Israel High Tech Scene November 6 – November 12

Tel Aviv at sunset, Israel

New Startups / VC Funding
Jerusalem’s AutoLeadStar Raises $57 Million For
AutoLeadStar, an Israeli startup based in Jerusalem that offers a digital customer data and experience platform for the automotive industry, raised $40 million in a Series C growth round of investment led by Riverwood Capital with the participation of existing investors. This brings the company’s total investment to $57 million to date.

So, Mobileye is not the only firm to come out of Israel Startup Nation that deals with automotive technologies. And it… Read More Here

Israel’s Teridion Gets $25 Million Investment From Deutsche Telekom
Deutsche Telekom, the major German telecommunications firm, has invested $25 million in Israeli software company Teridion. Teridion is best known for WAN networks that the company has already been providing to Deutsche Telekom.

WAN stands for Wide Area Network and as the name suggests this is something needed more by larger organizations. This is as opposed to a local area connection, like what people have in their homes. A WAN is a… Read More Here

Salignostics Offers First Ever Saliva Based Pregnancy Test
Salignostics, an Israeli startup that develops home pregnancy testing devices, is now marketing the world’s first ever such device that can test using a woman’s saliva. SaliStick, the company’s saliva-based pregnancy test is ready to be sold in stores in Europe, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates and Israel at the beginning of 2023.

How many times have you seen this as a storyline in a movie or a TV show? A woman thinks she might be pregnant and so she rushes out to get a home pregnancy test from the nearest pharmacy. Such storylines are used for either dramatic or comedic effect, as the audience… Read More Here

Everybuddy Games Raises $15 Million – Veriti Brings In $12 Million
Everybuddy Games, an Israeli startup that develops online games, raised $15 million in a Series A funding round, led by Makers Fund with participation from Key1 Capital. The company is best known for the casual mobile game Lucky Buddies. Meanwhile, Veriti, another Israeli startup that offers a security platform that proactively and continually identifies and remediates security gaps, raised $12 million

Lucky Buddies is the first-ever casual adventure-slot game. The object is to help the Lucky Buddies defeat… Read More Here

IPOs and Unicorns
Delek Group’s Ithaca Energy Holds Largest British IPO 2022 Then Crashes
Ithaca Energy, a subsidiary of Delek Holdings, held the biggest initial public offering (IPO) on a British exchange for 2022. Unfortunately, after the stock’s debut on the London Stock Exchange, it dropped considerably in value.

The Ithaca Energy IPO was also the 5th largest in Europe so far this year. The IPO left the company with a valuation of 2.5 billion GBP ($2.9 billion). Delek Group offered for sale 105 million ordinary shares… Read More Here

Gauzy Looks To NASDAQ IPO
Gauzy, an Israeli startup that develops liquid crystal glass panels for use in a variety of industries, is looking to go public. According to a report in Calcalist, Gauzy is considering holding an initial public offering (IPO) on the NASDAQ that would give the company a $600 million valuation.

The news comes not long after Gauzy raised $60 million in a Series D round of investment led by IBEX. And the company put that money to good use, acquiring the French company Vision Systems, which develops… Read More Here

Cato Networks Fastest Firm To Hit Centaur Status
Cato Networks, an Israeli startup and unicorn that provides the world’s first Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform, is now a member of the super elite club of companies known as Centaurs, having annual recurring revenue of $100 million. This comes just five years after Cato had only $1 million in revenue, making it the fastest growing enterprise network security startup. A Centaur is basically any startup that brings in at least $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

Cato Networks, which has raised over $550 million to date, first became a unicorn in November 2020. The company specializes in…Read More Here

Mergers and Acquisitions
IronSource Completes $4.4 Billion Unity Software Merger
Israel-based ironSource, which offers a multi-media platform, and the American video game company Unity Software, have finalized their $4.4 billion merger. The merger came after the deal hit a bump in the road when another company stepped in to offer its own buyout proposal for Unity.

Unity Software and ironSource said their new combined company is expected to be highly profitable and generate positive free cash flow. They added that game developers will now have access to more tools that “bridge the…. Read More Here

Nano Dimension Billion Dollar Bid
Is Nano Dimension, an Israeli company in the 3D printed electronics (Additively Manufactured Electronics (AME)/PE) field, worth $1 billion? Well, it may be worth almost that as a new bid for control of the company would give it a $995 valuation.

News of the offer led to a 16% spike in Nano Dimension’s stock on the NASDAQ.

Ironically, the news comes just a few months after Stratasys, a publicly traded company, took what is commonly referred to as a “poison pill” – also known as a Shareholder Rights Plan – in order… Read More Here 

Other Business Stories
Energean Says Billions In Israel’s Zeus Gas Field
Energean, the British energy company which operates Israel’s natural gas fields in the Mediterranean Sea, said that Israel’s Zeus exploration well in the Eastern Mediterranean may have as much as 13.3 Billion cubic meters (bcm) of recoverable natural gas resources (pre-drill estimate 10 – 12 bcm) within it.

(bcm is a unit of energy, specifically natural gas production and distribution. Pre-drill estimates are a way to predict yield using seismic velocities.)

The announcement comes just one month after Energean revealed that it had found as much as 15 billion cubic meters of natural gas in its Hermes field, located to the southeast of Israel’s Karish field. And Energean… Read More Here

Israel Not Immune To Meta Layoffs
It’s a massacre, so to speak, at Meta–Facebook. The company is laying off 11,000 people around the world, or 13% of its worldwide workforce. And these cuts will affect Meta’s Israel operations as well, where the company employs 1000 people in research and development as well as sales and marketing.

Mark Zuckerberg explained the move to his employees in a letter. “Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go… Read More Here

Israel Moving To Autonomous Buses
Just as Israel’s President Isaac Herzog departs for the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Sharm El-Sheikh, Israel’s Ministry of Transport on Sunday announced that four companies will carry out the autonomous bus pilot in Israel in what the ministry describes as a major step towards advancing autonomous public transport in the country.

Israel Startup Nation firms have been at the forefront of Autonomous driving tech for some time now. For example, Israel’s Mobileye – a company that offers all manner of driving safety technologies… Read More Here

Varonis Making Layoffs Too
Varonis, an Israeli cyber security company that is publicly traded on the NASDAQ, is joining the Startup Nation list of firms forced to downsize because of the ongoing worldwide financial crisis. Varonis will be letting go of 110 employees, or about 5% of its estimated 2,270-strong work force over what the company said was weakness in the European market and concerns that it will spill over into a slowdown into the US market.

The terminations include about 40 people in Israel, where Varonis has about 700 employees in total…. Read More Here