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.
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.
The goal of the ongoing Free Trade Agreement negotiation between India and Israel is to raise trade to $15 billion per year between the two countries by 2015. If you know of an Israeli company that is starting to do business in India, please let us know, we’d love to hear about you.
Seeing no borders, Daniel “Danny” Shechtman made his award winning discovery of quasi-crystals while working at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards. He is a graduate of the Technion in Haifa, Israel, and currently divides his time teaching and researching at Iowa State, U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames, and the Technion.
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.
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