News Briefs

 | April 18, 2017 | Aspect Imaging, an Israeli high-performance MRI developer has raised $30 million in funding. Unnamed existing investors participated in the round. Founderd by president and CEO Uri Rapoport in 2003, the company raised $20 million in a round last year and $150 million in total since it was founded.

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April 16, 2017 | Lithuania’s central bank has launched a fast-track licensing program for Israeli FinTech startups, which would help them enter European markets. The Bank of Lithuania “is making it easier for Israeli startups to launch in Lithuania from where they can gain access to over 450 million EU consumers,” according to a statement. The country is already home to Israeli tech firms that are using it as the base for their European operations, including giant DIY website design firm Wix.

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April 13, 2017 | Israel’s Hebrew University has launched a cannabis research center called the Multidisciplinary Center on Cannabinoid Research, which will focus on medical Cannabis. The university is already known for its marijuana research mainly thanks to Prof. Raphael Mechoulam, “the the father of marijuana research,” who successfully isolated the active constituent of the Cannabis plant and synthesized it.

 

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April 12, 2017 | Visa is inviting Israeli startups to compete for a chance to win €50,000 in its Everywhere Startup Competition in Europe. Participants will develop digital payments solutions. The competition will focus on three challenges: How can digital payment technologies help create products that connect people and enrich local communities? How can mobile technologies and connected devices transform the experience of intercity travel? How can new products and services deliver a more seamless international travel experience? The Visa Everywhere Initiative was created in 2015 in the US.

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April 10, 2017 | Israeli smart car company otonomo has closed a $25 million series B financing round led by Delphi Automotive with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, StageOne Ventures and Maniv Mobility. The company plans to use the funds to continue developing its automotive industry data exchange platform, and to expand globally into the US, Asian, and European markets. Based in Herzliya, otonomo was founded by CEO Ben Volkow and president Avner Cohen. The company has developed a cloud based platform that facilitates services for autonomous and connected cars. The company has raised $40 million to date including a $12 million Series A financing round just five months ago in November 2016. The company also opened offices in Menlo Park, California.

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April 6, 2017 | Israeli SaaS startup dapulse has announced that it has raised $25 million in its Series B financing round, bringing its total funding to $34.1 million. The round was led by New York-based private equity and venture capital firm Insight Venture Partners with participation from existing Series A investors Genesis and Entree Capital. Founded in 2014 by CEO Roy Mann and CTO Eran Zinman, DaPulse is web-based SaaS company, with the goal of introducing a more efficient and intuitive way to manage teams and entire operations. The Tel Aviv-based company’s unique visual management tool is fully customized to fit any operation, ranging from R&D, marketing, sales, product and customer-management.

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April 6, 2017 | Israeli semiconductor company Valens has raised $60 million in a financing round led by Israel Growth Partners (IGP), and including Delphi, Samsung Catalyst Fund, Goldman Sachs and MediaTek as new investors, in addition to Valens’ existing investors. Valens introduced its HDBaseT Automotive technology in 2016 to address the challenges of the connected car, including the increasing amount of bandwidth and wiring necessary to cater to infotainment and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems needs. The company was founded in 2006 by CEO Dror Jerushalmi, VP R&D Massad Eyal, CTO Eyran Lida, director of DSP Gaby Gur Cohen, director of software & system architecture Nadav Banet, and director of analog & mixed signal Alon Benzaray.

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April 6, 2017 | Israeli optical communications company ColorChip has raised $17 million led by the CIRTech venture capital fund. This completes a financing round of $37 million began last year when the company announced it had raised $20 million. The funds will help scale up production and support the expansion of marketing worldwide. ColorChip is a privately held Israeli company that provides cost effective, dense, hyper-scale transceivers and advanced optical splitters. Founded in 2001 by Dr. Shimon Eckhouse and Prof. Shlomo Rushin of Tel Aviv University School of Engineering, the Yokneam based company has raised $97 million including $62 million over the past 18 months. ColorChip’s CEO is Gidon Ezra.

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April 5, 2017 | British private equity firm Apax Partners has agreed to buy Israel’s Syneron Medical Ltd. a non-surgical aesthetic device company, for $11.00 per share in cash, or a total of $397 million, the companies said on Monday. Syneron says its products have a range of applications, like body contouring, hair removal and wrinkle reduction. The products are sold under two brands, Syneron and Candela. Syneron, founded by Shimon Eckhouse in 2000, is headquartered in California with research and development offices in Israel.

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April 5, 2017 | Israeli events marketing platform Bizzabo has announced the closing of $6.5 million series A financing round led by Magma Venture Partners co-founder Zvi Limon, serial entrepreneur Avigdor Willenz, founder of Annapurna Labs and Galileo Technology, and Danny Tocatly, a leading Israeli angel investor. Existing investors, including LionBird, Kaedan Capital, Prof. Yair Tauman, Gigi Levy, Eyal Ofer, and Eli Alroy also participated in the round. With offices in Tel Aviv and New York, Bizzabo was founded in 2011 by CEO Eran Ben-Shushan, Alon Alroy, and Boaz Katz. The company has raised $14.5 million to date including the latest financing round. Bizzabo’s cloud-based event success platform provides marketers with a suite of tools for events. Bizzabo offers corporations, publishers, agencies and third party event planners the tools to streamline and optimize their events.

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April 4, 2017 | Israeli enterprise guidance and engagement startup WalkMe has acquired visual analytics startup Jaco to leverage its real-time insights into consumer behavior. No financial details about the acquisition were disclosed. This is WalkMe’s second acquisition this year after buying testing and management company abbi.io. Jaco’s advanced technology records and analyzes users’ activity as they navigate through any web-based product in real time. Jaco enables users to replay every user session as a video, no matter how complex the app is or which framework it is running. Founded by CEO Dan Adika and president Rephael Sweary, and Eyal Cohen in 2011, WalkMe has 460 employees of whom 240 are in Israel. Founded in 2015, Jaco raised $1.15 million from Silicon Valley funds Hillsven Capital and UpWest Labs. As part of the acquisition, Jaco’s team will lead WalkMe’s Insights and Analytics business, based in WalkMe’s San Francisco offices. Jaco will remain available for its current customers as well as new customers, separate from the WalkMe platform.

 

 

 

 

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 April 4, 2017 | Israeli startup Airobotics, which has developed a fully automatic drone platform, announced it has received a permit to operate in Israel automated drones without a human operator and without eye contact with the drone. The company said that in the past few days, the Israel Civil Aviation Authority had granted the permit for missions of protection and security for industrial facilities in which the drones can be operated from within special command and control rooms. The Civil Aviation Authority of Israel (CAAI) was the first in the world to authorize commercial, fully unmanned drone flights in their nation’s airspace.

The system developed by Airobotics is likely to save personnel costs, training for teams in operating the drones, and so on. The computer-based system works according to the varying needs of the party operating it. The system has been tested for the past two years, during which rigorous trials on the drones were conducted mainly in order to test their safety. The trials, during which thousands of flight hours were logged by the company’s drones, were attended by Civil Aviation Authority representatives. Airobotics is a Tel Aviv based company which was co-founded by CEO Ran Krauss and VP R&D Meir Kliner and has over 70 employees.

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April 4, 2017 | The US venture capital fund and accelerator 500 Startups is launching a short marketing ramp-up bootcamp for startups in Israel. The goal is to train them into the firm’s specialization: marketing and growth. The four-week program in Israel will target pre-seed and seed companies as they get to the stage where they begin marketing their products.

500 startups hopes to attract companies looking to quickly build a large customer base for their products. 500 Startups competes aggressively with firms like Y Combinator to get the best startups into its programs. 500 Startups takes 1 percent of the company for $25,000 earmarked to marketing experiments. The company is launching its first program with nine business-to-business startups which include: Wizer, Distribyte, CybeReady, Ubeya, ONDiGO, Udobu , MuvingApp, GreenQ, and Market Beyond.

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April 4, 2017 | Israeli artificial vision device company OrCam has closed a $41 million financing round that values the company at $600 million, the company’s chairman Prof. Amnon Shashua told “Reuters.” The Jerusalem based company was founded in 2010 by Shashua and CEO Ziv Aviram, the same duo who founded car sensor developer Mobileye, which was sold to Intel last month for $15.3 billion – easily a record exit in Israel.

OrCam has raised $63 million to date, including the latest financing round. Prof. Shashua did not disclose details about the investors in the latest round but previous investors included Intel Capital, BRM and Aviv Venture Capital.

SEE ALSO: OrCam Will Help The Visually Impaired Read Anywhere

OrCam has developed a computer vision device that includes a miniature video camera and processing unit that can be attached to eyeglasses. Through a computer vision algorithm, the device is able to vocalize texts it encounters, such as street signs, a restaurant menu, a newspaper, or a book, to those with vision problems. It can identify supermarket products and distinguish different denominations of bills. The identification is communicated to the user verbally with almost no delay from the moment the information is requested by pointing. Shashua told “Reuters” that OrCam expects to conduct an IPO on the NYSE or Nasdaq by the end of next year.”

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April 2, 2017 | Established in 1902, the Rhodes Scholarship is widely considered one of the most prestigious scholarship programs in the world. Only a few students each year, from a set number of countries, have the opportunity to become Rhodes Scholars.  In 2017, for the first time ever, Israeli students had the opportunity to be selected for the scholarship. Maayan Roichman, a recent graduate of Tel Aviv University‘s Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Program, has become one of only two Israeli recipients. The Rhodes Trust, a British charity, provides full financial support for Rhodes Scholars to pursue a degree or degrees at the University of Oxford. As many Rhodes Scholars have gone on to successful careers in politics, media and academia – among them former president Bill Clinton – Roichman will soon be joining an elite group of international leaders and academics.

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