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 June 2011 edition after the jump. For previous editions, click here.
The latest Global Trends in Venture Capital report, compiled by the British Venture Capital Association (BVCA) and Deloitte, asks the question: "Is a an active IPO market in your home country essential for the success of the venture capital industry in that market?"
If you visited or lived in Israel, you know that parking in Tel Aviv can be a huge problem. Too many cars and too few spots. Two Israeli entrepreneurs in the 30s, Gev Rotem and Ilan Blum, are tackling the problem with their new startup, Parkpool.
Techcrunch broke the news on the acquisition of Poland-based Bliscy.pl by Israel-based MyHeritage.com. Bliscy will help MH increase reach as the acquisition brings MyHeritage family network to 56 million registered users and approximately 762 million profiles, 18 million family trees and 116 million photos.
miLAB is a research and prototyping lab that explores the future of media, technology, and human-computer interaction. Launched in the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya (IDC), possibly the top Israeli college (and my alma mater), the lab's ambitious vision is to empower students to create and invent, by bridging media and technology as well as academia and industry.
Facebook surprised with its first acquisition in Israel today, with the announcement that it is buying Israeli startup Snaptu (previously known as Moblica) for an estimated $60-70 million. Founded in 2007 by Ron Makavy, Micha Berdichevsky, and Barak Naveh, Snaptu raised a total of $9 million in three rounds
Viola Private Equity, an Israeli PE fund with $164 million under management for technology buyouts, has announced a $7 million investment in Zend, the leading provider of open-source and commercial solutions based on PHP web applications.
The World Bank published the Doing Business 2011 report earlier this week, measuring how easy and pricey it is to complete the various bureaucratic procedures and red tape involved in setting up, running and shutting down a firm. Israel went up one spot from last year in the latest report, ranking 29 among the 183 countries included in the study.
The summary of high tech capital raising in Q2 is out, and the IVC Research Center confirm what we've already knew - capital raising in Israel is showing seeds of recovery (see VC Cafe's post "Crisis Shmisis") with $343 million raised in 104 deals, representing an increase of 47% from the previous quarter. Life sciences continue to lead capital raising, attracting $109 million, and Israeli VC investments are a much smaller slice of the pie.
The most obvious impact on the export-dependent sector was the incidence of widespread layoffs and massive declines in venture capital investment. While some analysts warn of the risks of a “double-dip” recession in the US, Israel’s principal export partner, others point to green shoots signaling the promise of recovery.
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