News Briefs

January 19, 2017 | Forbes has announced its second Under 30 Summit EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa), which will take place in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, April 2-6, 2017, under the theme “Innovation, Exploration, and Inspiration.” Over 750 of the world’s most influential young entrepreneurs — 250 from the US, 250 from Europe and 250 from Israel – are expected to attend the invitation-only event. The event will feature product demos and keynotes, showcasing the most cutting-edge innovators and disruptors, and will provide mentorship from successful business leaders.

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| January 19, 2017 | The Mortimer B. Zuckerman Institute was honored by Reuven Rivlin at the official residence of the President of the State of Israel for its $100 million initiative to provide scholarships to the next generation of STEM leaders in the United States and Israel. The American business leader and philanthropist Mortimer Zuckerman launched the Zuckerman Stem Leadership Program, to support future generations of leaders in science, technology, engineering and math in the United States and Israel and, over time, foster greater collaboration between two of the world’s most advanced scientific research centers. The program will give the highest-achieving American post-doctoral researchers and graduate students the ability to collaborate with leading researchers at Israel’s top research institutions – the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology; Tel Aviv University; and the Weizmann Institute of Science – which are among the world’s most advanced.

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January 19, 2017 | Leading Israeli adtech firm, Woobi, a startup with offices in London and Tel Aviv, has been awarded Best Video Distribution Platform at The Digiday Awards which recognizes the most outstanding and inspired work in branded digital video, video marketing and video advertising. The awards gala was held on January 17 at The Rubin Museum of Art in NYC. The other three finalists alongside Woobi in the category for “Best Video Distribution Platform” were Unruly, Playbuzz and EPIX. Woobi’s programmatic video solutions are designed to remove the barrier of entry for brand advertisers who are looking for new and engaging ways to reach their target audience. Woobi accommodates ads to each user’s own interaction patterns, and provides brands and advertisers access to hundreds of millions of users. 

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 January 17, 2017 | Israeli mobile ad analytics company AppsFlyer has raised $56 million, increasing the total capital it has raised since it was founded to $84 million. The round was led by new investors Qumra Capital, as well as Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing (PCI), Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners (DTCP) and Pitango Growth. AppsFlyer enables app developers (such as Gett) to economically analyze the effectiveness of their campaigns on mobile. The company does not sell or buy media; it measures the return on investment (ROI) for buying media. The current financing round follows substantial growth in the company, which asserts that its revenue has grown six times over during the past two years, but does not disclose how much that revenue is. AppsFlyer measures 250 billion actions using over 10,000 apps each month and its customers include Samsung, HBO, Waze, Playtika, Alibaba, Baidu, Trivago, Macy’s, and others. It is an official analytics partner of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Adobe, Twitter, and more than 2,000 others. AppsFlyer was co-founded in 2011 by Reshef Mann, and Oren Kaniel.

 

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January 17, 2017 |The Israel Venture Capital Research Center (IVC) is reporting that Israeli venture capital fundraising activity in 2016 reached a total of $1.4 billion, with 23 VC funds raising for the 2016 vintage year, including 12 first-time funds. Of the 2016 vintage funds, 14 made a first closing at an average 60 percent of their targets, and are expected to raise additional capital to be added to the 2016 vintage funds. It is expected that 2016 vintage fund raising will have totaled $1.6 billion, a record for the past decade, to surpass 2015 vintage year’s $1.5 billion raised by 19 funds. A seventh Israeli VC fund raising cycle started in 2015, and has already reached 79 percent of the total amount raised in the sixth cycle, which took place from 2011 to 2014. Moreover, the amount raised by Israeli VC funds in the past three years remained high.

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January 16, 2017 | One of the largest TED events in the Middle East, “TEDxWhiteCity“, will be held on Wednesday January 25th at the Opera-Performing Arts Center in Tel Aviv. Guest lecturers include: 2016 Rio Olympics judo bronze medalist Ori Sasson , synthetic biology author Dr. Tom Ren, CEO and founder of Tridom, Yaron Schwartz, and many more. Some 1,500 participants are expected for the event. Gathering insights from the fields of technology, education and art, TEDxWhiteCity will focus on the spirit of innovation in Israel as the theme this year is “Destination: Unknown”.

 

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January 16, 2017 | U.S. software provider Oracle Corp announced today that it was opening an accelerator program in Israel for startups developing cloud technologies or whose technologies are based in the cloud. Run by Oracle’s research and development team, the program provides six months of mentoring from technical and business experts, advanced technology, access to Oracle’s customers, and partners and investors. A pilot program was first launched in India and more centers will be announced soon. Oracle said this was a multi-million dollar program but did not disclose how much it would invest in each center. Oracle’s startup cloud accelerator program builds on its excellence center for Israeli startups, which was established in 2003 by Oracle Israel in cooperation with the government to support the growth of early stage startups. Thirty six companies were approved to take part in the excellence center, totaling more than $150 million in estimated exits.

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January 16, 2017 | Fraugster, a German-Israeli anti-fraud company that has invented an Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to eliminate payment fraud, has raised $5 million in funding. The international venture capital fund Earlybird is the new lead investor in the company, alongside existing investors Speedinvest, Seedcamp and a large Swiss family office. This latest round of investment will be used to hire new staff to support the international growth of the company, which is used by online merchants and retailers. Fraugster was founded in 2014 by Max Laemmle, who previously co-founded payment gateway company Better Payment, and Chen Zamir, who has spent more than a decade in different analytics and risk management roles including five years at PayPal. The company already handles almost $15 billion in transaction volume for several thousand international merchants and payment service providers, such as Visa.

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January 15, 2017 | Israeli company VisIC Technologies Ltd, a fabless developer of power conversion devices based on gallium nitride metal-insulator-semiconductor high-electron-mobility transistors, has closed a $11.6 million Series C round of financing led by new investor Birch Investment and existing investors. The company was founded in 2010 by Tamara Baksht and is based in Nes Ziona.

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January 15, 2017 | Israeli company WalkMe, which offers on-screen site guidance and engagement analytics, has acquired Israeli startup Abbi, specialists in mobile A/B testing and app engagement. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. WalkMe raised $50 million last year on a $400 million valuation. Abbi has raised around $1 million in funding. WalkMe has some 1,000 larger enterprises and thousands of small and medium businesses using its services, including MasterCard, PayPal, Pandora, BT, Unilever, Prudential, Panasonic, U.S. Postal Service, Sony, State Farm, Comcast, IBM, Microsoft, Wells Fargo, Home Depot, HP, J.P. Morgan Chase, Verizon, and Toyota.

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January 12, 2017 | Israeli digital health and mobile health solutions developer DarioHealth Corp. (formerly Labstyle Innovations) has raised $5.1 million in a private placement. DarioHealth closed on $3.1 million of the transaction while $2 million more of gross proceeds are subject to shareholder approval per Nasdaq rules. The company has developed a mobile blood glucose monitoring platform. The deal was led by OurCrowd Qure, a dedicated digital health fund that invested $2.5 million of the $5.1 million. Current investors of Jerusalem based DarioHealth also participated in the current round indicating the strong support and belief in the company’s strategy moving forward. OurCrowd Qure was granted two board seats, which will be selected and announced at a later date. Funding will be used to accelerate adoption across existing markets and into new geographies such as Germany in 2017.

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January 12, 2017 |Israeli startup Transmit Security, which is developing programmable biometric authentication has come out of stealth and announced a $40 million self-funded round of financing. Based in Boston and Tel Aviv, the company has unveiled a platform that will disrupt the $10 billion authentication software market. The technology enables organizations to displace passwords and implement any form of identity verification, on any device, across all their customer/partner facing channels. The company is being financed by its founders, CEO Mickey Boodaei and president Rakesh K. Loonkar, who previously created online banking security pioneer Trusteer, which was acquired by IBM in 2013. Boodaei also cofounded Imperva, a billion dollar provider of cyber and data security products. The company’s research and development team is made up of former members of Unit 8200, the elite Israeli Intelligence Corps.

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January 11, 2017 | Israeli drip irrigation manufacturer Rivulis Irrigation announced today that it has acquired Greek irrigation company Eurodrip, the world’s fourth largest irrigation equipment company. The acquisition will make Rivulis into the world’s second largest irrigation company outside of India. No financial details about the detail were disclosed although the announcement did say that it was an all-share deal. Israeli private equity firm FIMI Opportunity Funds (FIMI), controlled by Ishay Davidi, will remain the controlling shareholder in Rivulis after completion of the deal. Based at Kibbutz Gvat near Afula in the Jezreel Valley, Rivulis was formerly Plastro and then the water division of John Deere, before it was acquired by FIMI.

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January 11, 2017 | Israeli startup Corephotonics, which is developing dual camera technologies for smartphones, has completed a $15 million financing round. Since it was founded in 2012 by CEO Prof. David Mendlovic and VP R&D Dr. Gal Shabtay, the Tel Aviv based company has raised more than $50 million. Strategic investors participating in the financing round are Samsung Ventures; Foxconn, and Taiwan’s MediaTek. Two additional investment funds participated in this funding round, one from China and the other from Hong Kong. Corephotonics’ current investors include Magma VC, Samsung Ventures, Amiti Ventures, Chinese billionaire Li Ka-shing and Solina Chau’s Horizon Ventures, OurCrowd, SanDisk, Chinese telephony services provider CK Telecom, and additional private investors.

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January 28, 2015 | Israeli flash storage company Kaminario announced today it has closed a $75 million financing round. This bringing the company’s total funding to $218 million since it was founded in 2008. The latest round was led by Waterwood Group with a mix of new and existing investors, including Sequoia, Pitango, Lazarus, Silicon Valley Bank and Globespan Capital Partners. The new capital will be used to accelerate go-to-market initiatives, expand Kaminario’s global presence, and fuel R&D. Last month Israeli company Zirra, which uses AI to evaluate startups, estimated that Kaminario was worth $811 million. This latest financing must surely mean it is now a unicorn worth more than $1 billion. Kaminario was founded by CEO Dani Golan, Ofir Dubovi and Moshe Selfin. The company is headquartered in Needham, Massachusetts and has its development center in Yokneam, near Haifa.

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