Taboola Innovation & Technology Culture

From childhood dreams to global impact, it’s recognition time for the teams behind building and launching Realize and its new Predictive Audiences tool. We asked Taboolars across Product, Engineering, and Product Marketing, “What was your dream job as a kid?” 

Their answers? Heartwarming and unexpected. Their jobs today? Inspirational and game-changing, and the impact of their work is increasingly making its mark on advertisers worldwide. 

Predictive Audiences: Its Superpower, Explained

Before we meet the incredible team behind the magic, let’s dive into what exactly Predictive Audiences is and what’s got the team so hyped. “We love superheroes at Taboola,” Roei Turgeman, Group Director, Product Management shared, with Boaz Shor, Algorithm Engineer, and Allen Chang, R&D Team Lead, adding that if Predictive Audiences had a superpower, it would be “x-ray vision for customer behavior.”

The Predictive Audiences tool is about leveraging data to connect advertisers with the right people at the right time. Allen explained, “Predictive Audiences leverage historical data to help advertisers identify and reach users with similar interests to their existing customers.” A key strength of the powerful tool the team is super proud of? It allows advertisers to move beyond simple demographics and tap into users’ intent, predicting their future actions based on their online behavior. 

Meet The Team

While the road to their careers today may have been unexpected for some—from childhood aspirations of journalism, lawyering, and astronomy—the team behind Realize has many reasons to celebrate their accomplishments. Their work has driven users to report strong performance and higher conversions for less spending compared to campaigns run outside of Predictive Audiences, and it’s just the beginning. Now, let’s meet the team!

Meet Allen Chang, R&D Team Lead. With an early childhood dream to work in AI, his passion is now a driving force in his work at Taboola. He leads the R&D team behind Predictive Audiences and builds solutions that empower advertisers to reach their ideal customers. Allen’s younger self? “He’d be excited to see what I’m doing because it’s always been my dream to build AI products.”

Boaz Shor, an Algorithm Engineer, took a significantly different route to the tech world. “I initially wanted to be a doctor,” he revealed. His pursuit of medicine led him to computational biology, where a love for the “computational” side of things ultimately steered him towards computer science. Today, Boaz plays a crucial role in crafting the algorithms that power Predictive Audiences. “The kid that I was would think this is a part of an amazing science fiction movie. They’d be very excited.”

Gabi Assif, Product Manager, expressed how his early goal was to be a lawyer for deaf individuals. “I even learned sign language,” he added. While his path shifted away from law, today, Gabi has been an integral part of ensuring that tools like Predictive Audiences are intuitive and impactful. When reflecting on his earlier career dreams and recent accomplishments, Gabi humorously added that his younger self would ask, “What’s a product manager?”

Jonathan Quach, an Algorithm Engineer, shared how, in his earlier years, he was fascinated by astronomy but ended up transitioning to tech after admiring his friend’s coding work, piquing his interest in pursuing a tech career. Today, Jonathan expressed, “It makes me genuinely happy that our users are reporting good performance using Predictive Audiences. They’re saving costs, and with every dollar they put in, they’re getting more out.”

Katherine Pickles, Senior Product Marketing Manager, shared, “When I was younger, I wanted to be a journalist or a writer.” Today, her knack for crafting compelling narratives and understanding audience needs now translates into her work in product marketing, ensuring that the value of Taboola’s products are clearly communicated. Her younger self? Katherine said, “They’d be excited that I’m working on products that show real innovation and drive impact.”

For Tom Chin, an Algorithm Engineer, working in tech and building tools that solve real-world problems was always a motivator. Tom shared, “I wouldn’t have imagined that someday I could become someone who would develop such large systems serving this number of users globally. I see a real impact on this product because I see the daily real-time metrics.”

Roei Turgeman, Group Director, Product Management, also took a turn from his early aspirations. “As a kid, I wanted to be a lawyer, but I used to take apart VCRs, so I think, in some way, it was my destiny to build cool products that have an impact,” he shared. Now, he’s at the forefront of overseeing a team of product managers. Roei’s expertise lies in understanding market needs, defining product strategy, ensuring collaboration between product and R&D, and playing a key role in the strategic direction of innovations like Predictive Audiences.

A Team Collaboration

Like any successful product, Predictive Audiences was a deeply collaborative effort. Katherine shared, “I work in product marketing, so that means that I work very closely with our product teams developing new products, and I work on enabling our advertisers and our sales and account managers to sell those products to their customers.” This collaborative spirit extended throughout the development process as Boaz explained, “We have a very good collaboration between R&D and Product. (Product) tells us what they hear from their customers, what their needs are, what they’re looking for, and we (R&D) tell them what we can actually do.” This partnership, he noted, led to “an amazing experience working together,” where both sides helped each other “achieve what we needed to” and “define the product in the best way” for customers. 

Roei further highlighted the importance of teamwork, adding, “I’m fortunate to work with a team of skilled product managers and our R&D partners to bring innovative ideas to fruition.” This close partnership was echoed by Gabi, who called out the “exceptional” nature of the collaboration and the expertise he gained. Reflecting on the full-cycle experience of working on this product, Tom added, “Being involved from the beginning and seeing the positive impact on our advertisers has been incredibly rewarding.” With a joyful smile, Boaz emphasized, “It’s safe to say that we’re proud of what we accomplished.”

From those early childhood dreams to building and launching Predictive Audiences under Realize, a performance marketing platform that has a real impact on how advertisers connect with their audiences, it’s remarkable and (might we add, heartwarming) to hear the excitement and pride from the team who stands behind it. As Jonathan reminds us, “Technology should ultimately serve people, and I’m proud to be in a job that allows me to get to do that.” 

To learn more about why we are consistently ranked as a great place to work, check out the Taboola Life blog.  Visit our careers page and realize your potential with #TaboolaLife.

If my younger self could see me now… they’d probably be shocked and a little confused, but also incredibly excited about the work I’m doing today as a Data Science Team Leader!

Huge shoutout to the amazing team I had the privilege of working with to bring #PredictiveAudiences to life :)

NEW YORK, NY  – Taboola (Nasdaq: TBLA), a global leader in delivering performance at scale for advertisers, today announced the launch of Realize+, the next phase of Taboola’s performance marketing platform, Realize.

Realize+ is an agentic system that helps performance marketers unlock more conversions beyond search and social. It continuously makes and executes campaign decisions, helping drive incremental results, while reducing manual effort.

Taboola estimates that around 80% of marketers would increase investment in the open web if it offered automated, AI-powered campaign solutions that they get from the walled gardens. Additionally, nearly 86% say they would allocate up to a quarter of their performance budgets to the open web if such capabilities were available.*

Realize is a technology platform that helps advertisers achieve outcomes at scale, leveraging Taboola’s unique supply, first-party data, and AI. It enables performance campaigns across many of the world’s largest and most trusted publishers, OEMs, and apps.

To deliver this, Realize+ is built on a two-part approach: 

• The Decision Engine: Within Realize, automatically moves budget in real time to the highest-performing campaigns and opportunities using a new tool called the Budget Allocator.
• The Element Generator: Creates and continuously improves ads and targeting, helping campaigns stay effective without manual updates.

Together, these capabilities are designed to replicate the performance and autonomy of walled gardens, while providing a direct path to premium inventory and ensuring more budget is spent on outcomes. 

Realize is also opening itself to Claude Skills, giving advertisers and agencies a conversational front door to Taboola from inside Claude. The first skill released will handle campaign setup and optimization and it is the first of several skills Taboola plans to release over the coming months, which remove friction for agencies and advertisers standardizing on AI-native workflows.

Realize+ has spent several months in beta. Stemming from positive early results, phase 2 of the beta will now be expanding in Q2 with improved models, while also featuring an extensive roadmap throughout 2026.

Supporting quotes

“Allocating budget across campaigns in real time is one of the biggest challenges in performance marketing,” said Héctor Vargas Mendoza, Senior Growth Marketing Manager – Team Lead at Sonova Marketing GmbH. “Tools like Realize+ and its Budget Allocator are especially compelling because they have the potential to automatically shift spend toward what’s working best—without constant manual adjustments. That kind of efficiency could be a meaningful unlock for teams looking to drive stronger performance at scale.”

“Driving consistent performance at scale requires both efficiency and adaptability,” said Matt Linder, Co-founder at Strand Marketing. “We’ve been encouraged by the early results we’re seeing with Realize, particularly its ability to help optimize campaigns in real time and surface new opportunities for growth. As these capabilities continue to evolve with Realize+, we’re excited about the potential to further streamline execution and drive even stronger performance moving forward.”

“For years, advertisers have hit a ceiling when trying to scale performance beyond search and social,” said Adam Singolda, CEO and founder of Taboola. “With Realize+, we’re removing that barrier – bringing automation, intelligence, and true performance to the open web so marketers can drive measurable growth at scale. And by launching Realize+ we’re meeting advertisers and agencies where they already work. As the industry shifts toward AI-native media operations, we want Taboola to be the easiest open web platform to plug into any agent, any stack, any workflow.”

“We’re entering an era where advertising is shifting from manual optimization to fully agentic systems. With Realize+, we’re building intelligent agents that operate continuously on behalf of advertisers – evaluating strategies across thousands of signals, learning from patterns across the entire ecosystem, and making decisions in real time. 

If you think about the complexity advertisers face today – hundreds of variables across creative, audience, bidding, and placement – it’s simply not tractable for humans to manage. Agentic AI changes that. It allows us to explore and optimize across that entire space dynamically, not just reactively. What’s powerful about Realize+ is that we’re doing this while maintaining transparency and control, which is something that’s been largely missing in walled garden systems. Advertisers don’t just get outcomes, they understand and guide how those outcomes are achieved. 

Additionally, as the industry shifts toward AI-native media operations, we want Taboola to be the easiest open web platform to plug into any agent, any stack, and any workflow. I’m excited to make it easier for any agency, big or small, or any advertiser to now operate Realize with full control, or Realize+ with more automation from within their Claude environment,” continued Singolda.

*Source: Based on a survey of 200 senior marketers at U.S. and UK enterprises with 1,000+ employees in 2026.

About Taboola  

Taboola empowers businesses to grow through performance advertising technology that goes beyond search and social and delivers measurable outcomes at scale.

Taboola works with thousands of businesses who advertise directly on Realize, Taboola’s powerful ad platform, reaching approximately 600M daily active users across some of the best publishers in the world. Publishers like NBC News, Yahoo, and OEMs such as Samsung, Xiaomi and others use Taboola’s technology to grow audience and revenue, enabling Realize to offer unique data, specialized algorithms, and unmatched scale.

Disclaimer – Forward-Looking Statements

Taboola (the “Company”) may, in this communication, make certain statements that are not historical facts and relate to analysis or other information which are based on forecasts or future or results. Examples of such forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding future prospects, product development and business strategies. Words such as “expect,” “estimate,” “project,” “budget,” “forecast,” “anticipate,” “intend,” “plan,” “may,” “will,” “could,” “should,” “believes,” “predicts,” “potential,” “continue,” and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements but are not the exclusive means for identifying such statements. By their very nature, forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties, both general and specific, and there are risks that the predictions, forecasts, projections and other forward-looking statements will not be achieved. You should understand that a number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from the plans, objectives, expectations, estimates and intentions expressed in such forward-looking statements, including the risks set forth in the Company’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025 under Part 1, Item 1A “Risk Factors” and our subsequent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Company cautions readers not to place undue reliance upon any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made. The Company does not undertake or accept any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect any change in its expectations or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement is based.