News Briefs

June 11, 2014 | According to Globes, the Office of the Chief Scientist in the Ministry of the Economy has chosen two new technology incubator franchises, which include Philips and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries as well as Strauss Group. The Phillips-Teva incubator will operate an incubator called Inspire Healthcare Innovations that will invest in pharmaceutical developments and medical devices, with an emphasis on digital platforms. The other incubator run by the Strauss Group will invest in food-related technology in fields spanning from agriculture, to production processes, to packaging.

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June 11, 2014 | SingTel’s (Singapore Telecommunications Limited) digital advertising unit in Israel Amobee acquired Israeli digital content intelligence developer Kontera for $150 million and two units of the cross channel advertising company Adconian Media Group for $235 million. The deal was announced on Wednesday, with Amobee stating that the acquisition of Kontera and Adconian Media North America and Australia will strengthen its position on mobile-driven digital marketing technology. Amobee was founded in 2005 as a mobile advertising company and too was acquired by SingTel in 2012 for a sum of $321 million. Kontera is a unique big data web advertising platform that hyperlinks words to promotional content founded in 2003 by Israelis Assaf Henkin and Yoav Shaham.

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June 11, 2014 | The Israeli incubator Trendlines Group has issued a prospectus to file its first ever IPO on the Toronto Stock Exchange in Canada. According to reports, the offering will be led by Paradigm Capital, Euro Pacific Canada, Octagon Capital Corporation and M Partners and is set to be valued at tens of millions of dollars. The Trendlines Group, founded in 2007, is responsible for the establishment and development of 52 Israeli companies through the Misgav medical technology incubator (now Trendlines Medical) and Mofet B’Yehuda Accelerator (now Trendlines Agtech), investing between $500,000 to $5 million in its portfolio companies.

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June 11, 2014 | The Israeli crowdsourced public transportation application Moovit announced a partnership with Lyft, a rideshare application based in San Fransisco. The two companies announced that the goal of their partnership is to make commutes easier by providing public transportation users with the option to access the rideshare community. As part of the partnership, Moovit will offer new Lyft users a $25 coupon to pay the Lyft drivers that they are paired up with. Moovit, founded in 2011 by Nir Erez, Roy Bick and Uri Levine, is the first crowdsourced public transportation app of its kind, with over 6.5 million users in cities across the globe.

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June 11, 2014 | Guesty (formerly superhost), a service for property owners to manage their apartments listed on Airbnb, raised $1.5M according to report in Geektime. The current financing round was led by Magma Ventures, a group of American angel investors and the company’s accelerator, Y Combinator. The company’s founders, Amiad and Kobi Soto, told Geektime that they hope to use the new batch of funds for development, recruitment of programmers and to fully automate their system, which offers services to property owners to make it easier for them to use Airbnb. Recently the popular site to sublet lodgings has come under criticism from municipal authorities in cities like New York for avoiding the municipal taxes on rent and lease agreements, a challenge that Guesty’s founders hope that their service will be able to address.

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June 11, 2014 | The Israeli security software developer Exabeam raised $10 million in Series A funding to develop software to protect companies from cyber attacks. The latest funding round was led by Norwest Venture Partners, Aspect Ventures and Shlomo Kramer, who is the founder and chief executive of Imperva, another security company. Exabeam applies big data analytics and machine learning techniques to detect patterns and disturbances in patterns that may point to a cyber attack in corporate systems.

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June 10, 2014 | According to reports, the peer-to-peer virtual currency bitcoin will be opening its first ATM in the Middle East in Tel Aviv, Israel tomorrow (Wednesday). The new ATM machines built by American company Robocoin will turn virtual bitcoins into cash, with a number of security features built-in to prevent fraud and theft. The bitcoin virtual currency system was created in 2009 by developer Satoshi Nakamoto and is controversial for removing traditional methods of monetary standardization that require all funds go through a central repository or administrator.

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June 10, 2014 | The Israeli automotive cyber security firm Argus Security reported exclusively to Calcalist that it raised $3 million in the company’s first round of funding. Argus Security, which was founded last year by Ofer Ben Noon, Oron Lavi and Yaron Galula,cyber security experts from the Israeli Intelligence Unit 8200, as well as chairman Zohar Zisapel, secured funding from Magma Venture Capital and Zisapel himself. Argus Security is considered a pioneer in the automotive cyber security sector as cars begin to become equipped with internet access and are therefore prone to cyber attacks.

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June 10, 2014 | The Israeli LTE chip firm Altair Semiconductor has raised another $25 million bringing the company’s total funding to more than $125 million. The company focuses on 4G LTE-only chipsets, making them significantly cheaper than competitors by avoiding the use of old 3G chipsets. The current investment round was led by Jerusalem Global Ventures and ended in March.

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June 10, 2014 | The Switzerland-based company SpacePharma, specializing in microgravity research for the life sciences, announced a new venture of nano-satellites that will serve Israeli and international scientists. Although the nano-satellites are still in development, they will allow individuals and companies that are interested in conducting experiments under zero-gravity and zero-oxygen conditions to send small satellites into space to test out their hypotheses. The first launch of a nano-satellite, which is shot into space using a launcher and can remain there for up to three years, is planned for early 2015 and will cost approximately $100-300 thousand per experiment. SpacePharma was founded by former Israeli Intelligence satellite special officers Yossi Yamin and Ido Priel and has offices in Basel, Switzerland’s “Bio-Valley” as well as an R&D center in Israel.

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June 10, 2014 | The CEO of GetTaxi, the popular application that allows users to order taxis using their smartphone, Shahar Waiser announced that his company’s revenue is growing 400 percent annually and that they are considering offering up an IPO. In a report by Globes, it was disclosed that GetTaxi expects to see about $500M in 2015 revenue, details which were published by Waiser following yesterday’s news  that competitor Uber raised another $1.2 billion, putting the company value at $18.2 billion. GetTaxi was founded by Waiser and business partner Roi More in 2011 and since has launched in Israel, London, Moscow and most recently in New York City.

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June 9, 2014 | The Israeli biopharmaceutical company D-Pharm‘s anti-epileptic drug DP-VPA is set to be fast tracked for approval by the Chinese Food and Drug Administration (CFDA). The drug, which has been deemed a novel treatment by healthcare professionals, is derived from the generic drug valproic acid that is used for the treatment of epilepsy, migraine headaches and bipolar disorder. The DP-VPA treatment for epilepsy has already completed a Phase II clinical trial, and with CFDA approval, D-Pharm will develop the drug together with its local Chinese partner Jiangsu NHWA Pharmaceutical Company. D-Pharm was founded in 1993 in the Kiryat Weizmann Science Park in Rehovot and focuses on the development of innovative drugs for the treatment of central nervous system disorders.

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June 9, 2014 | According to a “Globes” report, VBL Therapeutics (formerly known as Vascular Biogenics) announced that it will file for a $75 million initial public offering (IPO) on Nasdaq. The company will reportedly also offer an option for underwriter overallotment, or the issuing of 15 percent more shares, for the underwriters Deutsche Bank Securities, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan and Oppenheimer. Founded in 2000, VBL Therapeutics is developing drugs for the treatment of brain cancer and inflammatory diseases and has raised $100 million in investments.

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June 8, 2014 | According to reports, Israel is to become the first non-European country to receive grants and funding as part of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 scientific research program. The President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, is set to visit Israel on Sunday to sign an agreement with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Horizon 2020 is the European Union’s Framework Program for Research and Innovation that has a reported 77 billion euros on hand to delve out to potential researchers. Israel’s participation in the program will potentially allow Israeli researchers to participate in international research, cooperate with European researchers and give a variety of institutions, from startups to universities, the opportunity to apply for research and development grants from the program.

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June 8, 2014 | Google has announced that Israeli startups Mantis Vision and SagivTech will supply core technologies for the development of Project Tango. The smartphone and tablet project is part of Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group and looks to create a 3D model of each device’s surroundings by tracking its motion. The smartphone and tablet technology is set to be released this year and will combine Mantis Vision’s 3D engine, the MV4D, with SagivTech’s 3D video stitching technology as part of its core components.

Founded in 2005, Mantis Vision is based in Petah Tikvah and seeks to develop technology that will make 2D to 3D conversion instantaneous. Just this year, Samsung and Flextronics invested $10 million in the company to develop a 3D television. SagivTech is a Raanana-based startup specializing in image and signal processing algorithm development with partners in the European Union.

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