News Briefs

December 16, 2015 | Israeli startup Vayyar Imaging has raised $22 million in their Series B round of fundraising led by Walden Riverwood. Previous investors, including Battery Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Israel Cleantech Ventures and Amiti Ventures, also participated in the round, bringing the total amount raised to $34 million. The company will use the new funds to scale its enterprise offering globally. Founded in 2011 and led by Co-Founder & CEO Raviv Melamed, Vayyar Imaging has developed a 3D-imaging sensor technology makes it possible to see through objects, potentially revolutionizing cancer detection, robotics, and smart home industries.

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December 2015 | Mabaya, a new ‘digital shelf placement’ startup, announced today that it has secured $2.25 million in seed funding from lool ventures to expand its e-commerce services worldwide. In the physical world, brands pay a lot to have their products displayed on the most visible shelf in the store. Mabaya brings this power to the e-commerce space, by letting online retailers display specific products to relevant shoppers in premium placement. Founded in 2013 and led by CEO Avi Rabinovich, Mabaya analyzes an online retailer visitor’s preferences in real-time, and displays the items a shopper will want to see the most. The biggest online retailers, like Amazon and Alibaba, already utilize similar technology internally. Mabaya makes this technology affordable and accessible to every level of e-commerce.

 

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December 15, 2015 | Israeli self-organizing networks (SON) startup CellMining has raised $5 million in their Series A round of fundraising led by Lazarus Israel Opportunities Fund. The investment will help the company to expand into new markets and to further develop its subscriber-centric mobile network optimization capabilities. Founded in 2013 and run by CEO Greg Snipper, CellMining uses behavior-based analytics to optimize network performance, namely by identifying usage patterns based on Customer Experience Management (CEM) metrics.

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December 15, 2015 | Israeli computer vision startup PointGrab today announced an investment totaling $5 million from Swiss fund ABB Technology Ventures, EcoMachines Ventures in London, and Silicon Valley-based Flex Lab IX. Saar Wilf, PointGrab’s Chairman and first investor, is also participating in this funding round. With this investment, PointGrab will be able to expand further into the $30 billion home and building-automation market. By embedding deep learning technology into optical sensing IoT devices, PointGrab products provide detailed information about activity within buildings to effectively support energy-saving, facility management, occupant comfort and safety, as well as business intelligence.

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December 15, 2015 | Israeli biopharmaceutical company KAHR Medical today announced that it has raised $12 million at the first closing of a $15M Series-B private equity financing. A second closing of the round, in which the additional $3M will be raised, is anticipated to take place prior to February 2016. Proceeds of the new financing will be used primarily to fund the clinical development of KAHR’s lead product, a lymphoma treatment (KAHR-102), which recently received regulatory approval in Israel to initiate a Phase-I/IIa trail. Korea Investment Partners, Mirae Asset Venture Investment and DSC Investment participated in the first closing, along with an existing investor, Flerie Invest AB, a fund controlled by Thomas Eldered, CEO of Swedish drug producer Recipharm. Founded in 2005 and led by CEO Dr. Noam Shani, KAHR is developing a drug platform that is based on the TNF-superfamily of proteins that control the immune system. KAHR’s technology allows the construction of drugs with bi-functional fusion proteins, which enable the drug to block or activate two reinforcing biological signals at the same time. KAHR’s Dual Signaling Proteins (DSP) drug platforms, named DSP-Hexamers and DSP-Clusters, are under development for the treatment of multiple cancer and autoimmune disease indications. The company’s technology is based on 15 years of research by Professor Michal Dranitzki Elhalel, Head of Nephrology at the Hadassah Medical Center, and Professor Mark Tykocinski, Dean of the School of Medicine at Jefferson University in Philadelphia and former Chief of Pathology at the University of Pennsylvania.

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December, 15, 2015 | Israeli crowd-funding company, OurCrowd has been voted the 10th most innovative Fintech company worldwide in the second annual ‘Fintech 100’ list, the leading Global Fintech innovators report published by investment firm H2 Ventures and KPMG. OurCrowd was the sole crowdfunding platform and the only Israeli company named among the top ten listed. This represents a significant leap from last year, when OurCrowd was ranked #22. Other renowned companies that toped the list include the UK’s Funding Circle and the US health insurance company, Oscar. OurCrowd CEO Jon Medved said, “It is truly an honor to be a part of such a prestigious list of Fintech innovators two years in a row. We are proud to be recognized as the world’s leading equity crowdfunding platform. Fintech is now a global sector and we are glad to be leading an Israeli contingent of eight companies on the list.”

 

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December 14, 2015 | Israeli cloud optimization company Cloudyn announced today that it has closed a Series B round of financing in the amount of $11 million. The round was led by Carmel Ventures, a member of the Viola Group, with participation of previous investors, Titanium Investments and RDSeed, a collaboration of Rafael and Elron Electronics (ELRNF). Cloudyn will use the proceeds to further its market share and brand, as well as to further develop its product. Founded in 2011 and led by CEO Sharon Wagner, Cloudyn helps enterprises to shift their operations to the cloud with hybrid, multi-layered solutions.

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December 14, 2015 |  Texas A&M University has announced the opening of a $6 million marine research center in collaboration with the University of Haifa. Expected to open in February 2016, the marine center is a departure from the original 2013 plan, which A&M Chancellor John Sharp called a “peace university” that would have been located in Israel’s largest Arab city, Nazareth. Since then, Sharp has decided to take advantage of the ongoing research efforts following the discovery of natural gas in the Eastern Mediterranean. The center will monitor ocean flow and aims to mitigate risks associated with offshore exploration.

 

 

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December 14, 2015 | Israeli flavoring company Frutarom, one of the largest companies in the field of food ingredients, has acquired the Germany company Wiberg GmbH for approximately $130.4 million (€119 million). Completion of the transaction, which will be financed using bank debt is subject to approval from the German and Austrian antitrust authorities, which Frutarom expects to receive at the beginning of 2016. This transaction marks Frutarom’s 13th acquisition of this year, following its acquisition of the Hong Kong company Inventive for $17 million earlier this month, and its stake in the Polish company AMCO for $20.7 million.

 

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December 14, 2015 | Israeli Minister of Science, Technology and Space Ofir Akunis signed this morning a joint declaration in Beijing with the Chinese Minister of Science Wan Gang to jointly invest in Chinese and Israeli research. According to the statement, the Israeli Ministry of Science will invest up to $1 million and the Chinese Ministry of Science will invest up to $5 million. The joint research will investigate, among other things, neuroscience, nanotechnology, three-dimensional printing, biomedicine, renewable energy, computer science, healthcare, and smart cities. The agreement comes after a string of partnerships and joint investments between Israeli and Chinese companies.

 

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December 13, 2015 | Israeli web analytics startup SimilarWeb has acquired Quettra for about $10 million. Though the Silicon Valley company only came out of stealth mode last year with $3 million in funding, it’s mobile analytics platform was founded and developed by Ankit Jain, the former head of search and discovery in the Google Play store. This deal marks SimilarWeb’s third deal this year, after the Israeli company raised another $25 million, which valued the company at $400 million. Founded in 2007 by CEO Or Offer and Nir Cohen, SimilarWeb monitors 80 million sites and 3 million apps worldwide, calling itself “the rating company of the digital world,”  and so far has raised a total of $65.1 million.

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December 13, 2015 | Chemical Engineering Professor Hossam Haick of the Technion Israel Institute of Technology has been listed on Nominet Trust’s annual list of the “100 most inspiring uses of digital technology for social good.” The list, which includes Facebook’s Safety Check and Google X’s Project Loon, included the professor’s device called Sniffphone, which screens a patient’s breath to provide early detection of lung cancer.

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December 11, 2015 | A drug that was researched and tested in Israel has helped former President Jimmy Carter overcome stage-4 melanoma, which in his case had metastasized to his brain. Keytruda, the immunotherapy drug that Carter has been taking, was developed by Jacob Schachter at the Sheba Medical Center and is now marketed by Merck. In contrast to traditional chemotherapy treatment, which are designed to destroy cancerous cells but may also destroys healthy ones in the process, immunotherapy drugs like Keytruda help immune system cells identify and destroy tumor cells.

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December 10, 2015 | This week 3M launched a customer innovation center in Herzliya. The announcement comes after the American industrial opened an R&D arm in Israel earlier this year. The customer innovation center is one of about 50 global locations in which 3M demo products and solicits customer feedback, which the company uses to modify existing products and develop new one. Since 1996 3M has been active in Israel and has invested in voice recognition software VocalZoom and water monitoring company Takadu. It also acquired remote-monitoring company Attenti for $230 million in 2010.

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December 10, 2015 | Israeli based cloud disaster recovery service, CloudEndure, has closed a $7 million round of investment led by Indian consulting firm Infosys and previous investor Magma Venture Partners. Founded in 2012 and led by Co-Founder and CEO Ofer Gadish, CloudEndure provides a cheaper and easier form of disaster recovery in the cloud that works regardless of whether the infrastructure is on-premise, in the cloud or a mix of the two. The new investment brings the total to just over $12 million, and will enable the company to hire and continue to expand its customer base.

 

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