News Briefs

January 7, 2015 | The Israeli online trading platform Plus500 signed a sponsorship deal with the major Spanish soccer team Atletico Madrid. The parties signed a deal for four months, for the remainder of the 2014/2015 season, with the option to be extended in future seasons. The Plus500 logo will be featured on the back of Athletico players’ uniforms during home and away games, as well as for La Liga and King’s Cup matches. The front of the players’ shirts will continue to be sponsored by the Azerbaijan Tourism Board. None of the financial details of the deal were released, but it is estimated that Plus500 payed up to €10 million to the team. Plus500 held its IPO in London in July 2013 and today has a market cap of £690 million.

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January 7, 2015 | According to the IVC Research Center and the Meitar Liquornik law firm, investors earned $6.94 million from selling stakes in Israeli technology companies in 2014. This is a five percent increase from last year, which was boosted mainly by the increase of stock market listings. This is the third highest figure after 2006 and 2012, years that were marked by major acquisitions of Israeli companies.”2014 was an excellent year for Israeli high tech even though there was not a mega deal,” said Koby Simana, chief executive of the IVC Research Center. The largest Israeli public offering this year was issued by automobile technology company Mobileye, in which it raised $890 million on the New York Stock Exchange.

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January 7, 2014 | Beamr, an Israeli imaging technology company and M-GO, a transactional video on demand company will partner to improve the company’s streaming service. Based on a patent-pending perceptual quality measure, Beamr Video automatically reduces the bitrate of any H.264 or HEVC HD and 4K video stream by up to 50 percent while retaining the full perceptual quality and format of the original file. M-GO is leveraging strategic partnerships with tier-one media companies to grow its vast premium content catalog, including 4K UHD titles. Beamr was founded by CEO and co-founder of Emblaze Sharon Carmel.

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January 7, 2015 | An Israeli biopharmaceutical company, cCAM Biotherapeutics, announced that it received Food & Drug Administration approval to begin a Phase I trial for CM-24. CM-24 is a antibody for the treatment of various types of cancers. cCAM was founded in 2010 and focuses on the discovery and development of novel immunotherapies to treat cancer. The CM-24 antibody was discovered by Dr. Gal Markel, Head of Research in the Ella Institute of Melanoma at Sheba Academic Medical Center.

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January 7, 2015 | The MIT-Israel-BGU Seed Fund recently approved several joint research proposals for funding, supporting new collaborations between faculty and research scientists at MIT and their counterparts at Ben Gurion University. The grants extend over the period between January 2015-August 2016. Some of the approved proposals include “Self-Sustained Agriculture Based on Marginal Water,” “Improving the Delivery of Treatments in Spinal Cord Injury Using Ultrasound, and “Guiding Students’ Learning Using On-line Collaborative Annotation Tools,” among others. The funds bestowed upon the projects bestow and support early-stage collaborations between MIT researchers and their counterparts around the globe. The partnership with BGU began in May 2014.

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January 6, 2014 | The Australian venture capital firm Square Peg Capital will commit $150 million to Israeli startups within the next three to five years. In connection to the announcement, Square Peg will also establish a subsidiary branch in Tel Aviv that will be headed by partner Dan Krasnostein, who recently moved from Israel to Australia. In addition, Erad Neve, a former partner in Benchmark Capital in Israel, will take part in Square Peg Capital in Israel. Square Peg Capital is a young venture capital firm founded in 2012 by Paul Bassat, the founder of seek, and two other entrepreneurs.

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January 6, 2015 | The German media giant Axel Springer is seeking Israeli startups to join its Berlin-based incubator ‘Plug and Play.’ The program has hosted nearly 40 companies since it became active a year and a half ago, and now the company is approaching Israeli startups that it would like to see break into the European and German markets. Axel Springer purchased the Israeli online second-hand marketplace Yad2 from Bezeq for a total of $217 million. Currently, the company is looking for startups in the fields of advertising, content, content systems for vehicles, health services and sharing economy initiatives. The program will last three months and as part of the program, startups will receive support, advice and connections in the German and European markets.

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January 6, 2015 | According a “Globes” report, Israeli venture capital firms have raised up to $855 million for Israeli startups in the last six months. Venture capital funds like Carmel Ventures, Magma Venture Partners, Jerusalem Venture Partners, Greylock Partners Israel, Glilot Capital Partners, Caanan Partners Israel and Ilan Shiloach’s First Time have raised the said funds that are set to go towards Israeli startups and entrepreneurs. However, this remains only a preliminary estimate, according to “Globes” as a number of firms have yet to disclose the amounts raised.

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January 6, 2015 | Leumi Card, Plus Ventures and Tel Aviv University are inviting seed and pre-seed stage startups to take part in a new competition called ‘TechPay.’ The competition organizers are looking for early stage startups in the financial services and digital payments to help them progress and move forward with their innovations. Plus Ventures, one of the leading venture capital firms in Israel, will provide selected startups with close guidance, support and numerous connections to like-minded entrepreneurs. Leumi Card will provide the selected startups with options to present their first product pilot and Tel Aviv University will host the program. Registration closes to interested startups on February 15, 2015.

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January 6, 2015 | According to the CEO of Israeli company Frutarom, the company plans to reach $1 billion in sales as the maker of flavors for Coca-Cola and Nestle seeks more acquisitions. CEO Ori Yehuda reported to Bloomberg: “We are on track in achieving our $1 billion sales target in 2016 and possibly as early as this year.” In addition, the world’s seventh-largest flavor maker in terms of sales reported to Bloomberg that the company is in talks with at least 20 companies and is weighing the possibility for acquisitions in the industry. Since the company was founded in 2001, Frutarom has acquired 32 companies, most recently acquiring the Slovenian company Vitiva for $10 million.

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January 6, 2015 | The shared office space rental company Mindspace announced that in addition to its two locations in Tel Aviv, it will open a third on Ahad Ha’am Street, at the former securities market. The building, which includes five floors and extends over 5,700 meters, will be devoted entirely to Mindspace companies looking for a fun and designed shared workspace. According to Mindspace, the building will be able to house nearly 600 workspaces, in comparison to the 320 workspaces at the Rothschild Boulevard location. The new Mindspace will also include an auditorium, a roof-top event space, gym, showers, a bike-parking station, cafeteria and an underground parking lot. The first Mindspace location was opened in May of 2014 to overwhelming success, despite the entrance of international competitor WeWork onto the Israeli startup scene.

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January 6, 2015 | Availo, an Israeli startup that has created a service to synchronize between all cloud accounts, raised $500,000 from private investors. The service takes a users’ documents in real time from which ever of the cloud services they are saved to, creating a feed of what was opened, saved and edited when. Availo was founded in 2014 by Ami Morali and Dror Sofer, employing ten in the company’s Holon offices.

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January 5, 2015 | The Israeli startup WebyClip, developing technology that matches video clips with products, announced that it raised $4.2 million in funding. The funding came from existing investors Magma Venture Partners, Vertex, Maverick Ventures and angel investor Amit Gilon, bringing the total funds raised by the company since it was founded in 2013 to $5 million total. WebyClip was founded by Verint alumni Ariel Shemesh, Alex Koltun, and Evyatar Ben Shitrit.

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January 5, 2015 | The Israeli members of Greylock Partners have reportedly split away and are set to announce a new venture capital fund worth nearly $200 million. The partners: Arnon Dinur, Yoram Snir, Erez Ofer and Laurel Bowden, the manager of Greylock’s European office, will invest the money in startups in Israel and Europe. In the past, Greylock Israel has invested in such startups as Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr, as well as Israeli startup Eatwith.

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January 5, 2015 | RisingTide, a New York-based gaming company is in talks to buy Win.com, the social gaming arm of Bwin.Party Digital Entertainment. The “Wall Street Journal” reports that the terms of the sale of Win.com to RisingTide, founded by Maytal Olsha, include Bwin exchanging their share in the company for a stake in RisingTide. Bwin, one of Europe’s largest online gambling companies, established Win.com in 2012 to gain a bigger stake in online casino gaming.

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