3 Israeli startups raise $37m

Startups Photo: Shutterstock
Startups Photo: Shutterstock

Israeli startups have raised $4.4 billion so far this year, which is set to break records.

Young Israeli high-tech companies are still raising money. Three companies have now reportedly raised an aggregate total of $37 million. A "Globes" survey found that Israeli high-tech companies have raised a total of $4.4 billion so far this year, similar to the whole of 2015, indicating that 2016 will be a record year.

In the largest of the current financing rounds, Logz.io raised $16 million, bringing the capital raised by it since its founding in late 2014 to $24 million. What does Logz.io do? It asserts that it is the only company to have developed a log analysis platform (computer log analysis is designed to achieve a more thorough understanding of information for purposes of information security, compliance with regulations, detecting problems, etc.) using the ELK Stack open code. Logz.io improved its capabilities last August, and launched a platform called Cognitive Insights that combines machine learning and human interaction with log analysis.

Jim Baum, a venture partner at OpenView, which took part in Logz.io's recent financing round, and who is also chairman of Dyn, highlights the solution capabilities of Israeli companies. "The operational team of Dyn's global network relies on Logz.io's daily service. I learned how critical Logz.io was for our ability to respond quickly to and cope with recent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against us. Logz.io's technology helped us identify the source, the target, and the protocol used by the attackers," Baum said. Logz.io's solution is already serving over 1,000 companies in 80 countries. The company claims to have doubled its revenue every quarter for the past year.

The second largest financing round was by SeaLights, which raised $8 million and announced that it had raised a total of $11 million since it was founded. The company has developed a cloud platform, allegedly the first of its kind, for continuous quality assurance (QA) tests.The company says that while continuous QA tests became the standard long ago, companies are still having difficulty in understanding the quality of code before they launch their product. Sealights was founded in order to solve this problem. The company's QA system provides high-quality analysis based on information collected from all the tools, thereby making quality measurable and simplifying the process of launching a product, without jeopardizing it.

"We are witnessing much faster launches of products or versions of products, from one or two a year to tens or hundreds a month," says Sealights cofounder and CEO Eran Sher. "There is a need for QA testing that will meet this pace in both quantity and quality. This is a challenge that every testing, development, or devops manager (i.e. IT personnel) must cope with," says cofounder and CTO Alon Eizenman.

The third round was by cyber security company Siemplify. This company completed two financing rounds within nine months, raising $4 million in the first last February and $10 million in the current round, a sum that probably indicates the company's potential.

Siemplify has developed a system called ThreatNexus that manages and analyzes cyber threats in real time, among other things by reducing the number of alerts (alerts frequently prove to be false alarms), thereby significantly shortening the time it takes to handle each event. Bill Wiberg, cofounder of venture capital fund G20, which took part in the current round, cited the capabilities of the company's solution, saying, "Siemplify's customers have made it clear to us that the ThreatNexus system is the main tool on which their information security teams rely. The system makes it unnecessary to jump around between different security tools that are isolated from each other when investigating attacks and dealing with them."

Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on November 15, 2016

© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2016

Startups Photo: Shutterstock
Startups Photo: Shutterstock
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