Israel Active

Israel’s Frutarom has made another acquisition in South Africa, buying Pretoria-based Unique Flavors for $6.7 million.  Unique’s African customers include in Ghana, Malawi, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Unique’s operations will be merged with Frutarom’s existing Pretoria site.

Israeli cloud infrastructure company Stratoscale has acquired Tesora, a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) provider, based in Massachusetts, USA.  Tesora’s database will help Statoscale customers move onto cloud-based systems.

I reported previously about Israeli security code checker Checkmarx and its massive revenue growth.  Now Checkmarx is preparing an Initial Public Offering (IPO) on the US NASDAQ.  It has grown to 300 employees from 180 a year ago, and plans to recruit another 100.

Microsoft and Qualcomm join the international investor partners of Israel’s Team8 – the venture fund formed by ex-IDF cybersecurity experts.  In addition, Citibank is becoming a non-investing partner. Existing partners include Cisco, AT&T, Accenture, Nokia and Mitsui.  

Israel’s budget deficit was only 2.1% of GDP at the end of 2016 compared to a target of 2.9%.  The reason was a NIS 9 billion under-estimate of state revenues.

Israel’s sale of its largest-ever euro-denominated bonds was more than four times oversubscribed.  The Israeli government sold 1.5 billion euros ($1.6 billion) in 10-year debt and 750 million euros in 20-year bonds. Investors, however, were prepared to buy 9.8 billion euros of bonds.

More details of the world’s largest equity crowdfunding conference taking place in Jerusalem on Feb 16.  5000 delegates from 80 countries including 200 multinationals. Most of OurCrowd’s portfolio of 110 startups will participate. They include Consumer Physics, MedAware, VocalZoom, Freightos and Zebra Medical. Search for info on them at

69% of all electricity produced in Israel now comes from natural gas - a new Israeli record. The Israel Electric Corporation reported electricity production at 11,936 megawatts, of which 8,258 MW was produced by gas-driven turbines. The rest is from coal and other sources.

Israel's unemployment rate fell to 4.3% in December, from the previous record low of 4.5% in November.  Most of the increase was in full-time jobs.  More women joined the labor force.  The average salary rose by more than 2.5% over the past year.

Ahead of the official announcement, foreign exchange analysts have calculated that the Bank of Israel's foreign currency reserves have exceeded $100 billion for the first time ever. Last month’s value was $98.361 billion and the BOI added at least $2.75 billion in January.