Israel's dynamic tech startup scene is no secret. The country has been called the "start-up nation" for years and, today, only the U.S. and China have more companies listed on the NASDAQ than Israel's 90 - worth a total of $40 billion. Innovation continues and a new crop of Israeli tech startups are on their way up, transforming healthcare, entertainment, finance, media and a myriad of other industries. The hot startups below have secured funding from investors, and are perhaps, on their way to successful exits or IPOs. Here are 25 Israeli tech startups to watch this year:
Zuta Labs
Kaltura
Yevvo
Yotpo
How many online privacy agreements have you confirmed without reading them in the last week? How about the last month or the last year? How many apps have access to your personal information? Probably more than any of us would care to count. The problem with e-signing privacy agreements and granting permissions to apps is that it can be hard to take privileges back, once they've been granted. MyPermissions is a dashboard that scans for all apps and web apps that have access to your information and shows you the results in one place. From there, you can get rid of apps you consider intrusive. Since its founding in 2012, the app has become available on iOS, Android and, recently, Chrome. Management is working with $2.6 million of funding raised in two rounds in 2013.
Otonomic
GetYou
BillGuard
Optimove
Petbnb
StartApp
A year and a half earlier this figure stood at 150 million. Recently, the innovative platform became available to iOS developers for the first time, which will give StartApp access to an as yet untapped market. The company's series A round in 2012 was worth $4.3 million. Perhaps it hasn't raised more money since because it's generating lots on its own from mega success.
Azure PCR
FeeX
Moovit
SCiO
Interlude
StoreDot
Tipalti
Telesofia
Hello Doctor
Takipi
Everything.Me
Mobile OCT
SundaySky
FundBox
Aqua Shield thwarts marine terrorism
The scuba terrorists who made their way from the Gaza Strip to Israel came through an area of shallow water a few dozen meters from the coast, where swimming is possible, but the water is not deep enough for naval vessels to patrol and operate there. The advanced detection systems, however, can also cover shallow water, which makes it difficult to penetrate Israel territory from this area. This unsuccessful terrorist strike exposed the problem of the threat of marine terrorism, a threat that has already been worrying the world for several years. Israel's Aqua Shield system, which gives marine terrorists no chance, makes it a global leader in this field.
There are currently two companies in the world capable of dealing with undersea threats.Ê
One of them is an Israeli company DSIT, a world leader in undersea technology.
Zuta Labs raised more than half a million dollars in a Kickstarter campaign that ended in May by offering to scratch an itch that's been bothering techies for years. The product? A truly mobile printer. The Zuta prototype, which is scheduled to ship in January 2015, is a 4-inch by 4.5-inch inkjet printer on wheels. It deposits ink line-by-line just like a conventional printer does, except that it rolls over the page rather than sucking it through the printing mechanism. The printer uses standard HP ink cartridges and charges by USB and it's light and small enough to fit in most bags. Consider the mobile printing itch scratched.
In many ways, Kaltura is the company that every startup wants to become: the elusive billion-dollar tech unicorn. Since its founding in 2006, it has secured $116 million of funding and has become an industry leader after introducing a highly disruptive product: an open source online video platform. The buzzwords surrounding Kaltura's SaaS platform are "highly flexible" and "future-proof." The idea struck a chord. Today anytime you're watching online video from over 300,000 media, corporate and educational organizations ranging from HBO to TMZ and Harvard to Bank of America, it's being powered by Kaltura's highly flexible, robust platform. What does that mean to investors? The word is that Kaltura could likely be one of the next billion-dollar exits or major tech IPOs.
Yevvo bills itself as the Twitter of live streaming, which is a pretty fair description. The app allows users to share a live video stream with their followers at any time. The young Israeli co-founder and CEO, Ben Rubin, raised several hundred thousands of dollars for Yevvo throughout 2013. In October, a proof of concept of the app's virality came when 3,000 students from four high schools in Detroit downloaded Yevvo after word of the app spread organically. Then, in February 2014, the serious money came in, when Yevvo closed a $3.7 million Series A round. Yevvo has continued to spread since then. In May, Bloomberg TV reported that the app's users had tripled in the last two weeks.
A simple solution to a widespread problem.That's often a formula for startup success, and it's what Yotpo has hit upon with its online customer review platform. The company seems to have struck the right balance between standardization and customization: it's a plug-and-play service with several standard features, such as a translator and moderation tools but it also flexible enough that it can be made to fit seamlessly with the aesthetic of any website. Investors seem to think the two young founders, based in Tel-Aviv, have gotten this balance right. In January Yotpo closed an A round worth almost $11 million.
Website builders, such as Weebly and Squarespace, generally try to reduce the number of clicks needed to complete a site. Otonomic, which launched in March, has taken this design philosophy to the extreme: one click is all it takes to build a site. Otonomic, whose target clients are small business owners and freelancers, achieves this economy of clicks by pulling all information for a site from a business's Facebook page. Then the site automatically updates whenever the Facebook page is modified. The simplicity does not, however, mean limited functionality. Otonomic sites natively support mobile devices and online stores. Also, if you don't mind clicking a few more times, the sites can be customized. The service has gotten off to a good start. More than 20,000 businesses built sites on Otonomic in the first two months it was available and in May the company closed a Series A round worth $1 million.
The developers of GetYou have created a social feedback platform that enables users to discover how strangers and friends perceive them. Users connect to others by guessing about certain characteristics, like age, occupation and personality traits. Users also see what others are guessing about them. GetYou aims to create a new paradigm in social input, allowing users to submit feedback and impressions on the social graph via interactive gaming mechanisms rather than in "comment" or "like" format. The platform's first application, launching next month, is a mobile game that uses semi-anonymous feedback. The company has raised capital from investors including RDSeed and Avishai Abrahami, the founder ofÊWix.com.
Yaron Samid, a serial entrepreneur, and Raphael Ouzan, a data security expert, founded BillGuard because they found checking their credit card statements to be a nuisance. They set out to design an app to streamline the process, but then the project became something more: a fraud detection device. Their insight was that fraud comes in a number of packages that don't necessarily involve career criminals stealing your identity. Fraud can be as mundane as your gym charging you fees you didn't agree to. These kinds of charges are costly on an individual level, and very common. BillGuard detects some of these charges on its own and allows users to flag others, which improves detection over time. The app also alerts users to data breaches at places where they've shopped and to other financial security risks. The company is well-funded with $13 million raised in two rounds in 2010.
Tel Aviv-based Optimove provides tools
for commerce businesses to retain and upsell customers by reducing churn. The retention automation platform is designed to replace marketers' guesswork with behavior tracking analytics and algorithms that spit out specific guidelines about what promotions and ads to serve to individual customers. Founded in 2009 by a data scientist and an operational researcher who met at Tel Aviv University, Optimove got started with the founders' savings and grants from the Israeli government. Today the company has 35 employees and a portfolio of clients, ranging from gaming sites to e-commerce companies. It's branching out now. In March it released a tool that will enable marketers to target Facebook app ads to their customers, and this quarter it expanded sales to the U.S.
Petbnb is exactly what you think. The service, which is currently available in Israel and is coming to the US soon, pairs pet owners with caretakers who can watch their pet while they travel. It is an elegant solution to a common problem and it means no more pawning off the pooch on Mom. It's also significantly cheaper than conventional boarding and, one presumes,more pleasant for pets.
A tenacious mobile advertising company, StartApp has spent the last four years taking on the giants in the space, and has been winning market share. As of early this year, the company's ad platform had been downloaded 1.5 billion times in Android apps.Ê
The game-changing molecular diagnostic technology developed by Azure PCR allows users to instantly diagnose viral, bacterial or fungal illnesses with a blood or urine sample. The significance of the software is threefold: the need for specially trained technicians is removed; results are obtained much faster than in current lab settings; and accuracy is improved. Not only are diagnostic costs drastically reduced with this technology, but in areas with limited technicians and labs - particularly in the developing world - it could revolutionize healthcare and save lives by empowering anyone to instantly diagnose a disease and seek treatment before it's too late.
Of course, monthly membership services aren't the only ones charging hidden fees. Retirement funds are notorious in this respect, but also are rarely held accountable. That's what FeeX plans to change. Created by Yoav Zurel, David Weisz and Waze founder Uri Levine, FeeX takes a snapshot of your retirement accounts and calculates what you're paying in fees and what percentage of your nest egg the fees will consume before retirement. Based on the results of the analysis of other users' accounts, FeeX can recommend cheaper alternatives if you're being fleeced. $3 million from Blumberg Capital has the startup on its way to building a wide user base.
Another project in Uri Levine's portfolio (he's an early investor and chairman of the board), Moovit is doing for public transportation what Waze did for navigation: crowd-sourcing information from users and designing clever software to use these data to give directions. Moovit was one of the big funding winners of 2013, closing a $28 million round led by Sequoia in December. The app is free and it's not making any money, but that's not the goal, at least for now. If Moovit is following Waze's playbook, it will keep expanding its user base and collecting data until one of the big players snatches it up. That worked last time. Waze sold to Google for $1.1 billion after rejecting lower bids from Apple and Facebook.
When Consumer Physics's founders launched a Kickstarter campaign in April 2014, they knew they'd need to raise a big sum to manufacture their SCiO molecular scanner. So they set the funding goal high: $200,000. The campaign wentÉ well. By
mid-June the Israeli company had raised $2.8 million. The scanner, which looks like a thumb-sized USB flashlight, has three modes for food, medicine and plants. From early demonstrations it appears to be highly accurate, able to distinguish, for example, between a Tylenol and a Tylenol PM and capable of determining the macro-nutritional content of many foods. The applications for the technology could be vast: Consumer Physics says that once the database grows with user data, it will become possible to identify almost any substance.
Interlude is the only company on this list with the distinction of having been founded by a rock star, Israeli musician Yoni Bloch. Bloch is modest enough to point out that "Israel is a small country" and his music has not become popular elsewhere. But there's no downplaying the reach of his interactive video platform, Interlude. The platform, which makes online videos work a bit like a choose-your-own-adventure novel, started as a novel approach for making music videos. Now it has brands and advertisers excited about the possibilities for increased user engagement and retention. A number of multinationals, including Microsoft, Shell and Revlon, to name a few, are already using Interlude. The company has raised more than $20 million from Sequoia, Intel Capital and others.
StoreDot is a nanotechnology startup that is exploring applications for a substance it has discovered that it calls Nanodots. The firm, based in Ramat Gan, Israel, is currently using a $10 million investment from Millhouse to explore two commercial applications of the material. One is a smartphone screen that doesn't use toxic minerals such as cadmium. The other (and this is the one that will have all compulsive phone users salivating) is a mobile phone battery that fully charges in a couple of minutes. No date has been set for these products to come to market, but they have the potential to become big sellers to customers including Apple and Samsung.
Founded in 2010, Tipalti has become one of the leading payment service providers to companies, such as online ad networks, that make hundreds or thousands of payments a day to payees around the world. Managing these massive payments in-house could be a nightmare, but Tipalti takes care of every aspect of the transaction, including currency exchange and compliance with tax laws and other regulations. So far, the company has handled more than $1 billion dollars of payments and has raised about $3 million of funding from investors including Oren Zeev, a lead investor in Chegg and Audible.
One of the most vexing and persistent problems of healthcare is that patients don't do what they're told. Telesofia, founded by Israeli doctors and tech innovators, seeks to change that. Its personalized instructional videos are meant to translate a doctor's or pharmacist's order into easy to digest steps that almost everyone will be able to follow. Telesofia, which has raised $1.5 million and had a series A round open as of May, uses a bank of clips and graphics to put together customized videos, controlled by medical providers, that are targeted to specific demographics, conditions and medications. The result is instructions that include everything a patient needs to know and nothing he doesn't. The videos can be viewed on any device from a smartphone to a television.
An iOS app, Hello Doctor is a simple interface that enables users to organize and annotate all of their medical records in one space. It's an elegant solution for a common problem faced by people with extensive medical histories or serious diseases. Many wind up carrying around dense, poorly organized binders and records are often lost. With Hello Doctor, users can carry all of their records in an iPad and have them ready on demand during a visit to the doctor. Founded by Maayan Cohen in Israel, the company is currently backed by a number of angels including John Malloy of BlueRun Ventures.
Debugging servers can be a tedious task for developers. Takipi's SaaS product aims to save the frustration (and hours) required to track down bugs by using a cloud-based analytical tool to find bad code on its own. The product can also detect bugs in code before they become apparent. The company closed a $4.5 million round with Menlo Ventures in December.
A new entrant in the popular category of "launcher" apps for Android, Everything.Me aims to one-up the competition with personalization. In the first days you have the app installed, it learns about which apps you use at certain times of day and in certain places. Then it starts showing those apps on the home screen when you are in the places (and at the times of day) it expects you to use them. So, when you wake up it might show you the weather app. Once you get to work, you'll see Google Drive. Out shopping, Around Me will appear. In 2011 and 2012, the Tel-Aviv-based company raised more than $35 million from angels and VCs.
Mobile OCT is a social venture that aims to bring low-cost medical diagnosis tools to the developing world. The company is founded on the insight that far more people - especially in poor countries - have access to mobile technology than to doctors. Mobile OCT plans to leverage that imbalance to use mobile devices to deliver health care. The company's first project is a mobile colposcope that attaches to a smartphone and uses the phone as the CPU. A colposcope is a device that can detect cervical cancer with specialized photographic methods. According to Mobile OCT, 250,000 women die every year of treatable cervical cancer simply because they aren't diagnosed. $225,000.Ê
It's looking for another $25,000 on Indiegogo.
One of Israel's hottest startups, SundaySky doubled its staff in 2013 after tripling revenue in 2012. In October, it closed a $20 million round led by Comcast Ventures. The impressive numbers are driven by SundaySky's personalized informational videos that brands can deliver to clients. SundaySky's video templates can be automatically personalized in real time based on a client's history and accounts with a brand. One application is that of a health insurance company providing a video overview of the previous billing period's activity. The videos can deliver highly targeted messages such as tips on how to spend less money, such as by switching from a particular brand name drug a client is taking to a generic alternative that has recently become available. AT&T, Orange, Office Depot and AIG are among the startup's clients.
As more Americans make their livings as freelancers, cash flow is a concern for more people than ever. Many freelancers' invoices take 60-90 days to be paid and they work without bank loans, which can mean financial strain even for people with high annual income. FundBox helps to smooth cash flow by loaning against outstanding invoices. If a freelancer is waiting for a $1,500 check that will arrive in a month, FundBox might give her $1,450 today and ask for the full amount once the payment comes in. The amounts of the cash advances are calculated automatically based on FundBox's software that analyzes risk. The company also enables SMB owners and freelancers to earn better borrowing terms the more they use the service. Investors see the value: in April FundBox closed a round worth $17.5 million.
One of the prominent events in Operation Protective Edge was the elimination of a Hamas terrorist squad sent by sea to Zikim on the Ashkelon coast in order to carry out a large-scale terrorist attack. The thwarting of the attack was unquestionably a very great achievement in many aspects: the rapid operational response, the encounter between the IDF unit and the terrorists, and above all the early detection of the threat, which made appropriate preparation possible.