Israel now has a record 26 unicorns with headquarters in New York City, according to the United States – Israel Business Alliance (USIBA). A unicorn is a startup with a valuation of $1 billion or more.
The new unicorns and big investments keep on coming for Israel Startup Nation, and since New York is the center of world commerce and finance it makes sense that so many Israeli startups have headquarters there. 26 may seem like a lot of companies to have hit unicorn status, but Israel has so many these days that maybe they should raise the standard for joining the unicorn club.
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Since last April, when USIBA issued its 2021 Unicorn Report, New York City has added 14 Israeli-founded unicorns. Half of these newly-minted unicorns earned their wings during the fourth quarter: Augury ($1 billion), Fabric ($1 billion), Hibob ($1.65 billion), Immunai ($1 billion), OpenWeb ($1.1 billion), Selina ($1.2 billion), and Veho, which recently relocated to the Big Apple from Boulder, Colorado and quickly saw its valuation jump from $1 billion in December 2021 to $1.5 billion in February 2022.
“New York supplies strategic resources that no single city can truly match,” USIBA president Aaron Kaplowitz said. “It offers access to seemingly endless sources of capital, a well-traveled path to the rest of America and global markets, a highly sophisticated workforce, cultural synergies – the list goes on.
Kaplowitz also talked about how the Coronavirus crisis caused Israeli startups a great many problems in raising capital and doing business over the past few years and why this led them to New York. “The New York metropolitan area,” he explained, “is the only place in the country with two airports that offer direct flights daily to Tel Aviv, so from the perspective of the executive who needs to travel back and forth frequently, New York has even more appeal.”
