| February 13, 2017 | After a successful Super Bowl Week, which showcased some of the latest Sports Technology, OurCrowd, a global leader in equity crowdfunding is partnering with the Adi Dassler International Family Office (ADIFO) backed sports accelerator LeAD, to discover high potential innovation in sports-related products and services on a worldwide scale. OurCrowd is also gearing up for the 2017 OurCrowd Global Investor Summit, the largest tech investment conference in the Middle East, which will take place this Thursday, February 16th, in Jerusalem. The event is expected to attract over 5000 people from all over the world.
News Briefs
February 13, 2017
OurCrowd Teams With LeAD Sports Tech Accelerator
February 13, 2017
AR Co. TIPIT Raises $2.5M
February 13, 2017 | Israeli augmented reality (AR) company TIPIT has raised $2.5 million in a seed financing round. With investment from Atooro Fund, TIPIT has developed a cross-platform engine aimed at innovating in the space of augmented reality (AR), which provides developers, cameras, and brands with a software development kit (SDK) of computer vision and AR technologies that increases platform users’ retention, engagement and boosts revenues at an affordable price. Founded in 2014 and run by CEO Jonathan Rimon, TIPIT has offices in San Francisco and Ra’anana.
February 12, 2017
JOY Ventures Launches New $50M Israeli Fund
February 12, 2017 | JOY Ventures, a new investment firm, has recently inaugurated its office in Herzliya Pituach, and earmarked $50 million for the first stages of its operations. JOY Ventures was founded by the Israeli-Japanese Corundum Open Innovation Fund. Joy Ventures will focus on startup companies, technological incubators for entrepreneurs and grants for academic research in the emerging field of Neuro Wellness, related to consumer products and technologies developed based on neuro research as anti-stress and mood alteration solutions. Avi Yaron, a serial entrepreneur, founder of Visionsense and the inventor of a state-of-the-art instrument for complex brain surgery, will head the company.
February 09, 2017
Cyber Security Co. Demisto Raises $20M
February 9, 2017 | Israeli cyber security company Demisto Inc. today announced that it has closed its $20 million Series B financing round. The company also announced the appointment of ClearSky managing director Jay Leek to its board of directors. Round participants also included Accel, Slack Fund and other strategic investors. Today’s funding brings the company’s total funding to $26 million. With offices in Tel Aviv and Cupertino, California, Demisto was founded in July 2015 by CEO Slavik Markovich, Rishi Bhargava (VP marketing), Dan Sarel (VP products) , and Guy Rinat (VP engineering). Demisto also unveiled the industry’s first comprehensive incident management platform to offer integrated threat intelligence.
February 09, 2017
Health Analytics Co. Intensix Raises $8.3M
February 9, 2017 | Israeli big data healthcare company Intensix has completed an $8.3 million Series A financing round. The investment was led by Pitango Venture Capital with the participation of German firm Rhon-Klinikum, which also recently invested in Israeli startup Inovytec. The funds will be used to boost the company’s sales and marketing operations in North America and to expand and accelerate the development of its predictive analytics platform. Based in Netanya, Intensix was founded by CEO Gal Salomon. Intensix has developed a real-time predictive analytics platform for early detection of patient deterioration in the ICU and high acuity departments of hospitals.
February 08, 2017
AI Co. Chorus.ai Raises $16M
February 8, 2017 | Israeli company Chorus.ai completed a $16 million financing round led by the Redpoint Ventures fund. The company uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to analyze sales conversations. Emergence Capital, which has advised the company from the beginning and invested in it previously, also took part in the round. CEO Roy Raanani and president and R&D manager Micha Breakstone founded Chorus.ai in 2015. The company has raised over $20 million since it was founded, including the current round. Chorus.ai has 25 employees in Israel and San Francisco.
February 07, 2017
Israeli Private Equity Financing Peaks
February 7, 2017 | In 2016, Israeli and foreign private equity funds invested a record $3.5 billion in 68 deals, the highest amount ever invested by private equity entities, according to a new report released today by IVC Research Center and Israeli law firm Shibolet. The amount was 14 percent up from 2015, and 29 percent above the $2.73 billion invested in 2014. The number of deals, however, dropped 17 percent in 2016, down from 103 deals in 2015, and 17 percent below the five-year average of 82 private equity transactions.
February 07, 2017
Biomed Co. Laminate Medical Raises $8M
February 7, 2017 | Israeli bio-medical start-up Laminate Medical Technologies, which is developing a blood vessel support device implanted in patients needing dialysis, has announced it has raised $8 million in a B round of capital raising. This round brings the total investment in the company to $13 million. A number of European funds took part in the current round, as well as the Chinese pharma giant Haisco. The company’s existing investors are private investors, including Nava and Yehuda Zisapel, Zohar Gilon, Eri Steimatzky, Henit Vitos, Ari Raved, and a grant from the Chief Scientist in the Ministry of the Economy. Laminate was founded in 2012 by Tammy Gilon, who is the company’s CEO, and Dr. Eyal Orion, and started out in the Rad-Biomed incubator.
February 07, 2017
Teva CEO Erez Vigodman Resigns
February 7, 2017 | Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. announced last night that CEO Erez Vigodman has resigned. He will be replaced as interim president and CEO by Dr. Yitzhak Peterburg, who has served as Chairman of the Teva Board of Directors since January 2015. Vigodman’s sudden departure is unexpected but not entirely surprising. The world’s largest generic pharmaceutical company has suffered a string of setbacks over the past year, which has seen it lose 40% of its share price. Some of the problems are shared by its generic rivals as the US government presses for lower drug prices. Others are specific to Teva including complaints that the company overpaid in the $40 billion acquisition of Actavis, and was duped in the $2.3 billion acquisition of Mexican company Rimsa. Teva has also been forced to pay antitrust fines in the US and last week lost a crucial patent case in the US on 40mg Copaxone, its flagship branded product.
February 07, 2017
Trax Image Recognition Raises $19.5M
February 7, 2017 | Trax Image Recognition completed a $ 19.5 million financing round led by Investec Bank. Trax will use this investment to expand its global operations with a focus in products and services for top tier retailers. Founded in 2010 by CEO Joel Bar-El and chief commercial officer Dror Feldheim, Trax has raised nearly $100 million since its founding. Headquartered in Singapore, more than half the company’s employees are in its Tel Aviv development center. Trax has developed a computer vision platform that turns retail shelf images into real-time actionable insights. Analyzing over 8 million images every month (representing a quarter of a billion products captured and analyzed monthly), Trax provides high accuracy data, intelligence, insights and recommendations to consumer good companies and retailers in over 45 countries.
February 07, 2017
Mobile Ad Co. Spotad Raises $3.5M
February 7, 2017 | Israeli mobile ad company Spotad has raised $3.5 million in a Series A financing round led by Hong Kong’s VLTCM. The startup has developed advertising technology that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to deliver mobile ads. The startup combines advertisers’ own marketing data and programmatic ad buying with its proprietary machine learning systems to create a demand-side platform (DSP) for buying any mobile ad space in real time. Spotad, with offices in Tel Aviv and Netanya in Israel as well as San Francisco, New York, London and Beijing, claims to be the first Western DSP to enter China. Spotad connects to all the main Chinese ad exchanges, including Baidu, Alibaba, Sina, and Weibo.
February 06, 2017
Group Buying Startup Shopiz Raises $2M
February 6, 2017 | Israeli startup Shopiz, which offers group shopping for products through a connection between consumers, has completed a $2 million financing round led by Ron Zuckerman and other private investors. The company has raised a total of $3.5 million to date. Founded in 2014 by CEO Gilad Brovinsky, Shopiz’s offices are in Tel Aviv. The company’s platform, which is available on its website, makes it possible to purchase goods and services at substantial discounts from a wide range of stores, websites, and various businesses. Shopiz operates a social shopping mechanism for lowering the price when more buyers join a purchase, even after the purchase is made. Customers continue receiving reimbursement directly on their credit card account after they buy a product when other customers join the purchase and the price of the product continues to fall.
February 05, 2017
Games Co. CodeMonkey Raises $1.5M
February 5, 2017 | Israeli educational games company CodeMonkey has closed $1.5 million in seed funding. The startup has developed a game-based learning platform for teaching children code. These funds will be used to expand CodeMonkey’s research, development, sales and marketing teams. J21 Corporation led the current funding round alongside Invictus Capital from Singapore. China-Israel Education VC Fund and Japanese holding company Edulab also entered the strategic partnership. As part of this partnership, Edulab announced the integration of CodeMonkey into its STEM resources portfolio in China and will expand the CodeMonkey platform to reach 30,000 elementary school students. Founded in 2014 and run by CEO Jonathan Schor, CodeMonkey is a game-based-learning platform that enables students eight years and older to learn the fundamental principles of computer programming. In the game, players help a monkey collect bananas by writing code.
February 05, 2017
Medical Cannabis Co. Cannabi-Tech Raises $1M
February 5, 2017 | Israel-based Cannabi-Tech Ltd., which provides lab-grade medical cannabis quality control testing systems, has closed a seed investment round of $1 million, and appointed two new directors to its board. The round will support the North American launch of Cannabi-Tech’s fully-integrated testing platform for medical cannabis labs and dispensaries. The robust system features patented optical testing and advanced imaging tools for the industry’s most accurate quality control testing of medical marijuana flowers, along with integrated cloud database, sorting and labeling systems, traceable packaging, mobile apps, and more.
February 02, 2017
APERIO Wins Cybertech Startup Contest
February 2, 2017 | APERIO Systems was selected “most innovative startup” in cyber security at the Cybertech Startup Competition powered by YL Ventures, that took place during Cybertech in Tel Aviv this week. Yoav Leitersdorf founder of YL Ventures, awarded the winning prize to company co-founders Yevgeni Nogin and Michael Shalyt. APERIO Systems secures critical control systems with a last line of defense against both internal and external cyber threats. The company uses statistical physics and state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to detect operational data forgery attempts and reconstruct the true state of industrial control systems in real time. APERIO was awarded two tickets to the prestigious RSA convention, the world’s leading cyber conference, to be held in San Francisco.
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