Israel Active

18 deals, worth $1.7 billion, in the third quarter of 2016 raised private equity investment in Israeli companies in the nine months of 2016 to $3.26 billion. This is more than the $3.22 billion for the whole of 2015. The 2016 figure includes BC Partners’ $1.4 billion July buy-out of Keter plastics.

Germany’s Daimler (which includes car manufacturer Mercedes Benz) is to open a Research & Development center in Tel Aviv which will focus on car mobility and information services.

Meir Brand, CEO of Google Israel since 2005, has been promoted to Vice President of the company.  Google, one of the world’s largest technology companies, purchased Israel’s GPS app Waze in 2013 and has a large R&D center in Israel. Brand’s responsibilities include the entire Middle East, Africa, Russia, Turkey, and Greece.

The Royal Bank of Scotland held a 3-day hackathon (hi-tech development exercise) in Tel Aviv to seek out Israeli financial technologies that will enable the Edinburgh-based retail bank to boost services to customers. The “fintackathon” also involved Google and Intel.

One of the two Israeli startups that I mentioned were planning Australian IPOs this year is voice messaging specialist HearMeOut.  It hopes to become the equivalent of Twitter for 42-second voice-clip messages on social media.

I featured Israeli website guidebook-writer WalkMe previously . WalkMe has now been rated the sixth fastest growing software company in North America by the Deloitte accounting firm, and the 13th fastest growing overall. It is growing at a rate of 8,085%,

Israel's unemployment rate for October dropped to an all-time low of 4.5%.  The number of Israelis usually working full time (35 hours per week or more) rose 9% from the previous month.

Although Google now owns traffic and navigation app Waze, it is still an Israeli-run company. Sao Paulo, Brazil (South America’s largest city) is to use Waze to help manage the heavy traffic tackled by nearly 20 million people every day.

Nine Israeli companies were among KPMG's 100 most promising fintech companies for 2016.  They are Payoneer, Ourcrowd, Tipranks, Lemonade, Innovative Assessments, Paykey, Zooz, Blackswan and DMway

Marius Nacht, co-founder of Israeli computer security firm Check Point, has raised $100 million for a new fund to invest in Israeli healthcare startups. He is hoping for the emergence of another Teva or the equivalent of a Check Point in healthcare.