Israel Active

BBC Global News has replaced Outbrain (see ) - its Israeli provider of recommendations for the website BBC.com - with Israel’s Taboola (see ). Ironically, the Israeli firms recently cancelled a 2019 merger agreement (see ). (No change likely to BBC’s anti-Israeli reporting)

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Israeli-founded, London based cybersecurity company Wandera, has been acquired by U.S. company Jamf for $400 million.

Dubai’s Arabian Travel Market was billed as the first travel and tourism event to happen in person since the global coronavirus outbreak. Israeli booth marketed the country as the “Land of Creation”. Videos advertised Israel’s vegan food, its beaches and urged: “Book Your Trip Now” to Tel Aviv.

On May 24th 18,000 passengers passed through Tel Aviv Ben Gurion’s airport with 134 flights taking off and landing. Many of the foreign airlines, who suspended flights during Operation Guardian of the Walls have now resumed Israel operations.

Israeli venture capital firm 83North has raised a new $550 million fund. This is the VCs sixth fund and will take its assets under management to $1.8 billion. 83North has invested in Israeli startups ironSource and Payoneer (who are about to go public) plus CYE, Trigo, Zerto, Via, and many others.

CNBC’s 2021 Disruptor 50 list (of companies aligned with a rapid pace of technological change) contains seven Israelis (up from 5 in ).  They are (at number 4), (9), (11), (15), (26), (31) and (32).

Four Israeli startups were listed in Garner’s 2021 Cool Vendors list. They are VOOM (Insurance), Run:AI (Enterprise AI Operationalization and Engineering), Lightrun (Monitoring, Observability and Cloud Operations) and Apiiro (DevSecOps).  All have previously appeared in this newsletter.

With R&D centers in Tel Aviv and Binyamina, US-headquartered Sunbit has developed a payment method that allows US stores to offer their customers the option to buy now and pay later, in installments. Sunbit has just raised $130 million of funds, to reach a “Unicorn” valuation of $1.1 billion.

Covid is over, as far as Israel’s hi-tech jobs market is concerned, with Israeli companies fighting over available local resources. This is according to the OurCrowd High-Tech Jobs Index - a quarterly report tracks vacancies and hiring patterns of high-tech companies in Israel and abroad.