The always-hot Israeli startup scene has been going even more bonkers lately.
2015 has been a record-breaker for VC funding. The valuations of young companies are skyrocketing and private-equity bankers have arrived in droves, as have Chinese investors.
It all adds up to a very healthy tech community, overflowing with innovation.
We recently visited Israel and met with many, many people in the tech industry and we asked all of them: which startups are you watching?
Of the dozens of startups we heard about and talked to, these are the ones that we found to be particularly outstanding for any number of reasons: their growth, their products, their mission and/or the pedigree of their founders.
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OurCrowd: disrupting the venture capital world
OurCrowd is a startup that helps ordinary, upper middle class folks (doctors, lawyers, business owners) invest in startups with the same terms that top-tier VCs get.
These days, tech companies are growing into multi-billion-dollar companies while they are still private. By crowdsourcing its investment fund, OurCrowd is helping more investors tap into that early stage wealth creation.
It's the brainchild of Israeli powerhouse VC Jon Medved, known as one of the founders of the Israeli startup scene.
IronSource: app discovery and monetization
IronSource helps mobile developers advertise to find customers and add advertising to their apps.
It's one of Israel's unicorns, with a $1 billion+ valuation after it raised a $105 million round in February. It employs 550, generates "hundreds of millions" in revenue and has half a billion users a month, founder and CEO Tomer Bar Zeev told us.
Bar Zeev has a unique management philosophy, too. He likes to acquire companies and then he turns those founders into co-founders at IronSource. So IronSource has 8 founders, and counting.
Earlier this week, he just bought another company, Supersonic, adding 250 more employees, and a few more founders, to the bench.
SimilarWeb: measuring websites and apps
SimilarWeb is another near unicorn. Its mission is to overtake Alexa as the most popular service for analyzing web traffic.
It was founded by charismatic CEO Or Offer, a computer geek who built SimilarWeb to research the competition while running a jewelry business.
A few years ago, he left the jewelry business to focus on SimilarWeb and his company has gone crazy ever since. Last year it grew from 60 employees to 200 and is hiring in New York and Israel about 20 more people a month.
SimilarWeb is backed by gigantic African internet investment conglomerate Naspers.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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from Tech http://read.bi/1j0Cj8H
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