News Briefs

November 24, 2015 | The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Israel’s Ministry of National Infrastructure, Energy and Water Resources (MIEW) have selected six projects to receive $5.1 million under the 2015 Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Energy program. Each project is conducted by a U.S. and an Israeli partner. Selected projects address energy challenges and opportunities of interest to both countries, while focusing on commercializing clean energy technologies that improve economic competitiveness, create jobs, and support innovative companies. This is the seventh round of funding for BIRD Energy which has approved 28 projects with a total investment of about $22 million (including the projects in the current annual cycle).

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November 24, 2015 | Zoomd, the Israeli search company, has acquired another search startup, SphereUp, for $7 million, Calcalist reports. Founded by Amit Luhansk in 2012, Zoomd provides search tools within an article so that readers will not have to open new screens, something especially pertinent for mobile devices where screen space is limited. SphereUp’s technology aims to increase engagement with search tools, and the company, led CEO Yevgeny Safovich, has so far raised $3.7 million.

 

 

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November 24, 2015 | Israeli based fund GreenSoil has raised €50-70 million for investing in agriculture technology companies in Europe and Israel, to be split equally between the two geographies. Founded by Alan Greenberg and Gideon Soesman, GreenSoil invests in startups that enable efficient resource utilization in energy, electricity, water, and land. So far the fund’s portfolio companies have attracted attention from large institutional investors, including Horizon Ventures, which invested in the sustainable packaging company Tipa, and Innovation Endeavors which invested in the smart irrigation startup CropX.

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November 23, 2015 | FSTE-listed Playtech have given up on a £460 million takeover of Plus500, due to regulatory ‘concerns.’ Teddy Sagi, the Israeli founder of Playtech and now majority shareholder, was hoping to expand into financial trading with the acquisition, and is considering other acquisitions to do so. Founded in 2008 and led by CEO Gal Haber, Playtech listed on the AIM in London in 2013, but has encountered some difficulties after regulators criticized its anti-money laundering identity checks.

 

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November 23, 2015 | Israeli optical communications developer ColorChip has raised $25 million in a round of financing led by Israel Growth Partners with participation from Vintage Investment Partners, and existing investors Gemini Israeli Funds and BRM Group. Founded in 2001 by Dr Shimon Eckhouse and Prof Shlomo Rushin of the School of Engineering at Tel Aviv University, ColorChip provides cost effective, dense, hyper-scale transceivers and advanced optical splitters. So far, the company has raised $60 million and CEO Yigal Ezra said the latest funding will be used to scale up operations and accelerate product development for data-centers that need to increase their traffic capacity.

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November 22, 2015 | Voiceitt, a startup from the IBM Alpha Zone Accelerator in Israel, won first prize in the international MEDICA App Competition for healthcare applications. Founded in 2012 and led by CEO Danny Weissberg, Voiceitt has developed software that understands the natural language of people with speech difficulties and can translate what they say into speech that can be understood by others. Doctome, another IBM Alpha Zone Accelerator startup, was chosen by a special committee to be one of the top ten companies to present their solutions as part of the competition. Founded this year and led by CEO Itamar Bitton, Doctome offers an advanced platform for telemedicine, enabling online video calls with doctors anywhere in the world, in their multiple languages, all year round.

 

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November 22, 2015  | Innovation Endeavors, an early-stage venture capital firm backed by Alphabet Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, released its 2015 Israeli Internet of Things Landscape. Based on a three-month research deep dive, the Innovation Endeavors team created a visual breakdown of Israeli Internet of Things (IoT) players, identified key trends impacting the sector, and evaluated Israel’s ability to lead the IoT market. “IoT represents the ultimate bridge between the digital and physical worlds — it will undoubtedly transform lives in almost every industry. Given the amount of high-quality IoT startups coming out of Israel, we believe it will become a world leader in this space,” noted Innovation Endeavors Managing Partner Dror Berman.

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November 19, 2015 |CloudEndure, a provider of live-migration and disaster recovery solutions, is teaming up with Google to Bring Free Migration into Google Cloud Platform. This partnership allows customers to quickly migrate from any Windows/Linux machine to any platform. Google and CloudEndure are inviting companies with a migration requirement for five or more servers on any infrastructure – physical, virtual, cloud, hybrid – to migrate to the Google Cloud Platform for free. Founded in 2012 and led by CEO Ofer Gadish, CloudEndure provides Cloud Migration and Cloud Disaster Recovery for any application, allowing companies to mobilize entire applications with their data to and across clouds with near zero downtime and no data loss.

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November 19, 2015 | The newly established Guangzhou-Israel Bio Fund, with $100 million in assets under management, will develop joint ventures between Israeli and Chinese life science companies. The fund will be led by Yehoshua Gleitman, a former Chief Scientist and will be managed by a joint Israeli-Chinese team. Its backers include the Guangzhou municipal government and three Chinese companies, among them one of the country’s biggest pharmaceutical firms. The fund said it was already investigating collaboration with five Israeli startups dealing in pharma and medical devices.

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November 19, 2015 | Israeli cyber security company Avanan has exited stealth mode yesterday and is offering enterprises cloud-based versions of best-of-breed technology from more than 60 leading vendors, including Check Point, Symantec and Palo Alto Networks. With a click of a button, CISOs can now deploy Malware Scanning, Advanced Threat Protection, Data Leakage Prevention, Anomaly Detection, Encryption, Cloud Access Control, File Sanitization, Shadow IT Detection, and Shadow SaaS Protection. Avanan aims to provide a SaaS security solution with a complete security stack of proven technologies. Led by Co-Founder and CEO Gil Friedrich, Avanan is headquartered in New York, with R&D in Israel, and has so far raised $1.5 million from Magma VC and StageOne, two leading Israeli venture capital firms.

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November 19, 2015 | Israeli semiconductor TowerJazz has signed an agreement with Maxim Integrated Products to purchase Maxim’s fabrication facility in San Antonio, Texas for $40 million. The purchase will expand TowerJazz’s worldwide manufacturing capacity by 28,000 wafers per month. As part of the agreement, the companies have also signed a long-term supply agreement for TowerJazz to manufacture products for Maxim in the San Antonio facility. All of the site’s nearly 500 employees, including production operators, production support personnel and process and integration engineers will be retained.

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November 18, 2015 | Israeli startup SafeDK has raised $2.25 million in a seed round led by StageOne Venture Capital. Founded in 2014 by Orly Shoavi and Ronnie Sternberg, SafeDK monitors third-party SDKs in real time to warn developers about prospect privacy, performance, and stability issues. Developers can then choose to turn off certain SDK features without affecting the app’s functionality.

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November 18, 2015| Tel Aviv University and Peking University have signed a memorandum of understanding to establish a joint research institute for food security in the city of Weifang in Shandong Province, China. The institute’s research will focus on the agricultural effects of climate change, improving crop yield, and creating food strains with enhanced nutritional properties. Under the agreement, the Chinese municipality will build the institute, which will include research laboratories and agricultural areas, where researchers and students from both universities will be able to collaborate.

 

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November 18, 2015 | The online foreign exchange, CurrencyTransfer, has opened its Tel Aviv office in the co-working space South of Salame (SOSA) in order to expand its presence in the Israeli market. Founded in 2014 by CEO Daniel Abrahams and CTO Stevan Litobac, CurrencyTransfer is an online foreign exchange market in which users my find the best rates from different buyers and sellers. Requiring a minimum of £5,000 ($7,500) per exchange, CurrencyTransfer has processed over $40 million in transfers since inception and aims to reach $500 million in the coming year. So far, the London-headquartered company has raised an undisclosed amount from several angel investors, including former 888 CEO Gigi Levy, Co-Founder of Taykey Itay Birnboim, and Wonga Founder Errol Damelin.

 

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November 18, 2015 | Israeli cyber security start-up SAFE-T is set to raise $5.6 million in its IPO on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE), making it the first technology company to go public on the TASE in 2015. The funds raised will be used to expand into international markets and hire additional sales and research teams. Founded in 2013 by CEO Amir Mizhar, SAFE-T provides Secure Managed File Transfer (SMFT), a cross platform that enables secure file, email, and data transfer both inside and outside an enterprise.

 

 

 

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