News Briefs

September 14, 2016 | Israeli startup Optimove has raised $20 million from Israeli venture capital firm IGP – Israeli Growth Partners. Optimove provides online marketing technologies to some 200 companies. Founded by Pini Yakuel in 2009, this is the company’s first financing round. 

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September 13, 2015 | Israeli network security startup Cato Networks has raised $30 million in a series B funding round. The financing was led by Greylock Partners with participation from Singtel Innov8 and existing investors U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), Aspect Ventures and the company’s founders, Shlomo Kramer and Gur Shatz. The funding will allow Cato Networks to offer its cloud-based network security as a service solution, the Cato Cloud, to the global market, bringing the cloud’s transformative power to networking and security. Today’s financing is the Tel Aviv-based company’s second after closing a $20 million series A round in June 2015, shortly after it was founded.

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September 13, 2016 | Israeli cyber security company Claroty has come out of stealth mode and announced it has completed a financing round of $32 million. The startup also announced that it is launching its protection platform for industrial networks. Established in 2014 as part of Israeli cyber security foundry Team8, Claroty’s backers include Bessemer Venture Partners, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Marker, ICV, Red Dot Capital Partners, and Mitsui & Co., Ltd. The company enters the market as the most substantially funded cyber security startup focused on protecting industrial control systems, and with one of the deepest teams in OT security from organizations including Siemens, IBM, Waterfall Security, Palo Alto, iSIGHT Partners (FireEye), ICS2, and Industrial Defender. With offices in Tel Aviv and New York, Claroty was founded by CEO Amir Zilberstein, chief business development officer Galina Antova, and CTO Benny Porat.

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Septemeber 13, 2016 | Israeli cloud company CTERA Networks announced a $25 million investment round led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Cisco, and new investor Vintage Investment Partners. Based in Petach Tikva and New York, CTERA, which was founded in 2008 by CEO Liran Eshel and VP R&D Zohar Kaufman, has raised $70 million to date including the latest financing round. The funds will be used to fuel sales and marketing initiatives and accelerate global customer acquisition as the CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform becomes a gold standard for file storage, collaboration and data protection among secure and distributed enterprise organizations.

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September 13, 2016 | Israeli marketing analytics startup Datorama has raised $32 million in a funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Marker LLC and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors also participated in the round. This series brings Datorama’s total funding to $50 million. Datorama was founded in 2012 by Ran Sarig, Efi Cohen and Katrin Ribant.

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September 12, 2016 | Israeli investment platform Creditplace has raised $6 million, according to a Globes report. The startup enables investors to buy invoices of vendors awaiting payment. Headed by CEO Yaron Saban, the Tel Aviv-based company was founded by Dekel Golan and Serge Aziza.

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September 11, 2016 | Columbia University’s top honor for achievement in biological and biochemical research has been awarded to two researchers from the Hebrew University for their research, which led to the new field of Epigenetics, and yielded insights into how cells and embryos develop. The 2016 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize was presented to Prof. Howard Cedar and Prof. Aharon Razin of the Hebrew University, and their American colleague Dr. Gary Felsenfeld.

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September 11, 2016 | Israeli startup Proov has raised $7 million from Mangrove Capital Partners and Israeli crowd-funding firm OurCrowd. Proov, a Pilot-as-a-Service (PaaS) platform, simplifies the way new technology is evaluated and adopted. Founded in 2015 by Alexey Sapozhnikov and Toby Olshanetsky, this is the company’s first series of funding.

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September 8, 2016 | Israeli startup Celeno Communications completed a $38 million financing round. Founded in 2005 by president and CEO Gilad Rozen, the company supplies chips and software technology for managed WiFi apps. Red Dot Capital Partners, which focuses on investments in growth companies, led the round. New investors participated in the current round, including Poalim Capital Markets, and the OurCrowd investment fund. Previous investors also took part, including Liberty Global, Cisco, Pitango Venture Capital, 83North (formerly Greylock Israel), Vintage Investment Partners, and Miven. According to figures from the IVC databse, including the current round, Celeno has raised $107 million since it was founded. Celeno has 120 employees, including 85 in its Ra’anana headquarters. The company also has representatives in the US, Europe, and Asia. Among other things, Celeno plans to use the funding to recruit 20 new employees in a variety of areas.among other things.

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September 8, 2016 | Israeli startup WSC Sports Technologies has closed a $12 million Series B financing round led by Intel Capital, with participation from existing and new investors including the Wilf family (owners of the Minnesota Vikings), the ownership of the LA Dodgers, and Dan Gilbert (majority owner of the 2016 NBA Champion Cleveland Cavaliers). The company also announced that Intel Capital Director Uri Arazy will join the WSC Sports board. The investment brings WSC Sports’ total funding to $16 million and will help the company significantly accelerate growth and international expansion. Based in Ramat Gan, the company has developed an automatic, real-time, customized video creation platform for sports broadcasts designed for amplifying sports content and value. WSC Sports was founded by CEO Daniel Shichman, VP business development Aviv Arnon, CTO Shmuel Yoffe, and COO Hy Gal. Their customers, including the NBA, Turner Sports, Big East Conference, British Telecom the ELeague and others.

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September 6, 2016 |  Israeli startup FairFly, which notifies travelers when the price of their airline ticket drops, has announced it will no longer serve individual clients, and is shifting focus to serve the enterprise sector. In a letter to clients, CEO Aviel Siman-Tov, writes: “We’ve decided to put all of our focus on our enterprise product and discontinue our mobile app.” Starting Sept. 15, the company will no longer provide services to individual clients through its mobile and web platforms. FairFly was founded in 2013 by Uri Levine (the co-founder of popular navigation app Waze), along with Siman-Tov, Gili Lichtman, and Ami Goldenberg.

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September 6, 2016 | The Hebrew University of Jerusalem retained its leading position in a list of the best colleges published today by British higher education data provider Quacquarelli Symonds (QS). The 2016-2017 rankings place Hebrew University first in Israel and 148th in the world. The other Israeli institutions on the list include: Tel Aviv University, at No. 212, The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, at No. 213; and Ben-Gurion University, at No. 320. Topping the list are MIT, Stanford, and Harvard. First compiled in 2004, the QS World University Rankings rate the world’s best-performing higher education institutions, considering over 4,000 for inclusion and evaluating over 900. The ranking considers universities’ performance across six indicators, selected to reflect research impact, commitment to high-quality teaching, internationalization, and global reputation amongst both academics and employers.

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September 5, 2016 | Israeli cyber security startup Cronus Cyber Technology announced that it raised $3.5 million. According to figures from the IVC database, the company has raised $6.2 million since it was founded, including the current round. CEO Doron Sivan and CTO Matan Azugi founded Cronus in 2014. Cronus’s product uses an algorithm to try to imitate a human hacker’s way of thinking. Former Israeli Air Force chief Eitan Ben Eliyahu is the company’s chairman. Cronus’s financing round included US fund Janvest Capital Partners, a European investor, and a strategic investor from Hong Kong. The company previously received funding from the Ministry of the Economy and Industry Chief Scientist. The company’s headquarters are in Haifa, and it also does business in the UK, Germany and Hong Kong. The money raised is expected to enable Cronus to expand its business to the US.

 

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  September 5, 2016 | Hargol FoodTech, the Israeli company developing Steak TzarTzar — high-protein grasshoppers — emerged victorious among 30 finalists chosen to present their budding food technologies at the recent Agro Innovation Lab startup competition held in Vienna, Austria. The competition attracted 160 applications from 49 countries. Agro Innovation Lab, a new accelerator for startups and entrepreneurs, is a subsidiary of Austrian agriculture multinational corporation RWA. As the winner, Hargol FoodTech will receive initial investment from RWA, which will become a shareholder and will join Israel’s Trendlines Group, an Israeli innovation commercialization company, as an investor. (Earlier this year, Bayer and Trendlines announced their $10 million, five-year Bayer Trendlines Ag Innovation Fund.)

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September 4, 2016 | Co-working space WeWork has announced that it will double its presence in Tel Aviv with the opening of two new Tel Aviv locations – Ibn Gabirol and Hazerem – and the expansion of the Herzliya Pituach location. WeWork Ibn Gabirol and WeWork Hazerem are expected to be open by the end of 2016, marking the 5^th and 6^th locations launched in Israel of the US-based firm, since entering the Israeli market two years ago. Herzliya Pitucah, the 2^nd location to open in Israel, is also expanding due to high demand. The new locations in Israel come at a time of global expansion for WeWork. In 2016, the company has opened its first locations in Montréal, Mexico City, Berlin, Shanghai and Seoul, with plans to come to Paris in 2017. Founded in 2010 by Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey, WeWork runs 77 sites in 23 cities around the world, including Berlin, London, Boston, New York and San Francisco, providing professionally designed workspace, as well as other services (insurance, consultancy, etc) that startups need in order to scale up. The company has achieved a valuation of $5-10 billion, after raising over $1 billion from institutional investors, including Goldman Sachs, Fidelity, J.P. Morgan and the Harvard Management Company.

 

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