its early stages, helping to establish and grow the company's Israeli operations, which serve as a significant technology and engineering hub for the global organization. His dual role as both a founding member and regional general manager underscores his long-standing strategic importance to the company's development and operational leadership. Outbrain was founded in 2006 in New York with strong roots in Israel, and the Israeli office has historically been central to the company's product and engineering capabilities. Lahav's continued leadership in this capacity reflects the enduring importance of the Israel hub within Outbrain's global structure. The company has grown to become one of the dominant forces in native advertising and content recommendation, competing closely with Taboola and other open web monetization platforms. This leadership profile is particularly relevant in the context of Outbrain's evolving business trajectory, including its merger with Teads announced in 2024, which would create one of the largest open internet advertising platforms globally. Lahav's foundational role and continued operational leadership in Israel positions him as a key figure in navigating the company through this significant transformation and integration period.

Ori Lahav's enduring role as Co-Founder and General Manager of Israel at Outbrain highlights the strategic importance of Israel as a technology and innovation center within the global AdTech ecosystem. Israel has long been a hotbed for AdTech talent and engineering excellence, and Outbrain's Israeli operations reflect this broader industry trend of leveraging Israeli R&D capabilities for competitive advantage in areas such as algorithmic content recommendation, audience targeting, and publisher monetization. From a competitive standpoint, stable and experienced founding leadership at the operational level is a meaningful asset as Outbrain navigates an increasingly consolidating native and open web advertising market. The planned merger with Teads, if completed, would significantly reshape the competitive landscape against players like Taboola, Google, and Meta in the open web and native advertising segments. Having co-founders like Lahav deeply embedded in core operational hubs provides continuity and institutional knowledge during such transformative periods. More broadly, this reflects a trend in AdTech where founding teams maintain operational roles well into a company's maturity, particularly in engineering-heavy regional offices. This continuity can be a stabilizing force for talent retention and product innovation, both of which are critical as the industry grapples with signal loss from cookie deprecation, the rise of AI-driven ad targeting, and the ongoing shift of ad budgets toward performance-driven native and contextual formats.