Israel: Start-Up Nation Comes of Age: John Reed, FT, Jan. 6, 2016— Vonetize, an Israeli company that offers video on demand to customers in Africa, Latin America and other emerging markets, is “not very focused on the exit”, in the words of its chief executive, Noam Josephides.
Forget BDS: Large Corporations Look to Israel for Innovation: Raphael Poch, Arutz Sheva, Dec. 21, 2016 — 25 of the world’s largest multinational corporations gathered in Tel Aviv on December 16 for the Axis Tel Aviv Corporate meetup…
Israel’s MobilEye Wants to Use Your Car to Build a Roadmap to the Driverless Future: David Gilbert, IBT, Jan. 7, 2016— At the Consumer Electronics Show here this week we've seen flashy demonstrations and slick presentations heralding the driverless car revolution…
Israel and India: A Partnership of Equals: Vijeta Uniyal, Jerusalem Post, Jan. 7, 2016 — Amid increasing bilateral trade and improving diplomatic ties, Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj embarked on a two-day tour of Israel yesterday…
2015 Was Red-Hot Year for Israeli High-Tech Scene: Viva Sarah Press, Israel 21C, Dec. 31, 2015
Google and Israel May Be Heading to the Moon: Jeffrey Kluger, Time, Oct. 7, 2015
Big Deals Expected at Biggest-Ever Israel Investment Event in China: David Shamah, Times of Israel, Jan. 4, 2015
“In the Fields of Warheads & Rockets we are Among the Global Leaders”: Ami Rojkes Dombe, Israel Defense, Jan. 6, 2015
ISRAEL: START-UP NATION COMES OF AGE
John Reed
FT, Jan. 6, 2016
Vonetize, an Israeli company that offers video on demand to customers in Africa, Latin America and other emerging markets, is “not very focused on the exit”, in the words of its chief executive, Noam Josephides. The founder says he has no plan to sell the company any time soon.
Vonetize, which provides a Netflix-style premium streaming service via mobile devices and smart TV, launched in 2011 with $200,000 from an angel investor. The company in 2014 then raised $6m via small, private financing rounds, with some help from friends and family.
Until recently Vonetize — like Israel’s other ambitious technology start-ups — would have struggled to muster the funding and overseas marketing muscle needed to see it from the start-up stage into a global expansion. Many, at the first reasonable opportunity, sold out to the highest bidder — typically a US technology or private equity group — and moved on to the next thing.
But now, Israel’s technology sector is awash with funds from US, European and Chinese investors scouting for companies that want to grow on their own terms and timetable. This is partly driven by the high valuations in the US that are encouraging funds to look beyond Silicon Valley for good deals, but it also underlines the attraction of Israel’s start-ups.
Vonetize is weighing up its options: to fund expansion into Southeast Asia and other new markets, the company may raise money from institutional investors, or launch an initial public offering in Tel Aviv, New York or London, its chief executive says. In any event, an IPO would be just a “step on the way” to what Mr Josephides calls the company’s first milestone: a $5bn valuation. “We want to build a huge company,” he says. “That is clear to us.” Shooting for a $5bn valuation might sound like hubris, but Israel is known for its cluster of innovative start-ups.
With a small domestic market of just 8m people, entrepreneurs in Israel have a tendency to sell early. A common question posed at conferences was when Israel — nicknamed Start-Up Nation in an eponymous 2009 book — might become “scale-up nation”. Israelis asked when their country, which has no household-name multinationals other than generic drugs group Teva, would get its own corporate national champions like Finland’s Nokia or Germany’s Siemens. But as its technology sector matures, the Jewish state is seeing more companies expand to employ hundreds of people locally, achieving valuations of $1bn or more and gaining the status of “unicorns”.
“Up until five years ago, 99 per cent of Israeli companies, when you asked them ‘what is your strategy?’, they would answer ‘exit’,” says Josef Mandelbaum, chief executive of Perion, a Nasdaq-listed digital advertising group that has been acquiring other companies and now has a staff of about 660 worldwide. Mr Mendelbaum, whose company launched in 2010 with $30m sales and closed 2015 with more than 10 times that amount, says: “I don’t think there’s any reason why you can’t build a big company headquartered in Israel. That’s what I want to do.”
The crop of new and bigger companies worth $1bn or more is a source of growth for an economy that contends with demographic challenges and acute political risks. While some “old-economy” companies and industries are stagnating or struggling, the country’s growing technology sector is a magnet for inward investment and a continuing source of jobs — including for its underemployed Palestinian and ultra-Orthodox minorities. The industry accounts for 18 per cent of gross domestic product and more than one-third of the country’s total exports, according to official statistics.
One of the reasons Israeli technology groups are expanding is that they are over-represented in sectors that are growing on the back of global demand: mobile applications, web engineering and most notably cyber security — an area where Israel’s national security needs are helping to feed a world-class industry. Check Point, founded by veterans of Israeli military intelligence, pioneered firewalls and Israel’s broader push into cyber security. It has long set an example for new companies, and remains one of Israel’s largest with a market capitalisation of $14bn.
It now has competition. Mobileye has built up a dominant presence in the market for camera-based automotive systems, powered by image processing algorithms that allow cars to brake or drive autonomously. It has resisted advances from would-be buyers; its founders Amnon Shashua, a computer science professor, and Ziv Amiram secured an early $100m investment from Goldman Sachs and set their sights on building a standalone company. It listed its shares in 2014 in the biggest Nasdaq IPO for an Israeli concern, and is now worth about $8bn.
CyberArk, a cyber security company that listed on Nasdaq in 2014, is worth about $1.5bn. Nasdaq-listed Wix.com, with a valuation just under $1bn, is growing its office in Tel Aviv as it expands its do-it-yourself web development business. Other “good candidates” for unicorn status, according to PwC’s partner in Israel Rubi Suliman, include Gett (formerly GetTaxi), an Uber-like cab-hailing and delivery company; IronSource, an online software and mobile distribution company; Outbrain, a “content discovery platform” provider; and Taboola, which helps content providers find links that will drive traffic to their sites. None have yet floated.
Critically there is a new generation of experienced serial entrepreneurs, who are drawing on resources gained building big companies overseas, to offer examples to new start-ups. “We now have two to three cycles of Israelis who spent time in the US, developed their companies there, came back to Israel, and re-created or joined another company, effectively importing this expertise,” says Gadi Tirosh, managing partner of Jerusalem Venture Partners, a leading venture capital fund, and CyberArk shareholder.
Uri Levine, co-founder of the mobile navigation and mapping app Waze, joined other shareholders in selling the company to Google for a reported $1.1bn in 2013 and is now involved in several new technology companies. “The difference is coming from the entrepreneurs themselves,” says Mr Suliman. “They are looking at Waze, Gett, and Mobileye and saying: ‘I want to build a large company, a large multinational’.” …[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
FORGET BDS: LARGE CORPORATIONS LOOK TO ISRAEL FOR INNOVATION
Raphael Poch
Arutz Sheva, Dec. 21, 2015
25 of the world’s largest multinational corporations gathered in Tel Aviv on December 16th, for the Axis Tel Aviv Corporate meetup, in which the Israeli company Axis Innovation, introduced them to 15 handpicked Israeli startups. The catch: the 25 multinational corporations were vying for the attention of the startups.
While the event was aimed at introducing the startups to the corporations, it was the corporations who came to Israel to woo the startups that Axis Innovation suggested for them. Senior representatives from firms such as AVG, Ford, IBM, GE, Tyco, GM, Coca-Cola, Singtel, PayPal, Yahoo, ProSieben and Kimberly-Clark participated in the second annual networking and deal-making meetup of its kind organized by Axis Innovation. “It is no secret about the large influx of international companies and corporate investors interested in Israel recently," said Ed Frank CEO of Axis Innovation. "The unique breadth of innovation and creativity has made Israel, and particularly Tel Aviv, a global high-tech hub.” “We put on this event to provide a platform for Israel’s leading startups and global companies to pitch to each other, network and support a full-face dialogue for partnerships to be created, subsequently benefiting both parties.”
The 2015 Corporate Edition is said to have been the biggest event of its kind and the only event in Israel, thus far, to target global corporate venture arms. Participating startups, whose identity is still being kept secret, even after the event, came from a variety of startup fields including big data, cloud, cyber-security, mobile, fintech and e-commerce. One of the highlights that Frank illustrated was what he termed “the internet of things”. The internet of things, according to Frank, is a new idea being developed in which one can put an internet connection onto a light bulb and you could use your phone to turn on and off the lights in the room.
“Another innovation that one of our companies is working on would give the ability to the consumer to put a small device on a water bottle which will flash if the person is not hydrating enough,” he said. Frank said that while some of the applications may seem “a little scary for some, we take it in stride, and keep an open mind to the innovations of the next generation.”
One of the chosen startups created a revolutionary agriculture technology for farmers to use their own generated data for optimization and sharing best practices worldwide, while another devised a tool to help small and medium businesses build an all-inclusive online marketing campaign in two minutes.
Frank pointed out that all of the multinationals have a presence in Israel, but “often startups have a hard time knocking on doors and and getting those doors to open.” But with the help of meetups like the one sponsored by Axis Innovation, the multinational corporation come to the startups and ask the startups to work with them.
“With all the talk of the boycotts in the EU, the fact that these multinational corporations are coming here, to Israel, shows that they all understand that the next best product is coming from here,” said Frank. “In order for our homegrown startups to really grow, they will need to partner in some way with these multinational corporations in their field. This is how they get larger and grow on the international market, and we are helping them to do so,” Frank concluded.
ISRAEL’S MOBILEYE WANTS TO USE YOUR CAR
TO BUILD A ROADMAP TO THE DRIVERLESS FUTURE
David Gilbert
IBT, Jan. 7, 2016
At the Consumer Electronics Show here this week we've seen flashy demonstrations and slick presentations heralding the driverless car revolution, but on the sidelines of the world's biggest technology conference one little-known Israeli company has proposed a unique solution to one of the biggest problems standing in the way of bringing autonomous vehicles to the masses: mapping. But not everyone is convinced it's the solution.
Compared to the flashy events held by the likes of Nvidia, Faraday Future and Volkswagen, the press conference by MobilEye here at CES Thursday was downright dour, but the plans laid out by co-founder, chairman and chief technology officer Amnon Shashua could have a much bigger impact on the market than anything else announced in Vegas this week.
MobilEye is a market leader in providing car manufacturers with the ability to put semi-autonomous features into their cars, including parking assist, lane departure warnings and crash avoidance — such as Tesla's AutoPilot feautre. By the end of 2016, MobilEye's technology will be in 237 car models from 20 manufacturers, including almost all of the world's major automakers.
At CES, Shashua outlined his latest plan to help solve one of the biggest challenges facing companies seeking to build autonomous vehicles — mapping. MobilEye revealed that it has developed a system which would allow all cars using its technology to effectively map the world and create what Shashua called a "roadbook," a detailed cloud-based map of the entire world, which would be constantly updated in real time and could eventually be used by all car manufacturers.
At the moment there are two approaches to solving the driverless car navigation challenge. The first, employed by companies like Google, is to created highly detailed maps of particular areas and then use them to allow their vehicles full autonomy in the areas that have been mapped. While this, along with some other technology, allows for a completely driverless solution, scaling it on a global level would be virtually impossible, and keeping the maps updated is also a tough ask considering the huge amount of data needed to create the maps initially.
The second solution is to create lower-resolution maps of the entire globe and employ higher-resolution sensors (cameras) on the cars to augment them. This is the approach being taken by companies like Ford, Volvo and Tesla today, but to work properly it requires human-level artificial intelligence to process the data captured by the sensors, which is still many years away.
To overcome this problem, MobilEye is proposing to create maps based on identifying landmarks in the environment (such as road signs, lampposts, road markings), then process this information in-car before sending it to the cloud packaged in a very small amount of data. This could facilitate the creation of maps on a global scale. MobilEye has already signed up General Motors (GM) and Volkswagen to its Road Experience Management mapping system, with GM rolling it out this year while Volkswagen — and a third unnamed partner — are to begin testing the system in 2018.
"The low bandwidth of the model, and the fact that it requires only a camera, which is already available in most new car models as part of the trend toward growing driver assistance deployment, enables the map creation and update to be managed by a cooperative crowdsourcing mechanism," Shashua said Tuesday.
However, not everyone agrees that using only a camera is a good solution. James McBride, who has been heading up Ford's autonomous car efforts for over a decade, believes there are some questions to be asked about MobilEye's system. "The thing I would say about a camera-only solution is that cameras have some sort of technical challenges that are very different from Lidar [light detection and ranging] sensors," McBride told International Business Times…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
ISRAEL AND INDIA: A PARTNERSHIP OF EQUALS
Vijeta Uniyal
Jerusalem Post, Jan. 17, 2016
Amid increasing bilateral trade and improving diplomatic ties, Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj embarked on a two-day tour of Israel yesterday. The ministerial trip comes just three months after President Pranab Mukherjee’s visit to the Jewish State, the first ever by an Indian head of state. Swaraj’s presence in Israel gains even more significance in light of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s much awaited visit, expected to take place this year. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will also be visiting India in the near future, honoring an invitation extended by President Mukherjee during his visit.
Swaraj is well known in diplomatic and government circles in Jerusalem. She served as the chairperson of the Indo-Israeli Parliamentary Friendship Group from 2006-09. A gifted orator and a strongwilled politician, she regards Israeli stateswoman Golda Meir as her role model. Twenty months ago, as Prime Minister Modi embarked on an ambitious plan to transform the Asian giant, he named Israel as one of the leading cooperation partners for India in the world, besides the United States, Canada, Japan and Singapore. He entrusted Swaraj to engineer India’s pivot to Israel.
Since India established full diplomatic relations with Israel in 1992, bilateral trade and cooperation has risen exponentially. In 1990s the trade between India and Israel was pegged at a meager $200 million, by 2014-15 it had crossed $4.5 billion. Since early 1990s, when prime minister P. V. Narasimha Rao (Congress Party) initiated normalization between the two countries, there has been a political consensus between India’s main political blocs, the center-right BJP and socialist-leaning Congress Party, to further improve ties. The recent diplomatic will to do so has been driven by the demands of the technology and business community back home.
However, India’s much-anticipated pivot to Israel has been less than smooth, and slow to come. Despite the strong political desire to strengthen technological and commercial ties with Israel, India still doesn’t want to lose the congeniality contest in the Arab and Muslim world. The real political considerations of over-dependence on Arab oil and a significant Muslim population at home force India to undertake a meticulous balancing act. Swaraj’s brief stopover in the Palestinian territories before embarking on her official engagements in Israel is seen as an attempt to assure President Mahmoud Abbas of India’s backing for his demands.
Seen as a traditional backer of the “Palestinian cause,” India has managed to change its diplomatic stance since Prime Minister Modi took office. India signaled a significant policy shift by repeatedly abstaining from anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations. Considering India’s foreign policy constraints, the country has come a long way in past two decades and even more so in past two months of Prime Minister Modi’s reign.
Despite the intricacies of statecraft and international diplomacy, there has always been strong support among Indians for the Jewish state since its inception. And these two countries share a lot more with each other than meets the eye. Both India and Israel gained independence from British colonial rule around the same time and went on to prove themselves robust democracies despite being surrounded by military dictatorships, failed states and theocracies. Both nations faced the trauma of displacement, absorbing huge refugee populations after being partitioned on religious and ethnic lines. Today, both India and Israel are multicultural societies with equal rights for religious minorities.
Free press, independent judiciary and vibrant civil society shape the political and social discourse in both India and Israel. Their societies are fiercely self-critical – a trait rare in their respective neighborhoods. Nowhere are their government policies scrutinized more intensely and their political class reproached more severely than at home. Both Israel and India hold the unique distinction of being ancient nations with a young demography. More than 40 percent of Israeli population is under 25; 50% of Indians are in the same age group. Young men and women in both countries share a passion for entrepreneurship and technological innovation.
Nowhere is the need to connect with Israel felt more in India than within country’s IT and start-up community. Indian entrepreneurs and technology driven companies have come to appreciate the need to connect with Israel. In 2015 alone, leading Indian corporations like Tech-Mahindra, Reliance Industries and Tata Group have made substantial and long-term investments in Israel’s innovation and start-up ecosystem.India’s private sector involvement in Israel also includes setting up start-up incubators and investments in academic research. Tata Group is the lead investor in Tel Aviv University’s RAMOT, a $20 million technology fund that translates academic research into industry-relevant solutions.
Since the advent of the Information Age, Indian and Israeli professionals have been at the cutting edge of innovation and business in Silicon Valley, San Francisco. What initially started as the brain drain soon created IT hubs back home. Clusters of high-tech industries sprang up around major population centers. The trend witnessed in Silicon Wadi has lot in common with technology-driven success stories unfolding in Bangalore, Delhi or Hyderabad. This bilateral cooperation does not restrain itself to university campuses or corporate board rooms.
Israel’s agriculture project in India is the Jewish state’s largest engagement anywhere in the world. In the framework of Indo-Israel Agricultural Project, MASHAV (Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation) operates 26 Centers of Excellence in nine different states across India. These agriculture centers act as platforms for transfer of technology to Indian farmers. If implemented, Israeli expertise in water resource management and cultivation of arid land could be valuable in ensuring India’s future food and water security…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
2015 Was Red-Hot Year for Israeli High-Tech Scene: Viva Sarah Press, Israel 21C, Dec. 31, 2015—Israeli high-tech startups were red hot in 2015, and are entering 2016 as exciting commodities for investors worldwide, according to numerous end-of-year market reports.
Google and Israel May Be Heading to the Moon: Jeffrey Kluger, Time, Oct. 7, 2015—Tired of waiting for NASA to get its Apollo-era mojo back and start putting spacecraft on the lunar surface again? Then you’ll be happy to know that Israel—with some help from Google—is about to show the moon a little love.
Big Deals Expected at Biggest-Ever Israel Investment Event in China: David Shamah, Times of Israel, Jan. 4, 2015—At the biggest-ever Israel-China investment event ever, being held in Beijing this week, the recent woes on the Shanghai Stock Exchange are just a passing thought, according to Ophir Gore, commercial attaché of Israel’s Ministry of Economy and Industry in Beijing.
“In the Fields of Warheads & Rockets we are Among the Global Leaders”: Ami Rojkes Dombe, Israel Defense, Jan. 6, 2015—IMI’s Corporate VP Marketing speaks about the challenge of maintaining the technological edge in a world where American and European defense industries have switched into an export-oriented strategy.
