IM Creator is gaining speed on its Israeli competitor Wix.com to become a leading WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) web design website. IM Creator offers high end web design for designers who need to rapidly prototype for their clients, small business owners who haven’t a clue of how to make a website, or for anyone who finds Adobe Dreamweaver too complicated.
The latest IVC Online report is out and it offers interesting color on the funding of Israeli startups. According to the report, 137 startups raised $522 million in Q3 of 2011, up 53% from the equivalent period in 2010, but down 8% from the $549 million raised in Q2 2011.
For the 12th consecutive year, the Deloitte Brightman Almagor Zohar Technology Fast 50 Program annually recognizes and honors the 50 private and publicly held fastest growing technology companies in Israel, based on percentage revenue growth over a five-year period.
Waze, the social GPS and traffic app, has raised a fresh $30 million from Li Ka-shing's Horizon Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers' iFund and Digital Growth Fund. This brings their total funding to over $57 million. Waze is headquartered in Israel but has another main office in Palo Alto.
A few months ago, my colleague Jalin Somaiya and myself (Eze Vidra) gave the below presentation to a group of 20 entrepreneurs who participated in Launchpad, a London-based accelerator organized by Launch48.
Binpress, the latest project by the Israeli startup incubator Lionite is making waves in the coding community with their source code marketplace. The purpose of binpress is to save coders time coding by finding existing solutions to time consuming problems. Their focus is on code for web applications in all sorts of languages, frameworks, and platforms.
BillGuard has raised $10 Million in their Series B round of financing. Investors include bigtime funds like Khosla Ventures, Peter Thiel's Founder's Fund, Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors; previous investors Bessemer Venture Partners and IA Ventures also contributed to this round
Moshe Lichtman, the man once in charge of all of Microsoft’s technology development in Israel, says that the time has come to build a billion dollar Israeli company. In this post I break down an article by TheMarker.co.il about Moshe Lichtman, and why he is one of few men or women capable of leading an Israeli startup to global billions.
Last month, Teva Pharmaceuticals, has announced the launch of a corporate venture capital fund. The new fund will be headed by Dr. Aaron Schwarz, a Teva veteran, and will seek investment in biotech companies. In doing so, Teva joins a list of leading pharmaceuticals that increasingly shift their attention externally as a way to stimulate their product pipeline.
Israeli startup Siklu Wireless Communications has raised a series B round of $19 million led by new investors Amiti Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures and joined by all existing investors: DFJ- Tamir Fishman Ventures, Evergreen Venture Partners and Argonaut Private Equity. Another strategic investor (CVC) joined the round but remained undisclosed. Siklu Wireless Communications has previously raised $12 million in 2008, bringing the funding to date to $31 million.
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.
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