Top 10 Big Investment Rounds in Israel Startup Nation 2021 Part One

Lendbuzz co-founder Dan Raviv (left) and Amitay Kalma (company PR pic)

Israel Startup Nation keeps on bringing in the gelt. The country sets record after record on fundraising round for new companies. From fintech to medtech, alternative energies to alternatives to meat and dairy, there seems to be no end to what Israeli ingenuity can create.

Here is the JBN list of the biggest rounds of new investment in Israeli startups for 2021.

Future Meat Brings in $347 Million
Just last week, Future Meat, an Israeli cultured meat startup, completed a new fund raise bringing in a total of $347 million. The new funding gives Future Meat a $900 million valuation, 50 percent more than the $600 million that was previously expected.

Whether meat or dairy, fake animal based food is great for the environment. All the millions of cows and chickens around the world used for meat and dairy and eggs leave behind waste that harms the environment. Then there is all of the energy consumed in raising the animals and the problems with animal cruelty for how they are treated.

Fake food, or artificially produced alternatives to animal products which are as good as the real thing, is nothing new for Startup Nation. Israel has several firms offering artificial meat through the wonders of 3D printing. Redefine Meat is one such startup.
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Founded in 2018, Future Meat Technologies is a Food-Tech company which boasts that it advances a distributive manufacturing platform for the cost-efficient, non-GMO production of meat directly from animal cells, without the need to raise or harvest animals. Future Meat Technologies focuses on developing a new generation of manufacturing technology that enables the cost-efficient production of fat and muscle cells, the core building blocks of meat. The technology is exclusively licensed from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is based on the findings of Prof. Yaakov Nahmias.

Orca Security Raises $550 Million
In October, Israeli cybersecurity startup Orca Security, which specializes in cloud services security, raised an additional $340 million. This brought Orca’s total Series C fundraising round to $550 million. Orca Security was already a unicorn, but now it is an even bigger one with a $1.8 billion valuation. The news came after Orca raised $150 million in July.

Founded in 2019, Orca Security offers a cloud security innovation. The company provides cloud-wide, workload-deep security and compliance for AWS, Azure, and GCP. Orca boasts that it treats a client’s cloud as an, “interconnected web of assets, prioritizing risk based on the severity of the underlying security issue combined with environmental context, including its accessibility and potential damage to the business.” This does away with thousands of meaningless security alerts to provide just the critical few that matter, along with their precise path to remediation.
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Lendbuzz Raises $300 Million
Israeli fintech startup Lendbuzz offers an AI based auto finance platform for people seeking a line of credit. In June Lendbuzz completed a $60 million Series C funding round led by Wellington Management, joined by Goldman Sachs & Co and MUFG Innovation Partners. The company also qualified for a whopping line of credit for itself, getting $300 million in debt financing led by Goldman Sachs Bank USA.

Fintech is anything new having to do with using technology to improve the transfers of money, or payments. This includes just about everything like every time a person pays for something on line. And, of course, fintech also includes any and all digital banking transactions, such as small loans and lines of credit.
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Founded in 2015 by CTO Dan Raviv and, Lendbuzz uses Big Data analytics to “significantly” improve access to credit for international students and professionals living in the US. The Israeli founders explain that they decided to found the company when living in the U.S. themselves. There they saw how difficult it was to qualify for small loans or to obtain credit.

AnyVision Raises $235 Million For Facial Recognition Tech
Israeli startup AnyVision is a facial recognition AI company. AnyVision brought in an investment of $235 million in July from SoftBank Vision Fund 2i and Eldridge with further participation from existing investors. The technology can be used in security and defense.

Facial recognition as a technology is highly controversial. Governments love it because it makes law enforcement much easier. With closed caption video camera popping up everywhere these day, AI facial recognition tech can help police more easily identify the people caught in videos which are not all that clear. The technology is also used in major public places, like airports, where it can scan faces in a crowd to spot possible wanted criminals or terrorists.
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Founded in 2015, AnyVision is a visual AI platform company. The company boasts that tier-1 brands use their “cutting-edge technology to create trusted, seamless experiences for their customers and employees.” AnyVision says that their solutions are built to function on any sensor, with any resolution and are “proven to operate with the highest accuracy in real-time and real-world scenarios.”

Steve Mnuchin Invests In Cybereason $275 Million Fund Raise
Cybereason is an Israeli cybersecurity company, which provides protection against cyberattacks to both governments and businesses alike. In July Cybereason (Cyber + Reason) raised $275 million in new financing led by the former US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and his new fund Liberty Strategic Capital.

Founded in 2012, Cybereason calls itself the champion for today’s cyber defenders providing future-ready attack protection that “unifies security from the endpoint, to the enterprise, to everywhere the battle moves.” The company boasts that their Cybereason Defense Platform combines the industry’s top-rated detection and response (EDR and XDR), next-gen anti-virus (NGAV), and proactive threat hunting to deliver “context-rich analysis of every element of a Malop (malicious operation).”
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