Israel Active

The Israeli government has put forth a NIS 15 billion plan to revamp northern Israel. It includes upgrading schools, improving health care, grants to businesses, road schemes, expanding Haifa’s bus system and a light rail between Haifa and Nazareth.

Having discovered that few Chinese own an oven, Israel’s Ronen Mechanik launched Uga Uga (Uga = Hebrew for “cake”).  Chinese users order cake-baking kits for use in their rice cookers. 4,000 kits have already been sold since the website’s launch - just through word of mouth.

Israel’s Arkia Airlines is commencing regular flights to London Stanstead, Milan, Salonika and Sardinia. It has already begun flying to Belgrade. Air France is going to Tel Aviv from Nice and Bilbao and China’s Hainan Airlines is offering Beijing flights for $500. And Air Transat is to fly direct twice weekly from Montreal between June and October with connections from Toronto.

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