Israel is a 65-year-old country of about 8 million people that is
home to between 4,000 and 5,000 startups.
It is second only to Silicon Valley as a hub of tech innovation.
Julie Bort, Business Insider
As Israel's tech industry matures, it has, so far, produced 68 public companies traded on Nasdaq.
It has also increasingly attracted investment by venture
capitalists worldwide. And it's hottest companies have been a big target of
acquisitions, particularly by big U.S. tech companies.
For instance, among the 20 hottest startups we named on our 2013 list, Waze was bought by Google for $1.1
billion, PrimeSense was bought by Apple for $345
million, Soluto was sold to a company called Asurion for an estimated $130 million, and Wix had a successful $119 million IPO. Once again we compiled this list by asking
people in the Israeli tech scene to name the buzzy, hot companies they are
watching. Plus we threw in a few of our own. We used CrunchBase as our source
for venture funding information.
CyActive came out of stealth earlier this year as one of
the first security companies to be part of the Cyber Labs incubator. The
incubator is a partnership between Ben-Gurion University and one of the
Israel's biggest VCs, Jerusalem Venture Partners.
CyActive claims that it has tech that can end nearly all
computer viruses for all time. The founders noticed that 94% of viruses
are some combination of old viruses. It is building a smart engine that can
recognize that existing code, even when hackers have changed it to escape
detection.
The young company has not announced how much seed money
it has obtained, but JVP did invest in it.
The main reason people go to conferences is to meet other people.
But dealing with a handful of business cards is ridiculous in this day and age.
Enter Bizzabo, which allows you to connect with other conference
attendees through their social media profiles, or to easily add them to your
email address book.
About 3,000 conferences have hired Bizzabo to to handle this
social networking piece, it says.
It's backed by $1.5 million in seed money from angel investors
including Jeff Pulver, co-founder in Vonage.
ironSource makes software that helps software developers get their
apps found, installed and generating money. It's flagship product is called
InstallCore. If you've downloaded an app from the Internet, there's a 1 in 3
chances you did it via InstallCore, the company says.
ironSource hasn't revealed how much money its raised through
investors, but it is backed by one of Israel's well-known VCs, Carmel Ventures.
It is now expanding into China, and was recently visited by famous
Chinese angel Xu Xiaoping and 20 other Chinese investors. During the visit
ironSource CEO Tomer Bar Zeev was made the first Israeli member of a Chinese
entrepreneur organization called the Dark Horse
Club.
After selling Waze to Google for $1.1 billion last June,
co-founder Uri Levine moved onto his next FeeX, which officially launched in March. FeeX analyzes hidden fees spent by financial
services companies that eat into things like your retirement account. It then
shows cheaper alternatives.
The company estimates that up to 1/3 of your nest egg can be
gobbled up by these fees.
FeeX launched in Israel and then moved its headquarters to New
York to be closer to the larger U.S. market, leaving an office in Israel.
Levine is as famous in Israel as Larry Page is in Silicon Valley
and FeeX remains a buzzy startup in that country.
Consumer Physics is building a science-fiction-like device called
SCiO which is currently going absolutely crazy on
Kickstarter. It has raised nearly $2.7
million from the crowdfunding site so far.
SCiO is a "pocket molecular sensor" meaning it can scan
materials and can tell you all about them, sending that information to your
phone. It can identify food, medicine, plants, chemicals.
Star Trek fans would call it a "tricorder"
The company also raised a bit over $2 million from venture
investors and angels.
Reduxio employees with co-founder Amnon Strasser (far right)
Reduxio makes enterprise computer storage hardware based on flash
storage technology. It was founded by experienced storage execs including Mark Weiner,
who was CEO of Exanet, a storage company that was struggling until it got a Hail Mary
exit when Dell bought it for $12 million in 2010. Its product is currently in beta testing and will be available
later this year, it says.
Reduxio is backed by Intel Capital and two well-known Israeli VCs, Jerusalem Venture Partners and Carmel Ventures.
Yotpo is a service that allows ecommerce sites to add and manage
reviews. It calls its service "social
promising "real reviews from real people, no more fake
reviews!"reviews" in that it uses an algorithm to filter reviews,
Think of it like a rent-a-Yelp for ecommerce websites. But it also
provides ecommerce sites with other tools. For instance, they can use it to
create a customer loyalty reward system.
While a social tagging startup might sound oh-so-2010, Yotpo is on
a roll this year. It landed a $10.7 million series A in January.
BillGuard protects consumers against a kind of fraud-like activity
it calls "grey charges." That's where
Once you sign up for BillGuard, you do nothing more. It monitors
the world for fishy transactions and gets the refund for you, for up to three
cards for free. It charges $80/year to protect up to 10 cards.
After it launched an iPhone app last summer, BillGuard landed
500,000 registered users. It did particularly well after the news broke about
hackers attacking Target. The company has identified more than $1 million in
fraudulent transactions, and $60 million in suspect, gray charges, it says. It
just launched an Android app in May, too.
BillGuard has raised $13 million so far from big-named VCs
including Bessemer, Khosla, Founders Fund (Peter Thiel's and Sean Parker's
fund) and Innovation Endeavors (Google chairman Eric Schmidt).
Checkmarx offers a tool for software developer that helps them
check their code to make sure it is bug free and can't be attacked by hackers.
It names Samsung, Coca Cola, and the U.S. Army as customers.
Salesforce.com is also a customer, a partner and an investor.
Checkmarx was recently included on Red Herring's
2014 Top 100 Europe Award, honoring the most promising private companies in
Europe.
CyberArk is an enterprise security company dedicated to solving a
really hard problem: stopping what's known as "advanced persistent attacks." That's when hackers gain
legitimate access to a network through things like stolen passwords.
This is such a hot area of security that when competitor FireEye
went public a few months ago, the stock went unreasonably nuts. CyberArk has benefitted, too. By the end of 2013, it grew its
workforce to over 300 people, grew revenues 30 percent and landed over 1,400
customers including 40 of the Fortune 100, it says.
Taboola helps publishers and blog sites recommend videos and
stories for their readers. It makes 130 billion recommendations per month to 350 million
people, it says, and names USA Today, The Huffington Post, Time, and The
Weather Channel as customers. It just struck a deal with Yahoo! JAPAN, too.
Although it is headquartered in New York City, with R&D in
Israel, it was founded by "a bunch of geeks in the Israeli army," as
the co-founders describe themselves.
MyHeritage.com is a popular genealogy website with more than 75
million registered users. It lists more than 1.5
billion names in 27 million family trees and hosts about 70 million photos. It
has also acquired a number of smaller genealogy sites over the last few years.
Earlier this year, its digital library of historical records
passed the 5 billion milestone, growing at a rate of five million records a
day. These records are the cornerstone of family tree research.
The company has also partnered with
Mormon Church-sponsored FamilySearch and
with BillionGraves, a crowdsourced initiative to preserve the world’s
cemeteries.
It's backed by Bessemer, Index and Accel and Israeli famous angel
Yuval Rakavy.
Kenshoo is a company that helps companies buy ads on search
engines and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Kenshoo claims half the Fortune 50 and all 10 top global ad agency
networks as customers including such brands as CareerBuilder, Expedia, KAYAK,
Sears, Walgreens, and Zappos.
It is doing particularly well in the hot Asia/Pacific region, it says, including China. That's an emerging market attracting a lot of
attention from American and European companies these days.
Sure, GetTaxi's competitor, Uber, just had a jaw-dropping round of
financing, a $1.2 billion deal that valued the company at $18.2 billion.
But that has only spurred GetTaxi to be more vocal about how well
it's doing, too. GetTaxi founder and CEO Shahar Waiser said that he expects
GetTaxi to hit revenues of half a billion dollars next year and start marching
toward an IPO.
GetTaxi operates in 24 cities around the world, claiming to be
profitable in 22 of them, it told the Wall Street Journal.
Celeno Communications designs Wi-Fi chips. It's known for chips
that deliver Wi-Fi for bandwidth-gobbling movies and music over home networks. Celeno has become an alternative to the two companies that
otherwise dominate this market: Broadcom and Qualcomm. Celeno's chips are used
by more than 75 service providers worldwide, the company
says.
Celeno's investors include Cisco Systems and Greylock partners.
Kaiima is a bio-tech company that is earning worldwide accolades
for developing non-genetically modified MIT's 50 Smartest Companies.
It's tech is being used by companies like Bayer CropScience to
create hybrid forms of rice (that's the agriculture unit of the company that
makes Bayer aspirin).
Outbrain automates
the task of showing related links on blogs and news sites. It makes over 150
billion it says. recommendations a month (58,000 links to content shown every second) , Outbrain
customers include American Express, P&G, Colgate-Palmolive and General
Mills. It's backed by Index Ventures, Carmel Ventures, Gemini Israel Funds,
GlenRock Israel, Rhodium and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Founded in 2005, Conduit is known to be one Israel's most valuable
private tech companies. In 2012, JP Morgan invested $100 million into the
company at about a $1.4 billion valuation.
Conduit originally offered app distribution/download services, but
it sold that business to another Israeli company, Perion, in a deal that closed earlier this year.
Today the company offers a platform that lets companies write
mobile apps. It says more than 600,000 apps have been created, with 3,500 new
apps added daily. It also offers an app that connects your mobile browsing on
your smartphone to your PC.
Altair Semiconductor makes chips that connect mobile devices to 4G
data networks. Because Altair's chipscofounder Eran Eshed told VentureBeat. don't support 3G at all, only 4G, it can make its chips far cheaper, $30 compared
to $80 to $90 range for typical 3G/4G ones,
The lack of 3G support hasn't stopped the company from acquiring
customers. More than 30 device makers are using Altair’s chip in over 80 mobile
devices including tablets, smartphones, USB dongles and portable hotspots.
Mobileye makes the cameras used in cars that warn drivers of
potential collision. Although Mobileye is an older, established company (its products have been used in cars since 2007),
it's been a buzzy company again thanks to all the action going on with autonomous
vehicles like self-driving cars and drones.
That's because it uses sophisticated vision algorithms to
‘interpret’ a scene in real-time. The company says that in 2016 it, and two
unnamed partners, will launch a product for hands-free driving at high
speeds in highway traffic.
Mobileye actually calls The Netherlands as its world headquarters
but its development lab is in Israel and it was founded by a team of Israelis including
Amnon Shashua, professor of computer science at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem.