Israel Active

650 Christian pro-Israel executives from 50 countries will attend the 2nd annual conference on “Israeli Innovation for Humanity” in December. It is run by the nonprofit ARISE, which matches Christian Israel-loving businesspeople from abroad with entrepreneurs in Israel.

Israel’s UWORK is an online recruitment agency targeted at new Olim - immigrants to Israel. The website is said to be the first recruitment platform specifically dedicated to immigrants and foreign language speakers, offering a variety of jobs in companies across Israel.

NGO Masa Israel’s “FastTrack Pro” program serves as a pipeline for coding and other key technical skills by matching North American Jews to jobs at Israeli start-ups. Meanwhile, (TY ) The Council for Higher Education’s “Study in Israel” also attracts international hi-tech talent.

Israel’s Composite State of the Economy index for October increased by 0.3% - a slight acceleration in the last two months. All components improved, especially consumer goods exports, services exports, industrial production, imports, retail trade revenue, services revenue and job vacancies.

In the World Economic Forum’s 2019-2020 Global Competitiveness Report, Israel was ranked first for entrepreneurship, (risk, embrace of disruptive ideas, growing innovative companies), R&D expenditure, macroeconomic stability and multi-stakeholder collaboration. Overall Israel was 20th of 141.

Israel’s GDP grew at 4.1% in the third quarter of 2019, far in excess of the market's 2.6-2.8% expectations, according to an initial estimate published by the Central Bureau of Statistics. The unexpected result indicates that economic growth is stronger than most analysts believed.

As reported previously, Israel’s BioCatch is used to prevent fraud by top UK bank Nat West and seven tier-one banks in Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico. This WSJ article reveals that the Royal Bank of Scotland also uses BioCatch’s behavior analysis to stop fraud.

Excellent bio and interview of Jon Medved – Founder and CEO of Israeli crowdfunding platform OurCrowd. He reveals that Israel is almost neck and neck with China in terms of an absolute number of AI (Artificial Intelligent) startups.

Israel’s Netanya-based software startup JFrog has been reported several times, but not when it raised $165 million last year. That transaction valued the company at $1 billion to award it the financial term “Unicorn”.

US-based Ribbon Communications is to acquire Israel-based telecommunications equipment supplier ECI Telecom for $324 million in cash plus shares worth another $130 million. ECI was founded in 1961.