Outbrain reshuffles senior team with two new appointments

Yonatan Maman

Adteach outfit Outbrain has appointed Yonatan Maman as chief technology officer and Andraz Tori in a newly created role chief product officer.

The restructure comes as co-founder Ori Lahav steps down from his role of chief technology officer. He will transition his responsibilities and focus on cross-company strategic initiatives, while continuing his role as general manager, Israel.

The newly-appointed executives will report to the company’s CEO David Kostman. In their new roles, the pair will support Outbrain’s growth by building upon the company’s existing technologies and product offerings to align with the evolving needs of publishers, brands, and advertisers as they increasingly seek to drive measurable outcomes while building deeper engagement with audiences.

“Under Ori’s esteemed leadership, Yonatan and Andraz have helped transform our engineering team into a world-class technology organisation, built a mature infrastructure fit for supporting our partners, and helped us reach over $1 billion in revenue,” said Kostman.

Yaron Galai, Outbrain’s co-founder and co-CEO continued, “We’re introducing a new generation of Outbrain leadership who are committed to advancing and elevating Outbrain’s capabilities, offerings, and culture, and I’m looking forward to seeing how Yonatan and Andraz will build upon Ori’s legacy.”

Andraz Tori

Maman joined Outbrain in 2011 as a senior software engineer and has served as vice president of engineering for the past five years. While leading Outbrain’s R&D team, he brought modern practices and new capabilities to the growing engineering organisation. While Tori served as head of recommendations and data science at Outbrain for the past four years, following Outbrain’s acquisition of Zemanta, of which he was a founder.

“Outbrain is entering a new era, and I’m excited to continue expanding upon our 16 years of prediction technology. We plan to keep innovating and providing great insights and actionable outcomes for our customers and partners,” said Maman.

Tori added, “Our industry is entering an AI-powered age where automation and machine learning are driving real outcomes more than ever before. I’m thrilled to support Outbrain in leading this next wave of innovation.”

“Yonatan and Andraz bring distinct strengths and capabilities to our team, and we’re fortunate to have a succession stemming from internal drivers of Outbrain success,” said Lahav. “I’m confident they will have a positive impact on the engineering organisation and the future of Outbrain as our company continues to evolve to meet the needs of this dynamic industry.”