News Briefs

November 8, 2016 | Israeli machine learning branding startup Tailor Brands has closed a $4 million financing round led by Mangrove Capital Partners, together with Disruptive Technologies L.P who had led the company’s seed round. Tailor Brands has raised $5.1 million to date including the latest funding. Co-founded in 2014 by CEO Yali Saar, CTO Nadav Shatz, and Chief Design Officer Tom Lahat, Tailor Brands is the only fully automated branding agency working with over 500,000 businesses worldwide. The company uses machine learning and pattern recognition to instantly design anything from logos to full ad set campaigns for affordable prices.

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| November 7, 2016 | Israeli social network wisdom company Feelter has closed a $4 million financing round. The company, founded in 2014 by CEO Smadar Landau, has developed an algorithm capable of analyzing text from numerous online conversations in real time. The analysis enables a filtering of information relevant to the content and to the question asked. Feelter is conducting several pilots and collaborations with leading companies such as El Al Israel Airlines Ltd., Cdiscount and Bookingisrael. The company intends to use the funds raised to establish its US HQ and hire additional employees, four of them for the Tel Aviv-based development team.

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November 7, 2016 | IronSource, an Israeli company which makes tools to help mobile app developers distribute and profit from their apps, has acquired Israeli startup Warranteer for an undisclosed amounted, rumored to be around $4.5 million. Warranteer’s app activates, manages and securely saves to the cloud all your product warranties. The sale is the most recent in a string of acquisitions by IronSource. IronSource is led by CEO Tomer Bar Zeev and was founded in 2010 by Bar Zeev along with Eyal Milrad, Omer Kaplan, Arnon Harish, Itay Milrad, Tamir Carmi, Roi Milrad. Tel Aviv-based Warrenteer was founded in 2014 by Avishay Pariz.

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November 2, 2016 | Israeli social dining service startup EatWith has closed a new financing round led by TripAdvisor and with participation from Greylock Partners. The amount of funding was not disclosed. GreyLock Partners led EatWith’s previous financing round in which it raised $8 million in 2014. EatWith will also team with TripAdvisor so that its pages will include the option of “dining with a local chef.” EatWith was co-founded in Israel in 2012 by Guy Michlin and Shemer Schwarz. In 2014 it moved its headquarters to San Francisco while retaining its development center in Tel Aviv. The company also remains popular with Israelis traveling abroad while in Israel itself more than 50 chefs host tourists.

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November 3, 2016 | A team of students from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology has won the gold medal in the iGEM international competition held at MIT. This is the third consecutive year that a Technion team has won the gold medal in this competition. iGEM is an international synthetic biology competition, which aims to develop products based on the creation of new biological systems and their operation in living cells.  Contestants must submit a research proposal, carry out an independent study, raise the necessary funding and present their results in the finals. The Technion team’s product that won the gold medal is Flash Lab – an innovative chip for fast, accurate and simple detection of various substances.  The chip is based on chemotaxis – a natural biological process in which bacteria respond to the presence of a specific substance by swiftly moving toward it or away from it, creating clusters of visible bacteria.

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| November 2, 2016 | Israeli cloud based connected car startup Otonomo has closed a $12 million series A round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Stageone Ventures, with participation from Maniv Mobility and LocalGlobe. Founded in 2015 by CEO Ben Volkow and president Avner Cohen, Otonomo’s cloud based platform facilitates services for autonomous and connected cars. The Herzliya based company has raised $15 million to date. Steve Girksy, a former vice chairman of GM, and Mary Chan, a former general manager of OnStar, have joined Otonomo’s board of advisors. Andy Geisse, former head of AT&T Business Solutions has joined Otonomo’s board of directors.

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November 2, 2016 | Israeli company Infinity Augmented Reality (Infinity AR), which is developing augmented reality systems for medicine, training, and games, in the midst of raising an $18 million round of financing. According to sources, the previously publicly traded company has re-entered the private market after a period spent traded on the US pink sheets. This restructuring comes with a $15 million investment from Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, along with another $3 million from previous investor Sun Corporation of Japan. Additional well known investors include Moshe Hogeg, who founded the company in 2012, and his Singulariteam Fund, which retain a small percentage of the company after this move. Following the investment, Alibaba is now listed as the largest single stakeholder in the AR company, holding over 22% of the shares.

 

 

 

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November 1, 2016 | Israeli artificial intelligence startup Voyager Labs has emerged from stealth mode with customers, use cases, and $100 million in funding. Voyager Labs raised the funds from prominent investors including Sir Ronald Cohen, Lloyd Dorfman, OCAPAC Holding Company, and Horizons Ventures. Founded in 2012 by CEO Avi Korenblum who served in the Israeli intelligence community for 20 years, the company has 90 employees at its R&D center in Hod Hasharon and offices in New York, Washington and London. Voyager Labs has developed an artificial intelligence engine that combines expert systems with deep-learning algorithms and is capable of extracting dynamic, real-time, and tailored insights into human behavior by analyzing massive amounts of publicly available unstructured data.

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November 1, 2016 | Israeli satellite communications company SatixFy is raising $25 million in a financing round led by Catalyst CEL Fund, which will be completed by the end of next month. By designing its own silicon chips, SatixFy’s technology radically reduces the cost, size, weight and power consumption of user-terminals, and cost of air-time for satellite communications. The Rehovot based company was founded in 2012 by CEO Yoel Gat, founder and former Chairman and CEO of Gilat Satellite Networks Ltd. SatixFy has raised nearly $30 million to date including the latest financing round. Catalyst is a leading private equity firm in Israel with more than $250 million in assets under management. Catalyst was founded in 1999 by Founding & Managing Partners Yair Shamir, Edouard Cukierman and Boaz Harel.

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 November 1, 2016 | Israeli crowd-funding firm OurCrowd announced today that it has launched Israel’s first exclusively focused digital health fund: OurCrowd Qure. The fund will focus on Seed and Series A rounds investing in innovative digital health startups. This is OurCrowd’s first sector fund dedicated to the rapidly developing digital health market valued globally at $70 billion US in 2015 and projected to be over $230 billion US by 2020. OurCrowd Qure has established a collaboration with Johns Hopkins University to provide validation of value, fast track market access, on-going feedback and exposure of unmet needs. The fund will be led by managing partners Allen Kamer and Dr. Yossi Bahagon.

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October 30, 2016 | Israeli startup Gauzy, which develops liquid crystals that can double as both glass surfaces and computer screens, has completed a funding round of $7 million. The company’s patented liquid glass solution can replace glass in appliances, cars, windows and anywhere where glass surfaces are used, and serve as a monitor. The current round of funding was led by Lazarus Fund from the US. Gauzy previously raised $5 million from the UK investment fund Sollange Investments. Gauzy was founded in 2009 by CEO Eyal Peso and CTO Adrian Lofer and following the current round of funding intends to double its workforce.

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October 27, 2016 | Israeli social video creation platform Wochit has closed a $13 million financing round, with investment from media giants ProSieben, Singapore Press Holdings’ SPH Media Fund, Carlo de Benedetti and several existing investors including Redpoint, Marker LLC and Cedar Fund. The funds will be used to further enhance Wochit’s award-winning technology and to expand its business with publishers and content creators worldwide. Based in Beit Dagan near Tel Aviv and with offices in New York and London, Wochit was founded in 2012 by CEO Dror Ginzberg and CTO Ran Oz.

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 October 27, 2016 | Israeli crowd-funding firm OurCrowd announced that Alec Ellison, former Vice Chairman of Jefferies, LLC, and Chairman of the Technology Investment Banking group, has joined the OurCrowd Advisory Board. Prior to Jefferies, Ellison was President of Broadview International (which Jefferies acquired).  He began his banking career at Morgan Stanley. Mr. Ellison holds a B.A. from Yale and an M.B.A. from Harvard, where he was a Baker Scholar. Founded in 2013 by Jon Medved, OurCrowd’s community includes nearly 15,000 investors from 110 countries. With offices today in seven countries and a worldwide staff supporting over 100 portfolio companies, OurCrowd has invested over $300 million focused on venture capital and technology startups and has had nine exits: two IPOs and seven sales. In September 2016 OurCrowd announced that it has raised $72 million in Series C funding for its General Partner fund.

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October 25, 2016 | Israeli Internet-of-Things company PointGrab raised $7 million for its advanced sensor technology for smart buildings. The investors include new partners – Philips Lighting, the global leader in lighting, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital Co. Ltd (MUCAP), a venture capital arm of MUFG, Japan’s largest financial group, in addition to existing investors ABB Technology Ventures (ATV) and others. Based in Hod Hasharon, the company was founded by chairman Saar Wilf, CEO Haim Perski, and VP technology Amir Kaplan. PointGrab raised $5 million last December.

 

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October 25, 2016 | Readers of the luxury magazine Conde Nast Traveler voted both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem among the 40 “best cities in the world,” in the magazine’s 2016 survey of destinations outside the U.S. published last week. Tel Aviv, which the magazine called “one of the world’s most vibrant, diverse cities” ranked 17th on the list thanks to its exciting nightlife, great beaches, amazing museums , and the world’s largest concentration of buildings in the International Style — more than 4,000 of them comprise Tel Aviv’s White City, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Jerusalem was ranked 28th on the list and was praised for its “cutting-edge art scene” and growing restaurant scene. ” Last year, Jerusalem was picked by Condé Nast Traveler readers as the 11th best city in the world, but Tel Aviv did not make the list. The world’s top city, according to the readers, was Tokyo.

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