Mobileye Robotaxi (Company Pic)
The past year was not a good one for Israel Startup Nation due to the worldwide financial crisis. Many firms were forced to lay off workers and some even shut down entirely. But there was some good news during the year as several companies were able to hold successful Initial Public Offerings (IPO). Yet a few also needed to cancel such plans.
Here is the JBN list of the top 5 Israel Startup Nation IPO stories for 2022:
Pagaya Technologies
Pagaya Technologies, an Israeli fintech startup, completed an $8.5 billion business combination with EJF Acquisition Corp in June, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) for the startup’s initial public offering. The plans were first revealed in January and Pagaya shareholders approved the deal on June 16, and EJFA’s shareholders on June 17.
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An SPAC is a publicly-traded pool of cash with no business activity other than looking for a private firm to merge with and subsequently take public. More and more companies are choosing this route towards their IPOS. The idea here is that a company goes public by merging with an already existing entity, thereby saving on many of the costs involved with an IPO, as well as some of the risks.
Pagaya manages institutional money with machine learning and big data analytics, with a focus on a fixed income and alternative credit. Pagaya Pulse, the company’s technological platform, is powered by a suite of artificial intelligence technologies and cutting-edge algorithms. CEO Gal Krubiner, CTO Avital Pardo, and CRO Yahav Yulzari started the company in 2016.
Nayax
In September, Nayax, an Israeli fintech startup that offers a global commerce enablement and payments platform designed to help merchants scale their business, held its IPO on the NASDAQ. Its shares opened at $34.25. Nayax currently has a market cap of roughly $2.27 billion.
Founded in 2005 by CEO Yair Nechmad and CTO David Ben-Avi, Nayax was an Israeli fintech startup that already had a successful IPO. But since then its shares have fallen in value by 20% and so the company hopes for better results in New York.
Mobileye
After a few setbacks, Mobileye held its IPO in October with a $16.7 billion valuation. This is far short of the $50 billion that its parent company Intel originally expected. Mobileye raised $861 million from the IPO.
Mobileye floated 41,000,000 shares of its Class A common stock at an initial public offering price of $21.00 per share on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on October 26, 2022, under the symbol “MBLY.”
In 2017, Intel bought out the company for $15.3billion.
Founded in 1999, Mobileye offers autonomous driving and driver-assist technologies, harnessing “world-renowned expertise in computer vision, machine learning, mapping, and data analysis.” The idea is simple: warning systems alert drivers of a possible collision. Eventually, the idea is to have entirely self-driving cars that can avoid accidents entirely.
Security Matters Limited SMX
In July, Security Matters Limited SMX, an Israeli firm that has developed solutions to mark products to track them in the supply chain and ensure authenticity, entered into a new deal to be listed on the NASDAQ after entering into a business combination with the SPAC Lionheart III Corp worth $360 Million. The Israeli company delisted from the Australian Securities Exchange where it is currently traded as a public company.
Security Matters SMX calls itself a company for the 21st century that enables a transition to a circular economy that is” positive, productive, and profitable for participants in the value chain – and for the planet. To unlock the way global businesses will operate tomorrow, SMX is an enabler for a real-world circular economy.”
SMX boasts that through its white label B2B offerings, the future of a sustainable world is able to be created by “narratives that connect tangible, sustainable, ESG practices with the brand’s transparent traceability strategy, designed to create a profitable lifetime relationship with its customers that is circular rather than linear or transactional.”
The Bust
In May the Actelis Networks IPO was officially a bust. At the end of the company’s first day of public trading on the NASDAQ its share prices fell by 50% from the IPO price, ending the day at $2 per share, for a market cap of just $34.7 million, way down from the anticipated $70 million valuation.
Actelis Network sclosed its upsized underwritten initial public offering of an aggregate of 4,212,500 shares of common stock, including the partial exercise by the underwriter of its option to purchase 462,500 additional shares of common stock, at a price to the public of $4.00 per share.
Founded in 1998, Actelis Networks offers cyber-hardened, hybrid fiber-copper networking solutions for wide-area IoT applications including federal, state and local government, ITS, military, utility, rail, telecom and campus applications. Actelis boasts that its portfolio of hybrid fiber-copper, environmentally hardened aggregation switches, high density Ethernet devices, advanced management software and cyber-protection capabilities, unlocks the hidden value of essential networks, delivering safer connectivity for rapid, cost-effective deployment.
