Israel tech companies raised $9.8 billion through 18 initial public offerings, up from just $1.2 billion the year before.
Mobileye, the maker of anti-collision technology, accounted for $890 million of the 2014 total with its Wall Street IPO in August, the largest-ever IPO of an Israel company, PwC said.
Meanwhile, some $5 billion of tech startups were bought in mergers-and-acquisitions deals, down from $6.45 billion the year before, PwC said, with one day left in 2014.
“Over the past year the stars were aligned perfectly for Israel high tech, ” PwC said, adding that 2014 “is by a wide margin a record year of Israel high tech.”
Mobileye is a camera that warns car drivers of danger and works the brakes.
The report cited the big surge in technology stocks in the U.S. and Britain, which lifted the valuations that Israeli tech companies could get through an IPO.
The turn to IPOs follows three years of giant M&A deals, the best known of which was the sale of the navigation app company Waze to Google for close to $1 billion.
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Read the full story at Haaretz, by Amir Teig
