Israel’s Otonomo, Flytrex Named To CNBC’s 100 Promising Startups List

Nine Israeli companies were among the 100 promising startups selected for the Upstart 100, the annual list of 100 promising startups selected by American business tv channel CNBC. It features a “diverse group of companies building brands and breaking industry barriers on the path to becoming tomorrow’s household names,” the channel said.

The companies were selected from more than 500 nominees in sectors like robotics, e-commerce, and autonomous vehicles. These companies “represent nearly every sector of the economy, from enterprise software and finance to insurance, health care and retail,” the channel said.

Each one was scored on eight quantitative metrics, including sales growth, user/customer growth, workforce diversity, industry size, and more.

Companies also had to be privately held and founded no earlier than Jan. 1, 2013. They must be pre-Series B in their funding and have raised no more than $50 million, CNBC said.

The 100 highest-scoring eligible companies have become the company’s Upstarts.

This is the second annual “Upstart” list by the prestigious finance channel, but the first only featured 25 companies with the premise that companies were increasingly launching to become impactful, revenue-generating ventures that are ones to watch.

Those 100 companies come from nine different countries and 13 US states, CNBC reported. Nineteen of the 100 startups are less than five years old, but 28 are less than three years and six were founded last year.

The nine Israeli companies on the list include CommonSense Robotics, the on-demand delivery tech for grocery retailers founded in 2015; Flytrex, the autonomous drone delivery service that just started dropping food deliveries to golfers on the golf course in North Dakota; Iguazio, the big data company, backed by Dell and Verizon; Optibus, the mass transit platform leveraging AI in 300 cities; Otonomo, the automotive data platform delivering apps and service to drivers; prooV, the testing platform for companies trying new enterprise software solutions; and VayaVision, the aggregated system of sensor technologies for autonomous vehicles founded in 2016.

Also on the list, two Israeli-founded companies now based in the US. The first, Excelero, is an Israeli-founded data storage company based in San Jose, California. The second is a New York-based cybersecurity firm named Illusive Networks founded in 2014, which grew out of Team 8, the think tank founded by veteran of the elite IDF intelligence unit 8200. The company is backed by Cisco and Microsoft.