Israel High Tech Scene October 22 – October 28

New Startups / VC Funding
Trigo Raises $100 Million
Trigo, an Israeli startup that offers retailers new technologies for in store customer service and checkout, raised $100 million in a new equity financing round led by Singapore state investment firm Temasek Holdings and 83North.

Founded in 2018 by brothers Michael and Daniel Gabay, Trigo uses AI-powered computer vision technologies together with off-the-shelf hardware to retrofit existing stores. The company applies its proprietary… Read More Here

Navina Raises $44 Million For Medtech
Navina, an Israeli medtech startup that offers a clinical platform for primary care, raised $22 million in a Series B funding round, led by ALIVE Israel HealthTech Fund. The raise doubled the company’s total investment to date to $44 million.

Navina explains that primary care physicians are overwhelmed by catastrophically complex and irregularly structured patient data. These deficiencies often result in missed diagnoses, provider and patient frustration, and economic loss. Navina uses medically-informed AI to restructure chaotic information into an “immediately clear, diagnostically-linked, actionable Patient Portrait. This data presentation gives physicians a radically reinvented view… Read More Here

Resonai Raises $43 Million To ‘Digitize The Built World’
Resonai, an Israeli startup that offers an operating system in order to build the “digital square foot” and prepare the built world for a mixed reality future based on digital twins, extended its Series A round of fundraising with an additional $20 million led by Meitav-Dash, a TSE-traded Israeli institutional investment house; Blue Square Israel, the second-largest retail chain in Israel; and Irani Ventures. This brings the total raised in the Series A to $6 million and the total investment brought in to Resonai to $43 million to date.

Founded in 2014 by CEO Emil Alon… Read More Here

Tetavi Becomes YOOM, Raises $15 Million For Photorealistic Digital Content
Tetavi is changing its name to YOOM. And the Israeli startup that offers a platform for creating photorealistic digital content and experiences for the Metaverse and Web3 also raised $15 million from investors like entertainment mogul Jimmy Iovine and Grammy Award-winning producer, singer and songwriter Finneas O’Connell.

Dating back to the late 1960s, photorealism is an American art movement defined as a genre of art that incorporates painting, drawing, and other forms of graphics where an artist studies a pre-existing photograph and tries to reproduce the picture as realistically as possible… Read More Here

Ask-AI Raises $9 Million – Expects To Be The ‘Google Search’ Of Enterprise Data
Ask-AI, an Israeli startup that uses Natural Language Processing NLP to power direct answer and insight surfacing platform, completed a $9 million seed round of funding led by Vertex Ventures and State of Mind Ventures. So, Ask-AI boasts that it will soon become the new Google for answers and recurring questions from all of an organization’s sources and customer communications.

So, where Google is the search engine that people all over the world use for surfing the web, it is about the Internet, not an Intranet. Ask-AI’s new service is about simplifying searches for data with an organization, which is especially important when dealing with huge conglomerates…. Read More Here

IPOs and Unicorns
Mobileye Hits $16.7 Billion Valuation With IPO
After a few setbacks, Mobileye is finally holding its Initial Public Offering (IPO) 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 will float 41,000,000 shares of its Class A common stock at an initial public offering price of $21.00 per share. The shares are expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on October 26, 2022, under the symbol “MBLY,” and the offering is expected to close on October 28, 2022, subject to customary closing conditions. In addition, Mobileye has granted… Read More Here

Cybereason Drops IPO Plans, Looks To Sell Out Instead
Cybereason, an Israeli cybersecurity startup and a unicorn is reportedly looking to find a buyer after its IPO plans fell through. According to the publication “The Information,” the company hired J.P. Morgan to handle its quest for a buyer.

Backed by people like former US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and his fund Liberty Strategic Capital, Cybereason was at one time valued at as much as $3.5 billion. But now reports indicate that the company is looking at just a $2.5 billion price tag… Read More Here

Vesttoo Insurtech Startup Makes Unicorn
Vesttoo, an Israeli insurtech startup that has developed technology in the field of risk management, raised $80 Million in a Series C financing round co-led by Mouro Capital and a private equity fund. The company is now a unicorn as the round left it with a $1 billion valuation.

This is some badly needed good news for a change as Israel Startup Nation has been suffering more from contraction and failures in recent months due to the global financial crisis. It’s gotten so bad lately that it…. Read More Here 

Other Business Stories
Cybereason And Vee Both Continue Startup Nation Layoffs Trend
Cybereason, an Israeli cybersecurity startup and a unicorn, and Vee, an Israeli startup that is building a platform for volunteering, are both making further rounds of layoffs. Vee laid off 50% of its remaining workforce and Cybereason sacked 200 employees, or 17% of its remaining workforce.

Vee was founded in 2020 by CEO May Piamenta, when she was just 20 together with CTO Gil Amsalem, and COO Avi Amor. Vee has raised a total of $13.5 million to date… Read More Here

Burger King To Use Israel’s Meat The End Meat Alternatives
Meat the End MTE is an Israeli startup that develops alternatives for animal based food products, specifically beef. And now Burger King in Israel has announced plans to market the company’s vegan burger nuggets in its branches.

Israel Startup Nation is at the forefront of the development of alternative meat production and technologies. This is an important factor in fighting climate change because the mass breeding of cows and poultry is a major contributor to greenhouse emissions and leaves behind… Read More Here

Fintech Unicorn Fundbox Continues Startup Nation Layoffs Trend – 3d To Do So This Week Alone
Fundbox, an Israeli Fintech startup and a unicorn, is continuing the recent trend of Israel Startup Nation firms being forced to make cutbacks. The company has laid off 150 of its 360 employees in Israel and the U.S., or 40% of its overall workforce.

On Monday, Snyk, an Israeli cybersecurity startup in the field of cloud native application security, revealed that it was forced to make cutbacks in its workforce. The company is laying off 198 of its… Read More Here

Eretz-Noshevet Launched To Promote Young, Innovative And Future Agriculture In Israel
Hashomer Hachadash (The New Guard), a Zionist social-educational organization established in 2007, has launched a new organization to aid and promote young farmers, Agro-tech technology ventures and land development in the State of Israel called Eretz Noshevet. This new investment company, Eretz Noshevet (Hebrew for “Inhabited Land”), has already raised $20 miilion and it aims to strengthen the Israeli agricultural industry and return it to center stage, to expand Israel’s agricultural areas, and to motivate young men and…. Read More Here

ICL Investing $400 Million In New Lithium Iron Phosphate Manufacturing Plant
ICL (formerly Israel Chemicals Ltd.) an Israel-based global specialty minerals company, is set to build a $400 million lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cathode active material (CAM) manufacturing plant in St. Louis. ICL stated that this is expected to be the first large-scale LFP material manufacturing plant in the United States.

The company was awarded $197 million for the project through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding, which is subject to the completion of negotiations with the Department of Energy. The plant is…. Read More Here