These are days when many are discouraged. In the 93 years of my life depressions have come and gone. Prosperity has always returned and will again. John D. Rockefeller (1929)
In the spirit of prosperity, VC Cafe brings you the latest announcements from Israeli start ups.
Capital Rounds
Peer39
– Developer of semantic ad technology that analyzes pages in order to optimize the remnant advertising inventory. The company has announced a series C round to of $10.5M, bringing the capital raised to date to over $22 million (Press Release). The round was led by Israel-based Evergreen Venture Partners as well as: Canaan Partners, Dawntreader Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank, and JP Morgan – who all previously invested in the company. Peer39 will use the funding to accelerate business development and sales, as well as further development of its semantic advertising technology platform. Led by CEO Amiad Solomon, Peer39 was founded in 2006 and has headquarters in New York.
Footbo – a social network and and user-generated news aggregator focused on what is probably the most popular sport in the world: football (or Soccer for the US). The company has recently announced a first round of $1 Million raised from Pitango Venture Capital, bringing it to a total of $2 million including seed. With 240,000 registered members around the world, Footbo is trying to penetrate the market through a combination of social media integration (with Facebook and Twitter) as well as SEO of its 50,000 team and player profiles filled with content and statistics. Users can interact with the data through prediction games, also available through Virgin Media.
GreenRoad – The company which makes a driver behavior tracking system, has raised $15 million in a round led by DAG Ventures, almost reaching $40 million in venture funding to date, including previous rounds led by Richard Branson’s Virgin Green Fund .GreenRoad’s system is designed for both fleet and consumer vehicles.
GameGround – There’s a vail of secrecy around this Israeli gaming company. GameGround has closed a $4.1 million funding round from Sequoia Capital last week. It’s a big seal of approval after previously raising $2 million seed round from a number of angel investors and founders. More on GameGround this week….
That’s all folks – if you have a tip or an update, or you’d like to write for VC Cafe, just contact us at eze [at] vccafe [dot] com.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
