Israel High Tech Scene August 26 – September 6

Tel Aviv at sunset, Israel Startup Israel

Israel High Tech Scene August 26 – September 6

New Startups / VC Funding
Allseated Raises $20 Million for New Event Planning Tech
Allseated, an Israeli startup developing a visualization and collaboration platform for event planning, raised $20 million in funding – including capital from Level Structured Capital (an affiliate of Level Equity), and existing investors, Magma Ventures, Vestech Partners, NYFF, and WGG, to further scale its space.

The global event industries have been completely transformed by the pandemic and the rise of remote communication and working with prospects, clients… Read More Here

Israel’s Radiaction Protects Medical Teams from Radiation Exposure
Radiaction Medical, an Israeli medtech startup developing radiation protection technology for medical staff during interventional procedures, raised $12.6 million in Series C2 funding led by U.S. private equity fund InnovaHealth Partners

Radiation is energy that travels in waves or particles. It can come from natural sources, such as the sun and the earth, or from man-made… Read More Here

QuantHealth Raises $15 Million for Drug Development
QuantHealth, an Israeli startup that offers an AI-powered clinical trial design, raised $15 million in a Series A financing round co-led by Bertelsmann Investments and Pitango HealthTech.

Founded in 2020, QuantHealth is an AI company conducting patient-centric drug simulations to accelerate and de-risk drug development. Over 90% of drugs in clinical development stage fail to reach the market, which accumulates… Read More Here

Gong Launches First Generative AI “Ask Anything” For Sales RepsGong  LaunchesToday, Gong introduces Call Spotlight, an “Ask Anything” generative AI solution for Sales reps—actionable insights from customer interactions and Next Steps for Revenue Teams.

According to the company, Call Spotlight delivers twice as accurate results as off-the-shelf models. It includes the industry’s first generative AI information querying capability designed specifically for First Generative AI “Ask Anything” For Sales Reps… Read More Here

IPOS and Unicorns
AI21 Labs Hits Unicorn Status with $155 Million Raise
Israel’s AI21 Labs, a startup from Amnon Shashua that specializes in Natural Language Processing (NLP), raised $155 million in a Series C round of funding. Google, Nvidia, and Shashua all took part in the investment. The raise left the company with the coveted unicorn status with a $1.4 billion valuation.

A unicorn is a startup that has a valuation of… Read More Here

EToro Offers More Secondary Stock Deals, Valuation Continues To Drop
eToro, the Israeli firm that offers its clients a trading platform, is continuing to offer packages of the company’s shares at a discount Globes reported. The discount is as much as 40% off the company’s trading price and the shares are being offered in secondary deals.

Investopedia explains that the term secondary offering refers to the sale of shares owned by an investor to the general public on the secondary market. So, the shares offered are ones that were previously sold by the company… Read More Here
Science

Mergers and Acquisitions
Will Wiz Buy SentinelOne?
SentinelOne, a major Israeli cybersecurity firm, might be acquired by Wiz, an Israeli unicorn that offers an API security platform, Bloomberg reported. If this rumor should come to fruition, it would create one massive company. It would also be an unusual move as Wiz is still just a startup, albeit a unicorn, and SentinelOne is a publicly traded corporation with a market cap of about $4.8 billion.

Not only that, but SentinelOne is a much larger company with… Read More Here

Israel’s Pagaya Looking to Buy American Firm GreenSky For $800 Million
Israeli fintech firm Pagaya is looking to acquire American financial technology company GreenSky from its parent company Goldman Sachs. Reports indicate that the deal could be worth as much as $800 million. According to Calcalist, the acquisition talks are in advanced stages, but Pagaya has some competition from firms like the Apollo investment fund and the growth investment firm Sixth Street.

Pagaya Management has had some troubles… Read More Here

Other Business Stories
US Marine Corps to Make $200 Million Iron Dome Deal, Acquire Thousands Of Missiles From Israel
The United States Marine Corps is set to acquire three Iron Dome anti-missile defense batteries from Israel in a deal worth a reported $200 million. The deal includes the acquisition of almost 2,000 Tamir missiles and more. Rafael Advanced Defense Systems is the prime contractor for the development and production of Iron Dome, which is developed in cooperation with the U.S.

The news comes just a few weeks after the American government… Read More Here

Vesttoo Co-Founders Axed By Board in Wake Of Scandal
Vesttoo co-founders CEO Yaniv Bertele and Chief Financial Officer Alon Lifshitz have both been fired by the company’s board of directors in the wake of a recent fraud scandal. Also, a Delaware court ruled that the two cannot receive any further compensation payments.

“Unfortunately, opportunistic parties exploited the temporary crisis the company was facing to advance aggressive and unilateral actions aimed at taking control of the company,” a clearly angry Lifshitz and Bertele said about… Read More Here

Dovi Frances May Dump Papaya Global At 90% Discount
Dovi Frances, a founding partner of the investment firm Group 11, is threatening to dump his stake in Israeli startup Papaya Global, a fintech unicorn that offers a cloud based platform for companies to handle their payrolls, at as much as a 90% discount. Frances is reportedly planning to sell his 2.8% share in the company for $12.5 million, which would leave the firm with just a $444 million valuation. After Papaya’s last round of funding the startup was valued at as much as $3.7 billion.

In January, Dovi Frances issued an open letter highly critical of Papaya Global’s move to divest itself from Israeli banks. The company’s leaders… Read More Here