587 Exits Worth $70 Billion: Startup Nation Had Booming Decade, Has Still Bigger Dreams

This article was first published by The Times of Israel and is re-posted with permission.

The last 10 years have seen the so-called Startup Nation flourishing, with increasing numbers of multinationals taking notice, snapping up Israeli companies and technologies and setting up local R&D centers.

Startup entrepreneurs, once eager to sell their firms to the highest bidder as soon as they could, are now holding out longer and raising more money from venture capital or private equity funds to grow their companies on their own.

A look at the figures shows that in the past decade, Israel saw 587 exit deals — defined as initial public offerings of shares, or merger and acquisitions of Israeli startups — for a total of $70 billion, according to data compiled by PwC Israel. The deal of the decade was the acquisition by US tech giant Intel Corp. of Israel’s Mobileye, a Jerusalem-based maker of self-driving technologies, for a whopping $15.3 billion.

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