News Briefs

January 26, 2016 | Israeli IoT startup Seebo, announced today that it has closed a $8.5 million Series A financing round, bringing the total raised to date to $14 million. The funding was led by Carmel Ventures, a member of the Viola Group, with participation from existing investors, including TPY Capital. The company also announced that Ori Bendori, General Partner at Carmel, will join its Board of Directors. Founded in 2012 by CEO Lior Akavia and COO Liran Akavia, Seebo provides companies with end-to-end tools and technology for the development, production and post launch needs of smart products, enabling product teams to expedite their go-to-market timeline while significantly lowering product lifetime costs. The company is currently working with numerous companies across a range of industries, including toy and children’s products, health and wellness, sports equipment, baby products, and education. “Introducing a smart, IoT-connected product to the market today is a long, costly and complicated process, often times leaving even the most motivated product teams frustrated and well over budget,” said Akavia. “Seebo allows any product team to easily transform innovation to creation and focus on what will drive value for their customers.”

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January 25, 2016 | Today Honda announced its formal engagement with the Israeli tech community and partnership with crowdfunding platform OurCrowd. “Honda believes that partnering together with entrepreneurs, start-ups, developers and academic institutions will help us develop truly transformational new products,” said Nick Sugimoto, Senior Program Director for Honda Silicon Valley Lab, who spoke today at the OurCrowd Summit in Jerusalem. Drawn in by start-ups pursuing vehicle intelligence technologies, apps and software, along with several notable exits, Honda has engaged OurCrowd to access its portfolio companies and facilitate introductions to notable innovators and entrepreneurs. In addition Honda Developer Studio and Honda Xcelerator will be scoping out Israeli startups in the automotive space.

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January 25, 2016 | Last year, 78 Israeli cyber-security companies collectively raised $540 million, an increase of 20 percent compared to 2014, according to a report prepared by IVC Research Center for the CyberTech 2016 Conference, held this week in Tel Aviv. In 2015, Israeli cyber-security startups were sold for a total of $1.2 billion, an increase of 40 percent compared to 2014, the report states.

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January 25, 2016 | Israeli high-tech companies raised a record $4.43 billion in 2015, 30 percent more compared to 2014, according to a report released today by accounting firm KPMG and IVC Research Center. In the fourth quarter of 2015 alone, Israeli startups raised $1.2 billion.

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January 25, 2016 | Israeli fintech startup BlueVine has closed $40 million in a Series C financing round, bringing the company’s total funding to $64 million to date. The investment was led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from new investor Rakuten FinTech Fund, and follow-on investments from Lightspeed Venture Partners, 83North, Correlation Ventures and private investors, as well as a new debt facility from Silicon Valley Bank. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California and with offices in Tel Aviv, BlueVine was founded by CEO Eyal Lifshitz and CTO Nir Klar in 2013 to give small businesses an advance on their invoices, freeing up their cash to meet payroll, buy supplies and expand their business. The company saw a twelvefold increase in funded invoices in 2015, and is on track to fund more than $200 million in working capital in the next year. Since launching in March 2014, BlueVine’s cloud-based invoice factoring service has helped thousands of small businesses obtain quick, easy access to funds they need to purchase inventory, cover expenses or expand operations.

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Jan. 25, 2016 | Israeli IoT cybersecurity startup mPrest announced today that it has raised a $20 million Series A round of funding, led by GE Ventures, the venture arm of GE, and OurCrowd, one of the leading equity crowdfunding platforms. mPrest will use the investment to expand its international presence in the industrial and commercial markets and rapidly scale up to meet the needs of the IoT world. Founded in 2003 and led by CEO Natan Barak, mPrest has developed software for “connecting the dots” across multiple systems, providing mission-critical monitoring and control software for the Internet of Things (IoT) in critical infrastructure sectors, including defense and security bodies, electric and water utilities, smart cities and buildings, fleet management companies and other large organizations around the world. “mPrest has created a scalable software platform for smart asset management that has great industrial applications,” said Jonathan Pulitzer, managing director at GE Ventures. “We look forward to potentially partnering with mPrest and exploring applications of their technology for GE.” For the past six years, mPrest has also been a strategic partner with Rafael Advanced Defense Systems to supply the command and control system for the Iron Dome air-defense system, as well as many other large projects.

 

 

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January 25, 2016 | Israeli Virtual Mobile Infrastructure (VMI) pioneer Nubo Software has completed a $7 million Series A financing round led by Magma Venture Partners with the participation of Motorola Solutions Venture Capital. Nubo will use the proceeds to expand its marketing, sales and support services for its remote enterprise workspace solution. Founded in 2001 by CEO Israel Lifshitzm, Nubo’s VMI infrastructure allows businesses to deliver corporate and consumer mobile apps as a display from a remote server, ensuring zero data is stored on employee devices. VMI technology affords enterprises a higher layer of security that completely separates corporate and personal environments without infringing on employee privacy. Because the corporate environment is controlled on one remote platform, IT can develop and manage just one customized app for any Android, iOS or HTML5-supported device. Enterprises no longer have to spend significant resources securing devices since they can simply be disconnected from access to the remote environment.

 

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January 24, 2016 | OurCrowd, one of the world’s leading equity crowdfunding platforms, is expecting to host 3,000 investors, entrepreneurs, corporate partners, and venture capitalists from over 50 countries at its second annual Global Investor Summit in Jerusalem on Jan. 25th – the largest investor conference in the history of the city. The event at Binyanei Ha’uma, Israel’s National Convention Center, will be focused on the theme “investing in the future.” Six major multinational corporations – Honda, Coca-Cola Company, Samsung Ventures, Philips, Intuit, GE – will provide a preview of their future plans for innovation together with scores of startup companies in the key areas of mobility/transportation, corporate innovation, health, cyber security, IoT, and mobile communications. OurCrowd CEO Jon Medved said, “While most eyes are on stock market retreats on Wall Street and global markets, we are proud that we are hosting in Jerusalem a glimpse of a much brighter investor future. Israel’s technology sector is setting new records and continues to boom. We are delighted that we have so many investors joining us to build the next generation of Israeli tech giants.”

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January 24, 2016 | Israeli DevOps startup JFrog has raised $50 million in their Series C round of financing, including investment from new investors Scale Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Battery Ventures, Vintage Investment Partners and Qumra Capital. Existing investors, including Gemini Capital, also participated in the round. The company will use the funds to realize its vision by investing in the talent, technology advancements and global expansion needed to meet the growing demand for its DevOps and software distribution platform. JFrog Artifactory, the only universal Artifact Repository, is an essential component of the Continuous Integration pipeline and is changing how developers and DevOps team manage binary artifacts. Founded in 2008 by Chief Architect Fred Simon, CEO Shlomi Ben Haim and CTO Yoav Landman, the 110-person strong company is based in Netanya.

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January 24, 2016 | Israel cyber security startup ForeScout Technologies has raised $76 million in a financing round led by Wellington Management. Now valued at $1 billion, ForeScout has tripled its valuation over the past 18 months while also surpassing $125 million in revenue in fiscal year 2015 (in excess of 50% compounded annual growth rate since 2012). The additional capital will be used to expand global field operations, build a support organization and increase R&D efforts to accelerate leadership in the Internet of Things (IoT). Headquartered in Campbell, California, ForeScout’s development center is in Ramat Hahayil, Tel Aviv where it has 150 employees. The company was founded in 2000 by Chairman Prof. Hezy Yeshurun from Tel Aviv’s Faculty of Computer Science, CTO Oded Comay, and senior manager Doron Shikmoni. Pitango led the company’s first financing round in 2001 and partner Rami Kalish serves on the board of directors.

 

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January 24, 2016 | Japanese conglomerate Sony is set to buy Israeli semiconductor company Altair Semiconductor for $200 million. Established in 2005 by former Texas Instruments executives CEO Oded Melamed, CTO Yigal Bitran and VP Marketing Eran Eshed, Altair Semiconductor develops high performance single-mode Long Term Evolution (4G LTE) chipsets, including baseband processors, RF transceivers and a range of reference hardware products used in IoT. Since inception, the company has raised $135 million, including equity funding from Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) (21%), BRM Capital (18%), Bessemer Venture Partners (14%), Giza Venture Capital (13%), and Walden Israel (7%). Each of the founders holds a 0.5% stake in the company and will likely earn $1 million from the exit.

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January 22, 2016| Amazon has chosen Israeli digital printing company Kornit for its Merch program, which like its self-publishing program, allows anyone to design and print t-shirts. Kornit was chosen for the on-demand production of textiles because of its high-productivity, digital apparel printing technology called Avalanche 1000. Traded on the NASDAQ since April 2015, Kornit was founded in 2003 as the first company to apply the methods of digital inkjet printing to garment production, and is today the world’s biggest seller of direct to garment printing systems.

 

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January 21, 2015 | Israeli startup TravelersBox has raised $10 million in its Series A funding round, led by Singaporean fund Arbor Ventures. Existing investors also participated, including Pitango Ventures, Global Blue, iAngles, and an number of Israeli angel investors, bringing the total equity funding to $15.5 million. Founded in 2013 by Tomer Zussman and Idan Deshe, TravelersBox is an ATM-like machine at airports where travellers can deposit leftover foreign currency in exchange for an equivalent Paypal payment or e-gift card to Skype, itunes, Starbucks, and a host of other online retailers. Today, the company operates over 75 deposit machines in airports around the world.

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January 21, 2016 | After receiving FDA approval for its diabetes monitoring device, LabStyle Innovations is looking to raise $11.5 million through public share offering and warrants. LabStyle has earmarked the funds for expanding its production capacity, furthering development of its software, and marketing in the US and other markets. Founded in 2010 and run by CEO Oren Fuerst, LabStyle has developed a small glucose monitor device called ‘Dario’ that gives accurate readings when plugged into a smartphone. The company went public in 2013 when it listed for over-the-counter trading, and later raised $10 million at a valuation of $51 million.

 

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January 21, 2015 | Israeli cybersecurity startup IronScales has raised $1.5 million in seed financing led by RDSeed, the investment arm of Rafael Development Corporation (RDC). Coming out of the 8200 Entrepreneurship and Innovation Support Program (EISP) in 2013, IronScales has developed what it calls the industry’s first ever employee-based intrusion prevention system with an automated phishing-mitigation response. Most successful cyber-attacks on companies and organizations still involve employee-targeted spear-phishing, whereby criminals attempt to deceive employees into revealing sensitive information such as usernames and passwords so they can then install spyware, remote-access Trojan horse attacks or ransomware. Damages can range from the theft of sensitive information to ransom demands. Led by CEO Eyal Benishti, IronScales uses a “gamified” and interactive approach, simulating real-world email phishing attacks, and helping prepare employees for actual attacks. Those who fail to spot the mock attack will receive on-the-spot quick, fun, interactive training.

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