As silicon valley veterans who are experienced working with startups Gil Ben Artzi, a former Yahoo exec, and Shuly Galili, founder of the CICC and organizer of the Israel web/mobile/cleantech tours, spotted the gap and launched Upwest Labs, a new accelerator for Israeli startups in Silicon Valley.
Safebit has launched a Chrome extension preview version which received positive reviews, and is now operating in Alpha mode. According to the founders, on the first 24 hours of operation, over 725 unique users paid with Safebit.
It's enough to observe consumer behavior for a couple of hours in the nearest mall to you, to understand that the way we shop, has dramatically changed since welcoming smartphones and tablets to our lives. People browse, choose, pay and troubleshoot products using mobile sites, apps and social media shaking the ground for multi-channel retailers, who until now mainly focused on their brand and brick and mortar shops
Globes reported a rumored $1.5 million A round for Tactus Mobile, an Israeli startup in the mobile payments space. The round was led by Lool Ventures, an incubator/micro fund started by ex AOL/Yedda execs and joined by Israeli angel Yuval Tal (founder of several payment startups including Payoneer) and additional private investors who led the company's seed round.
It seems like yesterday that Israeli startup Shaker won Techcrunch disrupt, and today the company is announcing a $15 million round led by Menlo Ventures. Other investors include Innovation Endeavors (Dror Berman), Troy Carter and Rami Beracha from Pitango as well as CrunchFund who was already an investor in Shaker.
As every month, VC Cafe is re-posting the “Invest in Israel” Newsletter, published by the investment promotion center of Israel’s Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor, which offers many helpful tools for prospecting investors. See the September 2011 edition after the jump. For previous editions, click here.
I connected with Ofir to learn more about Capple Factory and Just Us. As app startups are growing in numbers and in popularity (taking Israeli startup Shaker who was crowned the winner of TechCrunch Disrupt yesterday), I was especially interested in the early stage challenges of launching an app and driving adoption
eBay acquired Israeli startup The GiftsProject for an undisclosed sum, according to AllthingsD. Founded in 2009, The GiftsProject has created a social commerce application, enabling users to vote, comment and buy a gift together as a group. Back in February, the GiftsProject announced a partnership with eBay as well as $1 million seed round from Gemini and Index ventures.
Alley Insider, one of my favorite tech blogs, published an interesting post yesterday, titled "If We Hear About Any More Startups Like These, We'll Scream", listing some of the latest startup trends in idea buckets. Their frustration is coming from the sheer number of startups doing the same thing in the US, but for all of us living out of the US, the question should be: Is it currently being done right your country?
This summer, I had the pleasure to be a mentor at the Entrepreneurship Summer School, an elective at London Business School (my alma mater) where students are tasked with testing whether their startup ideas can turn into a fundable business over the course of three months. Check out the tips for raising funding from angels after the jump.
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