Author: OurCrowd

OurCrowd’s portfolio company BillGuard featured in VentureBeat

Sep 24, 2015 | ,

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

Sep 20, 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

Sep 20, 2015 | ,

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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OurCrowd’s portfolio company Lucid Energy featured in The Guardian

Sep 18, 2015 | ,

OurCrowd’s Portland-based portfolio company Lucid Energy was featured in The Guardian, a leading online news source, content aggregator and blog. Lucid Energy is a renewable energy company that enables managers of large water infrastructure to generate low-cost power by capturing energy embedded in moving water in their pipelines, without disrupting their operation and with no environmental impact. To tackle the high demand water and energy place on one another, micro-hydropower is emerging as a technology with potential. In January, Portland, Oregon became the first city to harness electricity from its water pipes and sell it to the electricity grid. The city is using a technology developed by Lucid Energy, which says it will generate 1,100 MWh of electricity a year – the equivalent of powering 150 homes – from four turbines installed along a 50-foot section of Portland’s water pipes. Lucid Energy raised $1,650,000 from OurCrowd investors in November 2012. Read more on The Guardian...

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[Forbes] 24 Israeli Companies You Should Watch For

Sep 16, 2015 |

“It seems like everybody knows about crowdfunding nowadays — even your parents. But what’s less well-known is equity-crowdfunding. Instead of investing to back a campaign and support a new product, you invest to support a new company and to receive a stake in the company in exchange. OurCrowd was built by seasoned investors and is open only to accredited investors, giving it a more focused...

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