Author: OurCrowd

[Kenna Security in The Wall Street Journal] Survey Roundup: A Critical Look at Board Debate

Critical Eye: A survey of around 345 female board members by WomenCorporateDirectors and executive development firm Bright Enterprises Inc. found 77% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that boards would make better decisions if they were more open to debate and argument, while 94% agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that succeeding as a board member means being open to criticism. Nearly 80% said board members need more training in how to give criticism. Read more on The...

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OurCrowd’s portfolio company Neverware featured in CNN Money

OurCrowd’s portfolio company Neverware was featured on CNN Money. The company repurposes obsolete school computers though desktop virtualization to make them function better than they did when newly purchased. Jonathan Hefter is passionate about two things: education and problem solving. The 29-year-old has put both at the heart of Neverware, the startup he founded in 2011. Neverware created software that revives old school computers and gets them running like new again. […] The company worked with Google to develop a cloud-based operating system called Cloudready. Built on Google’s browser-based Chromium operating system, it basically converts existing PCs and Macs into a Google Chromebook. Neverware raised $1,012,000 from OurCrowd investors in January 2014 and $107,424 in its 2nd round of funding in September 2014. Read more on CNN...

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OurCrowd’s portfolio company BillGuard featured in VentureBeat

OurCrowd’s portfolio company BillGuard was featured in VentureBeat, a leading technology website. BillGuard identifies fraud and “grey” charges, which cost consumers over $25B annually, by analyzing crowdsourcing transaction data from its millions-strong user base. BillGuard, the crowdsourced security app for personal finance, has been acquired by peer-to-peer lending giant Prosper Marketplace. […] Prosper said that the acquisition will enable it to offer its current customers more tools “to make smarter financial decisions.” Moreover, BillGuard boasts a strong engineering and product team in Tel Aviv, where the company’s two founders — Yaron Samid and Raphael Ouzan — hail from. And Prosper pointed to this as a major boon. BillGuard raised $3,896,064 from OurCrowd investors in August 2014. Read more on VentureBeat here. [xyz-ihs...

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[Business Insider] The 27 hottest Israeli startups of 2015

“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. […] By crowdsourcing its investment fund, OurCrowd is helping more investors tap into that early stage wealth...

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OurCrowd’s portfolio company Curiyo featured in Times of Israel

OurCrowd portfolio company Curiyo was featured in The Times of Israel, an English-language news website covering Israel, the region & the Jewish world. Curiyo is a browser plugin that helps deliver relevant content to users curious to know more about a word or phrase on a site, without forcing users to leave the page they are on. A decade and a half ago, the world was enthralled with text — and Answers.com, the pioneering web information service, made it easy for users to learn about a topic by highlighting a word on a website and connecting to Wikipedia and other sources for definitions, history, and background information. That was a fine idea for the early years of the 21st century, said Bob Rosenschein, creator of Answers.com — but in the new era of mobile multimedia and social media interaction, text isn’t enough. […] “With Curiyo, our new information search engine, you can find images, videos, Reddit posts — as well as information from text sources. Plus, we have developed a mobile version of the service to enable users to get in touch...

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