Israel Active

Four Israeli entrepreneurs launched their companies during the coronavirus pandemic. Stayy Live streams live broadcasts; Gooo allows greengrocers and farmers to sell direct to consumers; Canditech provides remote recruitment; and Wishbox manages hotel guests during the pandemic.

Israeli Venture Capital fund Cyberstarts has just closed its second $100 million fund for investing in early-stage cybersecurity startups. To date, the fund has made six investments, and highlights the growing demand for innovative cybersecurity solutions, particularly in times of crisis.

Israel’s 3d Signals has won a Red Herring top 100 Europe award, recognizing it as one of Europe’s outstanding and promising companies. 3d Signals is an Industry 4.0 pioneer with its AI-based IoT Asset Performance Monitoring platform for digitalizing production floors.

US giant National Instruments Corp bought Israeli data analytics Optimal+ (reported previously) for $365 million. Optimal+ founder and CEO Dan Glotter said the deal was “testament to the leading-edge innovation delivered by our R&D, Product and Data Science teams in Israel”.

US IT data services company NetApp has acquired Israeli cloud services startup Spot.io for a reported $450 million. NetApp previously acquired Israeli startups Cognigo, Plexistor, Topio, and Onaros.  The technology of Spot.io helps companies save Cloud computing costs. Beautiful publicity video by sand artist Ilana Yahav.

Latest funding includes: raised ; GreenEye raised , raised ; 1touch.io raised l; Watchful.ai raised .

Israeli companies raised $2.74 billion in the first quarter of 2020 – 76% more than Q1 2019.  March saw a slowdown, but funds raised in April were nearly $1 billion.

When Covid-19 struck, Israeli company Lightricks (developer of photo editing software Facetune) sent home its nine cleaners. Days later, maintenance manager Nadav changed their lives. He taught them basic computer skills and had them inputting photos of faces for image processing.

The Israel-Asia Center (reported previously) was founded in 2011 Since then it has secured some $185 million for the Israeli economy. Its 8-month fellowship has trained almost 100 young leaders from 14 different countries across Asia, including Indonesia and Malaysia.

The US gets a high return on its annual $3.8 billion Israeli investment. Israel invests almost $24 billion in the US, nearly triple that in 2010. Israeli-designed components are an integral part of US hi-tech products. Areas include IT, biotech, life sciences, energy, defense, cyber-security and much more.