Conduit Joins Billion-Dollar Club As Yozma Sells Stake To Silver Lake

Yozma Venture Capital is selling its stake in startupConduit for a massive return. The story was reported in the Israeli publication Globes, but I’ve confirmed the details with a source who has knowledge of the deal, and who also identified the buyer (described by Globes only as “a large foreign investment firm that has tens of billions of dollars under management”) as private equity firm Silver Lake.
Yozma invested $1.5 million for 9 percent ownership of Conduit in 2006. Now it’s selling its stake for $250 million. In other words, it’s seeing a return that’s nearly 200 times the size of the initial investment. According to Globes, the Israeli venture capital industry has never seen a return on that scale.
This deal values Conduit at $2.5 billion — which, incidentally, puts it in the billion-dollar league thatIndex Ventures partner Saul Klein predicted for it last year. The company started out as a toolbar startup, partnering with both Google and then Microsoft, but it recently rebranded as a wide-ranging service to help publishers engage their users. Conduit says it works with 260,000 publishers to reach 250 million users in 120 companies.
I’ve emailed Silver Lake for comment and will update if I hear back.
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/09/yozma-selling-conduit/