News Briefs

September 29, 2014 | The Israeli cyber security company CyberArk exceeded expectations in its recent NASDAQ IPO, raising $85.8 million at a company valuation of $473 million. The company sold 5.36 million shares at $16 per share, above the estimated range of $13-$15. On Thursday, the first day of trading, the share price doubled to $35, only to fall back to $29.80, reaching a market cap of $881 million. CyberArk is the third Israeli company to see its share price double on its first full day of trading, after Mobileye on the NYSE and ReWalk Robotics on NASDAQ. CyberArk was founded by CEO Uri Mokady and specializes in IT security solutions to protect organizations from cyber attacks.

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September 29, 2014 | PolyHeal, a company producing treatments for slow healing and chronic wounds, signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding with a European pharmaceuticals company. According to the memorandum, PolyHeal will give the European company a global, exclusive license on its products. Forty one percent of PolyHeal is owned by Clal Biotechnology Industries, with the latter company warning that no binding agreement has been signed. In exchange for the license to PolyHeal’s product, the European company will finance the continued development of PolyHeal2, up until the product obtains CE approval. PolyHeal asserts that its technology aids the body in restarting the natural healing process in the case of hard to heal wounds.

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September 29, 2014 | The digital advertising company Crossrider controlled by Teddy Sagi raised $75 million in its IPO on London’s AIM Stock Exchange. The money was raised at a company value of $250 million, after money. This will be Sagi’s third company to trade in London after Playtech Cyprus (PTEC) and SafeCharge International Group (SAFE). Shore Capital investment bank led the offering, and after the offering, Sagi was left with a 56 percent holding in the company, leaving the public 30 percent and the company’s employees 14 percent. Sagi acquired Crossrider in 2013 for $37 million, just 20 months after the company was founded by CEO Koby Menachemi and CTO Shmueli Achdut in 2011.

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September 28, 2014 | Israel Chemicals (ICL) announced the pricing of its New York Stock Exchange IPO at $7 a share. According to reports, ICL will sell over 60 million ordinary shares which are currently owned by the company’s majority shareholder, Israel Corporation, in a second offering at a price of $7 a share. In addition, the underwriters for the IPO, which include Morgan Stanley, Barclays Capital, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and BMO Capital Markets, will be given a 30-day option to purchase an additional 6 million shares. Due to Israel Corporations majority shareholder position in the company, ICL will not receive financial proceeds from the sale. ICL is a multi-national manufacturer, producer, developer and marketer of fertilizers, metals and other special purpose chemical products that was founded in 1968.

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September 28, 2014 | BioCancell Therapeutics, an Israeli company researching and developing cancer drugs, announced a successful clinical trial of its treatment on high-risk bladder cancer patients. The US Food & Drug Administration, which requires that the trial be conducted successfully in order to move on to Phase III, will allow the company’s BC-819 drug, which is used together with existing bladder cancer treatment BCG, to move forward in the approval process. As a result, the company’s share price rose by nine percent in afternoon trading on Tuesday on the TASE. In the trail, 17 high-risk bladder cancer patients, whom already had malignant tumors removed, were treated with a mix of BC-819 and BCG three times a day, and 11 of the patients saw no reoccurence of malignant tumors up to three months from the beginning of treatment. BioCancell was founded in 2004 by Hebrew University Professor Avraham Hochberg and is based on a technology developed by him over the past 20 years.

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September 28, 2014 | The Israeli biomedical investment company Trendlines Group filed a prospectus with securities regulatory authorities in Canada. The company filed with authorities in Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Nova Scotia, with plans to sell over 2 million shares at C$3.60 (US$3.23) a share at a company value of C$80 million after money (US$71.7 million). The company hopes to raise C$9.5 million (US$8.5 million) in the offering, and most of the shares have already been allocated. The offer is set to close on September 30th, after the IPO was delayed due to Operation Protective Edge. Trendlines Group was founded in 2004 by Todd Doloinger and Steve Rhodes, American immigrants to Israel that began their company as a business consulting service for medical companies, which expanded to the agritech sector.

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September 28, 2014 | The Israeli cyber security company CyberArk priced its NASDAQ IPO above range, with the company selling 5.36 million shares at $16 per share, up from the planned range of $13-$15. CyberArk granted its underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to 804,000 shares to over over-allotments when the company began trading on NASDAQ on Wednesday. JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank are joint book-running managers and are the representatives of the underwriters for the offering. CyberArk, founded 15 years ago by CEO Uri Mokady, specializes in IT security solutions to protect organizations from cyber attacks and has raised over $70 million to date, with its largest investor being Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP).

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September 28, 2014 | The digital delivery company based in Israel, ironSource, announced the close of a $85 million investment round. Significant investments in the company came from strategic and institutional investors in the United States, China and Europe. Using the new batch of funds, ironSource hopes to expand its international presence and offerings, driving forward the adoption of its solutions. ironSource provides a platform to help developers improve their digital discovery, delivery, distribution and monetization through the company’s four cores: mobileCore, installCore, displayCore and mediaCore. According to reports, due to the company’s fast growth since its founding in 2009, ironSource will file for a Wall Street public offering in 2015.

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September 28, 2014 | The Israeli biotechnology company Galmed Pharmaceuticals announced that the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) awarded the company with Fast Track Designation for its drug candidate Aramchol. Aramchol is a treatment for Non-Alcoholic Steato-Hepatitis (NASH), also known as ‘silent’ liver disease. Upon the announcement, the company’s share price rose 38.58 percent to $8.98 per share on Tuesday, reaching a market cap of $99.12 million. In March, Galmed held a NASDAQ IPO, raising $38 million at a company value of $137 million after money. Galmed Pharma was founded in 2000 by Mr. Allen Baharaff, the CEO and co-founder of the company, and has a number of international patents.

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September 23, 2014 | Clal Biotechnology will sue Hyperion Therapies for a total of $200 million for damages, breaching of contracts between the two companies, and unprofessional behavior. The announcement came after Clal Biotechnology informed the company’s investors that it has requested Hyperion to turn over information regarding the latter company’s claims in the lawsuit. Hyperion Therapies acquired Andromeda from Clal Biotechnology this past June, after extensive checks into the companies management. On the 8th of September, Hyperion published a statement according to which it announced that it would halt the production of Andromeda’s treatment for juvenile diabetes, a sister company of Clal Biotechnology, after which the  value of latter company’s stock dropped by at least ten percent.

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September 23, 2014 | The modern event planning platform HoneyBook announced that it raised $10 million in Series A funding. The HoneyBook platform, which is currently in beta, is an invite-only platform allowing event planners to collaborate together with their clients and other service providers (such as photographers) to plan events. The Series A financing round was led by Aleph VC together with Hillsven VC, Ev Williams, James Currier and Stand Chudnovsky of Ooga Labs, among others. HoneyBook was founded in 2013 by four friends who encountered much difficulty trying to plan big events. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and has a development office in Tel Aviv. Since the platform’s launch earlier this year, HoneyBook has retained 1oo percent customer retention and sustained 30 percent growth per-month, securing its place as a trusted tool for event planning professionals and industry leaders alike.

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September 23, 2014 | The Tel Aviv Municipality has opened a number of its transportation databases for the development of applications to relieve the traffic jams and parking problems in the Israeli city. The municipality’s new databases will provide users with information on traffic signal timing, availability in parking lots, the nearest Tel-O-Fun bike rental stations as well as the number of cars on the road. In addition, the Tel Aviv Municipality is set to integrate some of Waze‘s services into the application, free of charge, according to Aviad Heilbrun, the company’s Tel Aviv development manager. The municipality hopes to use Waze’s crowd-sourced navigation services to provide users with information on roadwork and well as streets that have been blocked off by police for events. Waze was founded in 2008 by Uri Levine, Ehud Shabtai and Amir Shinar, and sold to Google in 2013 for $1.1 billion.

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September 23, 2014 | The Ministry of the Economy and the Ministry of Finance have approved a plan to award Intel with a $300 million grant over a period of five years. Intel, an American multinational corporation headquartered in California, is set to make investments of nearly NIS 22 billion (approx. $6 billion) in expanding the company’s Kiryat Gat plant in the coming years. In addition to the grant, the government will allow Intel to benefit from a reduced Companies Tax rate of five percent for ten years. In return, the company has committed to extensive reciprocal procurement in Israel in the next few years that is set to amount to nearly NIS 2 billion (approx. $546 million). Minister of the Economy Naftali Bennett told Globes, “We approved the biggest investment in the country’s history.” The expanded Intel plant in Kiryat Gat will employ 1,000 individuals directly, and nearly 2,500 individuals indirectly.

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September 22, 2014 | The Ben Gurion University in the Negev and the Soreq Nuclear Research Center won a tender to create a National Photonics and Electro-Optics Research Center with a budget of NIS 175 million ($47 million). The tender was offered by The Research and Development of Armaments and Technological Infrastructure Administration (MAFAT), which is part of the Ministry of Defense, on behalf of the Telem Forum, which includes MAFAT, the Office of the Chief Scientist, the Planning and Budget Committee of the Council for Higher Education and the Budgets Branch of the Finance Ministry. The BGU team will be led by Prof. Gabby Sarusi of the Electro-Optics Engineering Unit who will partner with Dr. Rafi Lavi, the head of Soreq NRC in Yavne.

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September 22, 2014 | The Chairman of the Department of Computer Science at Bar Ilan University, Prof. Doron Peled, is the recipient of the 2014 CAV (Computer-Aided Verification) Award. The Award was presented to him at the 6th annual CAV conference in Vienna, Austria. Together with Prof. Antti Valmari of Finland’s Tampere University of Technology, Prof. Pierre Wolper of the University of Liege and Dr. Patrice Godefroid of Microsoft Research in the U.S., Peled received the award for developing methods that can be used to analyze communications between ATMs and a bank’s computer. At the ceremony, the team was commended for the “historical importance and deep impact of their contribution.” The CAV Award was established in 2008 and is granted in recognition of specific or a series of substantial contributions to the field of computer-aided verification.

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