Poalim Hi-Tech - So here it is… meet our two big Startup+ winners

We can't believe it's over!

So here it is… meet our two big Startup+ winners 🥁

Pickommerce AI Robotics LTD who took first place!

Blyp who took second place!

Congratulations! We are so proud of you.

Wishing you and all participants good luck on their journey.

RevealSecurity Raises $23 Million for Application Detection and Response

By Ryan Naraine on June 21, 2022

RevealSecurity, an Israeli data security startup building technology to thwart malicious insider threats, on Tuesday announced the closing of a $23 million funding round led by SYN Ventures.

In addition to SYN Ventures, Hanaco Ventures, SilverTech Ventures and World Trade Ventures also joined as RevealSecurity investors.

The Series A financing provides capital for the Tel Aviv-based company to build "Application Detection and Response" technology capable of ferreting out malicious activities executed by insiders and imposters in enterprise applications.

The company said the funding will be used on product development and global expansion initiatives.

RevealSecurity is joining a crowded market of well-capitalized startups hawking products and services that provide attack surface visibility in hybrid cloud environments.

"The market-wide shift for business-critical functions from on-prem to SaaS and the cloud has expanded the attack surface for malicious activities by imposters and trusted users," RevealSecurity explained in a note accompanying the funding announcement. "This trend has resulted in a greater need for solutions that monitor user activities accurately, to detect business process attacks in a way that scales across multiple different types of applications."

The company said its detection technology is application agnostic and is capable of analyzing user journeys in and between different applications - SaaS, cloud and custom-built applications to detect suspicious user journeys. 

SYN Ventures managing partner Patrick Heim said he invested in the company because it is addressing the perpetual challenge in cybersecurity to "find the needle in a haystack."

"[Finding] those singular bad events among the billions of records that are generated in the format of event logs. This requires breakthrough technology," Heim added.

RevealSecurity said its technology can be used to protect enterprise organizations against cases in which either an authenticated user is taking advantage of their permissions to perform malicious activities, or when an impersonator successfully bypasses authentication mechanisms to pose as a legitimate user. 

WoodSpoon’s Marketplace of Culinary Side Hustles

The delivery platform offers meals cooked in the homes of neighborhood chefs, such as Raghida Haddad’s festive Lebanese offerings and Yuhe Su’s deeply personal dishes inspired by his childhood in northeast China.

By Hannah Goldfield

June 3, 2022

The other night, using a delivery platform called WoodSpoon, which offers meals cooked in the homes of neighborhood chefs, I ordered what seemed to be a reasonable amount of Lebanese food for dinner. What arrived was more like catering for a small but festive affair—enough for days—in containers densely packed with lacy, crisp-edged zucchini fritters, layered carefully between sheets of parchment and strewn with arugula, pine nuts, and pomegranate seeds, glistening like jewels; garlicky sautéed dandelion greens, luscious with olive oil and garnished with radishes carved into roses; neatly cut wedges of kibbeh saynieh, a tray-baked loaf of ground beef, cracked wheat, onion, pomegranate syrup, and spices and herbs including cinnamon and marjoram.

I was surprised not only by the generous portions but also by the add-ons and flourishes: cups of sumac, za’atar, and olive oil; fresh pita and lush green salads; whipped baba ghanoush and hummus, dotted with more pomegranate seeds, sprigs of mint, and scallions; a zesty yogurt sauce thick with chopped cucumber. Everything had been prepared by a woman named Raghida Haddad (WoodSpoon profile: Tate’s Kitchen), who was born in Beirut, spent years working for the New York City mayor’s office, and lives in Brooklyn. When I spoke to her later, the reason for the above-and-beyond bounty became clear: she simply couldn’t help herself. “I have witnessed my mom, my grandmother, every woman in my family offering food, so I give so much food!” she told me. “It’s not that I’m not a good businesswoman, it’s just—it’s in my DNA.”

The crux of some of WoodSpoon’s subway ads is that the company proffers comfort through food without the hassles of human interaction, let alone the obligations of family: “It’s like getting Grandma’s soup, without questions about your love life,” one poster declares. This is a common trope in branding that targets millennial and Gen Z city dwellers, who are often cynically imagined as anxiety-ridden and antisocial. But this undercuts WoodSpoon’s true appeal, as well as the company’s compelling origin story. Pre-pandemic, Oren Saar, a young Israeli immigrant living in New York, was introduced to a fellow-expat who had a side hustle making and selling Israeli food. Saar loved to cook himself but didn’t have time to make certain labor-intensive dishes that he missed from home, such as jachnun, a Yemenite Jewish pastry that’s traditionally baked overnight. After Saar’s wife requested the acquaintance’s jachnun while in labor, a startup was born: a marketplace of culinary side hustles.

What delighted me about WoodSpoon was the sense of connection it gave me, and the curiosity it fulfilled; it really did feel like being invited into my neighbors’ (carefully vetted) kitchens. On a given day, I could order Guyanese curry chicken, dim-sum-style turnip cakes, and Peruvian alfajores. The food was comforting but also stimulating and educational. My order from Haddad came with a handwritten note: “I loved the dishes you chose as they seem to be a culinary bridge between the East & the West.”

I got a similar card from Yuhe Su (WoodSpoon profile: Daddy’s Got Chopsticks), whose menu paints a fascinating, deeply personal portrait. Su, a photographer, grew up in Harbin, in northeast China, before moving to New York to attend Parsons. Of his dishes, the hearty, fragrant lamb-and-sour-cabbage soup, featuring long ruffled noodles, tofu, and star anise, is the most representative of his native region, he explains: “When I was living with my grandma, every year, she would use a gigantic jar to pickle as much cabbage as possible, then make this dish all the time until it ran out.”

Su’s desserts include flaky Portuguese-style egg tarts—just like the ones he used to eat in Harbin at Kentucky Fried Chicken, which bought a recipe for them from a famous bakery in Macau in 1999, the year in which rule of that city was transferred from Portugal to China. “Oh I miss KFC in China so much!!” Su’s description reads. His homesickness is our gain. (Entrées around $10-$22.) ♦

Published in the print edition of the June 13, 2022, issue, with the headline “WoodSpoon.”

Cybersecurity startup Semperis raises over $200 million

The Israeli-American company provides identity security solutions for hybrid Active Directory users, with a focus on Microsoft's Active Directory

Reuters and Meir Orbach

13:06, 24.05.22

Israeli-American cybersecurity startup Semperis said it has raised over $200 million in a funding round led by private equity firm KKR & Co at a valuation substantially higher than in its previous round.

Existing investors including Insight Partners and new investors such as Ten Eleven Ventures joined KKR in the round, Semperis told Reuters. Calcalist has learned that $100 million from the round will go towards secondary deals with veteran shareholders.

While the firm did not disclose its latest valuation, it was valued at about $142 million after raising $40 million in May 2020, showed data from private market data provider PitchBook.

The Hoboken, New Jersey-based identity security company said it has since experienced robust growth as enterprises invest in security solutions that could better protect them in a remote working environment.

Semperis was founded in 2013 by CEO Michael Brezman, Chief Technology Officer Guy Teverovsky, and Matan Liberman, who serves as executive vice president of business development and leads the company’s Tel Aviv branch.

"We are focusing on identity-driven cyber resilience and threat mitigation because in this new reality where companies are working remotely and accessing applications and assets in the cloud, putting everything behind a firewall no longer offers the same degree of protection," said Semperis CEO Mickey Bresman.

Founded in 2014, Semperis provides identity security solutions for hybrid Active Directory users, with a focus on Microsoft's Active Directory - a directory service widely used by Fortune 500 companies across industries.

Semperis reported $11.6 million in revenue in 2020 and told Reuters its revenue has more than doubled year-over-year.

With the new funding, Semperis said it plans to grow its research-and-development team across the United States, Canada and Israel, and continue to grow its customer base in Europe and Asia.

It also said it plans to expand beyond identity protection into protecting a customer's entire cloud data.

KKR is investing through its Next Generation Technology Growth Fund II, which raised $2.2 billion from investors in January 2020.

An active investor in cybersecurity companies, KKR's portfolio includes artificial intelligence firm Darktrace and digital identity management company ForgeRock, both of which went public last year.

The 50 most promising Israeli startups - 2022

The high-tech market has cooled off, so in this year’s list of the 50 most promising Israeli startups we placed a special focus not only on growth and innovative ideas, but also on business models, actual revenue and the ability to realize potential

Meir Orbach and Sophie Shulman

13:52, 04.05.22

Over $25 billion was raised by Israeli startups in 2021, an almost unimaginable magnitude of investments. Just three years earlier in 2018, investments reached $6.5 billion in what was at the time considered to be a record year. The incredible influx of funds into local high-tech correlated with the dramatic entrance of venture capital giants like Insight Partners, Tiger Global and SoftBank and resulted in dozens of new Israeli unicorns (companies valued at over $1 billion) in 2021.

Last year’s list included numerous excellent companies, but also young companies that had only been around for 2-3 years, had annual revenue of several millions at best but had already raised hundreds of millions at ludicrous valuations. Companies that had only just been founded raised tens of millions in Seed funding rounds, while others rented out entire buildings as office space in order to display their strength. The competition for employees became so extreme that companies spent massively on billboard advertising and grandiose parties abroad. It seemed as if the traditional approach of the local market, one which believes in frugality, modesty and an ability to quickly build a sustainable business model was no longer relevant. Everyone knew that the funding paradise couldn’t last forever, yet Israeli high-tech was still euphoric.

This resulted, among other things, in a mental chasm between the industry and Israeli society. While in the past success stories of local tech companies were immediately adopted as a success for the entire country, for example with M-Systems, Check Point, Waze and Mobileye, today’s success stories also angered some sections of the public who feel that they aren’t benefiting from the good times. There’s no doubt that tech’s success generated huge sums in taxes and brought billions of dollars into the economy, strengthening the dollar and limiting the effects of the Covid-19 crisis on Israel. However, the public instead focused on the huge salaries being paid to tech employees, the chef restaurants opening at their office complexes, the luxurious parties and the rise in the cost of living supported by the cheap money. One of the indications of this sentiment could be seen in the public objection to any government benefit provided to the tech sector, even if it made complete sense.

This year got off to a far more pessimistic start, initially showcased in the continuous drop in the valuations of public tech companies, the cooling of the IPO market and the near disappearance of the SPAC trend. If in 2021 companies boasted about being valued higher than Check Point, now they are valued exactly as a young startup which is only being kept alive by its huge cash reserve should be. Most of the companies that went public over the past two years are currently being traded at about half their original value, with entrepreneurs who were on course to go public discovering that investors are far less keen to get involved, forcing them to cut their company valuations. Additionally, share options lost their luster as a tool to attract employees.

This relative winter also arrived in the private market, with quite a few startups struggling to raise funds, the valuation they are aiming for becoming debatable, and those who have cash in the coffers choosing to avoid additional rounds until the sentiment changes. Companies which postponed their funding rounds to 2022 discovered that investors are suddenly insisting on strange requests like significant revenue and a timeline to reach profitability, which combined together provide proof of a business model.

There is of course no need to eulogize local tech, with massive sums still flowing into the industry, in particular in popular sectors like cybersecurity and fintech. But the coming year, with a backdrop of a global recession and struggling stock markets, will be a testing year for Israeli startups. Are they crisis resistant and did they prepare for tougher times, or will they have to initiate cutbacks and in some cases even shut down.

That is why when we put together Calcalist’s list of Israel’s 50 most promising startups we assessed not only if the growth is impressive and the idea is brilliant, but also, and mainly, do these companies have a sustainable business model. We looked, and found, companies that aren’t relient just on the money of investors and technological hype, but are capable already today, or in the near future, to sustain themselves on real revenue. We verified that they are active in a market in which they have an advantage, but that they are also at a business stage which will allow them to realize this advantage and not collapse beforehand. The final list is an optimistic one and includes 50 excellent companies that we believe will continue to flourish in a big way, even if they might encounter some struggles in the near future.