Analysis | The truth behind the Lemonade surge, America’s most successful IPO of 2020. Lemonade went overnight from being a unicorn that has never made a profit into a massive success. But there are some investors wondering whether the underwriters forced the company to leave money on the table. Read more
Co-living is wasted on the youth, Israeli startup Willa is offering urban living for midlifers. With their kids finally out of the house, 55 and ups have the time, money and desire for a change of pace; Covid-19 only highlighted the dangers of loneliness. Read more
Interview | From underwear to airline tickets, Israeli startup Fetcherr harnesses AI to predict prices. The company said it employs deep price neural networks to predict prices with 90% accuracy up to a year in advance. Read more
Next Food aiming for $7.5 million in first-of-its-kind IPO. The partnership, which is set to become the first R&D partnership to be traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, intends to invest in companies operating in varied foodtech sectors. Read more
Payroll and workforce management tool Papaya acquires HRIS platform Mensch. The acquisition will result in the first global human resources management system. Read more
7 gadgets that gained popularity in the coronavirus era. We all had a lot of time sitting at home this year. Here are some gadgets people collected to keep busy. Read more
Analysis | The fourth of July fireworks came early this year, loudly signaling a shift across the U.S. The coronavirus crisis led to a craving for normalcy. The quick and painful realization that it is no longer achievable gave way to hopes of redesigning the current state of affairs to sustain a revolution. Read more
Interview | Israel’s Startup Nation was born in caveman times.
Coronavirus? Economic crisis? For Oded Galor, one of the world’s most senior economists, these are just footnotes in the pages of history. In a new book he explains how geography made Scandavians calculated, why diversity is constructive in the U.S. but destructive in Syria, and why the last 200 years have been humanity’s best. Read more
Interview | How did scientific marketing campaigns and Covid-19 conditions help Kendago reach 600% growth? Thanks to the boom in business, Kendago, which currently employs around 50 people in its Kiryat Ono offices, is planning to increase its workforce by over 50% in the coming months. Read more
Warning: the following game is, in fact, a drug. The FDA recently approved a video game as a prescribed drug for the treatment of ADHD in kids, opening the door to the development of new chemical and side-effect free treatments that can also be fun. Read more
Software giant Amdocs set to lay off 1,000 employees. The coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis is shaking up even the biggest Israeli tech companies, with Amdocs Ltd. set to fire around 1,000 employees. Amdocs employs 25,000 people worldwide, including 4,500 workers in Israel, most of them in Ra’anana. It is still unknown how many Israeli-based employees will be among those fired. With $691 million of Amdocs’s $1 billion quarterly income coming from U.S. clients and the uncertainty surrounding the financial recovery in the world’s largest economy due to the pandemic, Amdocs is planning to cut many hundreds of jobs, including senior positions. Read full report
Analysis | Amdocs layoffs are only the first wave of Covid-19 storm. Firings by the software giant are a painful herald to other Israeli companies that operate in the bruised U.S. market. Israeli startups, that raised $2.3 billion in the second quarter of 2020 exist in a parallel world, where companies are dependent on funds. Amdocs exists in the same world as the rest of humanity, the one where people do business, the one in which there is a pandemic and in which American companies, which provide most of the revenues of the Israeli tech scene, are coping with a huge health and economic crisis and have been crippled for many months. Read full analysis
Israeli defense powerhouse IAI to stunningly lay off 900 workers. CEO resigned, workers union promised to battle the decision. Read more
DiplomaTech | When opposites attract: Can Japan help the Startup Nation become the Scale-up Nation? Special interview with Japan’s economic mission to Israel on how the two countries’ tech sectors can together innovate the world’s post-coronavirus new normal. Read more
Elbit Systems gets $53 million contract to provide intelligent suites to Southeast Asian Navy. The contract, which will last two years, also includes training services for the sailors onboard. Read more
Security startup for blockchain assets Curv raises $23 million in round A funding. Investments came from CommerzVentures, Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Team8, and Digital Garage Lab Fund. Read more
Interview | “This crisis is going to present many opportunities for banks,” predicts Citi Israel CEO. Neil Corney says Covid-19 crisis has proven how important it was to invest in Fintech for so many years.
Read more
ThetaRay appoints JVP’s Erel Margalit to its Board of Directors.
Margalit founded Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) and is currently its Chairman. Read more
Interview | “Many risk-taking fintech firms will falter,” predicts Qumra Capital managing partner. Erez Shachar says traditional banks are losing ground to tech giants entering the digital wallet world. Read more
Israelis are twice as likely to return to offices as Europeans, new study shows. The ‘Back to the Office’ report was conducted by Israeli flex space provider Mindspace. Read more
Israeli entrepreneur Moshe Hogeg sued for fraud once more. A Canadian investor in Hogeg’s crypto project Stox, alleges the company was a sting operation disguised as a business venture. Read more
Early-stage startups and tech employees suffering the most during pandemic, says Bank of Israel research. More than a quarter of Israeli tech employees handed salary cuts during Covid-19 crisis; significant fall in seed and round A funding. Read more
This company’s tools give employers a sneak peek at their workers’
productivity at home. Erez Buganim, deputy CEO of Tel Aviv-listed workforce management company SYNEL, believes companies must find ways to learn what their employees’ are doing when working from home during and after the Covid-19 era. Read more
BlackRock senior strategist optimistic markets to recover within six months. “Under the baseline scenario where there is no resurgence of the pandemic which brings further shutdowns we do expect a fairly strong recovery in the second half of this year and going forward,” said Isabelle Mateos y Lago. Watch moreArtlist announces $48 million in new funding to help grow catalog of content for video creators.The Israel-based startup aims to meet the increasing demand for video content as global viewership numbers skyrocket. Read moreDiplomaTech | Israeli tech companies can help expedite the French
(digital) revolution.
After Covid-19 shattered French conservatism, its giant companies need a boost of innovation, says Israeli trade attache. Read moreIsraeli cyber startup Cynet closes $18 million funding round.
The B+ round was joined by two strategic investors, Merlin International and Deutsche Telekom. Read moreIAI and Iron Drone partner to integrate interception skills into anti-drone systems.
The collaboration will ensure that Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) can protect the country’s skies from unwanted unmanned attacks. Read moreSoftware deployment company CodeFresh raises $27 million.
CodeFresh offers tools for the development, testing, and deployment of apps on the Kubernetes open-source container orchestration system and intends to use the funding for R&D. Read more
Domino Effect: Wirecard’s collapse is being felt in the Israeli Fintech sphere. Funds in cards issued by Wirecard’s UK subsidiary were frozen after the German company filed for insolvency. Read more
Israel’s biggest accounting firm EY to sack dozens of employees. EY put around 350 employees on unpaid leave at the start of the Covid-19 crisis and almost 100 of them are set to be fired. Read more
Analysis | Lemonade has learned the lesson of its fellow SoftBank portfolio companies. In its pre-IPO prospectus, Lemonade presents a clear, yet highly optimistic, perception of the current business reality. Read more
Israeli startup ecosystem ranks #6 in the world, according to new report. The study, conducted by Startup Genome, ranks Tel Aviv and Jerusalem as joint sixth out of 150 global cities. Read more
Israeli company Healthy.io acquires its American competitor, Inui Health. Established in 2013 by Jonathan Adiri, Healthy.io has acquired Inui Health for $9 million. Healthy.io has developed a kit for home urine testing using the smartphone image processing without having to go to the lab. Read more
Analysis | Don’t count on advertisers to end hate speech on social media. Don’t expect Unilever and Coca-Cola to hold hands and sing kumbaya together with the liberals. The history of the relationship between advertisers and social media platforms proves they have their own agenda. Read more
After veteran GM’s resignation, Indigo calls 102 employees in for termination hearings. Over the past couple of years, Alon Bar-Shany deflected two separate attempts by HP to downsize Indigo’s workforce. Read more
Amazon has launched a new service for businesses in Israel. AWS Outposts allows companies to extend their existing AWS infrastructure and works best for low-latency access to on-premises systems. Read more
Captain’s Column | Rockets, pilots and mishaps: The story behind Murphy’s law. Murphy had developed for the U.S. Air Force arguably the most accurate tools to monitor and plan ejection and emergency systems but it was one bad day at work that made him famous. Read more
DiplomaTech | Teflon Thailand is primed for Israeli innovation solutions. “You can’t just come and throw around words like AI and IoT and think that will be enough. The key word in Thailand is ROI,” said trade attache Dagan Alony. Read more
Analysis | ‘The Dark Side of TikTok’: How the newest social media platform lets anti-Semitism run wild. TikTok is taking the world by storm, but a new study suggests that young minds are often exposed to violent, anti-Semitic, and racist content. Read more
Regardless of Covid-19, online hiring is here to stay. As restrictions are slowly being lifted and most workers are going back to the office, many companies still prefer to continue to interview candidates and even sign employment contracts remotely. Read more
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