Buzescu Ca and RTPR Allen & Overy Advise Facebook on LiveRail Romania Acquisition

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An RTPR Allen & Overy team led by Partner Mihai Ristici and Counsel Alina Stavaru has advised Facebook on its acquisition of LiveRail Romania, a business specializing in providing online video commercials. Buzescu Ca advised on human resources, intellectual property, and data protection matters.

The exact terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but anonymous sources are claiming Facebook paid approximately USD 500 million for the tech company.

In a Facebook press release, the company announced that "today we’re announcing that we have agreed to acquire LiveRail, an advertising technology company that helps companies like Major League Baseball, ABC Family, A&E Networks, Gannett, and Dailymotion serve better ads in the videos that appear on their websites and apps. LiveRail was founded in 2007 and offers a comprehensive platform for online video publishers that help them find and serve the best ads possible. LiveRail also helps marketers by providing them with access to premium video inventory and the information that they need in order to decide where to show their ads. What LiveRail ultimately offers is a complete advertising solution for video publishers. We believe that LiveRail, Facebook and the premium publishers it serves have an opportunity to make video ads better and more relevant for the hundreds of millions of people who watch digital video every month. More relevant ads will be more interesting and engaging to people watching online video, and more effective for marketers too. Publishers will benefit as well because more relevant ads will help them make the most out of every opportunity they have to show an ad."

LiveRail CEO Mark Trefgarne issued a statement on the company's blog: "When (co-founder Andrei Dunca) and I started LiveRail seven years ago, it was with the vision of creating a next generation advertising platform designed specifically for digital video. We believed that over the coming years, television would increasingly move to the Internet, and that both broadcasters and advertisers would follow viewers into this new digital TV age. Our goal at LiveRail has been to build the best technology in the world to help connect the digital video advertising ecosystem.  Over the last few years, we’ve been hard at work building products that fulfill that vision. Today LiveRail is the world’s largest programmatic platform for video publishers, with 170 employees across four offices, hundreds of active customers and over 7bn video ads delivered each month, our platform sits at the heart of the video advertising ecosystem. But this is only the start of our mission.  When we started talking to the team at Facebook about how we could work together, it quickly became clear that we shared a vision for the future of digital advertising. They believed, as we do, that publishers deserve a new generation of audience-aware advertising technology. We realized that by joining forces we’d be able to draw upon our respective strengths to move even faster towards our shared vision of creating the advertising platform of the future.  This announcement marks the beginning of a new chapter for the team at LiveRail, and I’m incredibly grateful to all the amazing people who have helped build this company to where it stands today. I’m confident that as part of the Facebook family, our team has the opportunity to redefine the ad tech landscape and set a new standard in technology for publishers."