OurCrowd

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OurCrowd’s portfolio company BillGuard featured in VentureBeat

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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.
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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.

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OurCrowd’s portfolio company Curiyo featured in Times of Israel

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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.

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“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 with information anywhere, anytime. And our ‘My 2¢’ feature lets users get involved in creating content as well,” he continued.

Curiyo raised $550,000 from OurCrowd investors in December 2012 and $230,000 in a follow-on funding round in February 2014.

Read more on The Times of Israel here.

OurCrowd’s portfolio company Lucid Energy featured in The Guardian

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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 here.

OurCrowd & portfolio companies BillGuard, Webydo, Cimagine, Consumer Physics featured in Forbes

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OurCrowd and four of our portfolio companies — BillGaurd, Webydo, Consumer Physics, and Cimagine — were featured on Forbes, a leading business and finance magazine. Forbes tech contributor Ilya Pozin listed the top 24 Israeli Companies You Should Watch For.

Here’s what he had to say about OurCrowd and its portfolio companies:

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 approach.

BillGuard: In the modern world, credit card fraud and identity theft are unfortunately all too common. BillGuard provides a simple, streamlined solution to help users keep track of all of their credit card activity, along with their credit score. Critically, the service helps users protect themselves against fraud by closely monitoring their activity.

BillGuard raised $3,896,064 from OurCrowd investors in August 2014.

Webydo: The idea behind Webydo is that it wants to give the control of the Web back to designers, letting them craft and run their own business to create websites. Instead of having to deal with developers and programmers, Webydo provides designers with an intuitive platform to create websites.

Webydo raised $1,292,500 from OurCrowd investors in December 2013.

Cimagine: Augmented reality (AR) represents a unique opportunity for retailers to present their products to customers. That’s where Cimagine comes in with its solution for retailers. The company has built a platform that allows companies to easily add AR objects, such as furniture, to their apps.

Cimagine raised $389,071 from OurCrowd investors in July 2014.

Consumer Physics: One of the most buzzed-about startups to come out of Israel recently is Consumer Physics, maker of SCiO, which rocketed to $2.7 million on Kickstarter. The device is basically a pocket molecular sensor, letting you see the chemical makeup of everyday objects, like the food you eat. The company has positioned the device as a tool to learn more about the world and the materials it is made of.

Seeded by OurCrowd and top tier Silicon Valley VC Khosla Ventures, Consumer Physics raised $3,300,000 from OurCrowd investors in its 2nd round of funding in May 2014.

Read more on Forbes here.

OurCrowd’s Portfolio Company Freightos featured in TechCrunch

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Leading technology website, TechCrunch, featured OurCrowd portfolio company Freightos. The company offers a Software as a Service cloud solution for automating pricing and sales in the trillion dollar freight (cargo) industry.

Freightos, essentially, is building the Kayak or Expedia for international shippers. Both individual users and freight forwarders can use the platform to search for and filter shipping options by price, time, route, fees involved, or type of transportation.

“It’s quite straightforward, and quite analogous to what you’ve seen in other industries,” says [Freightos founder Zvi] Schreiber. “But in this industry, it’s really quite revolutionary.”

Freightos raised $550,000 from OurCrowd investors in November 2012 and $110,000 in a follow-on funding round in 2013.

Read more on TechCrunch here.

[Crosswise in Business Wire] Apsalar and Crosswise Partner on Cross-Device Matching for Mobile DMP Clients

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SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Apsalar, a global leader in mobile data management and mobile app measurement, today announced a partnership with Crosswise, a leading provider of cross-device identification mapping.

Under the agreement, Apsalar will offer cross-device matching as a service for its Mobile DMP clients. Through the partnership, Apsalar Mobile DMP clients will be able to use the Crosswise device map as a tool to link the mobile-app-, mobile-web- and PC-web-data of millions more consumers to create true cross-device profiles and deliver “360-degree customer insights”.

Read more in Business Wire

OurCrowd’s portfolio company BioCatch featured in TechCrunch

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Leading technology website, TechCrunch, featured OurCrowd portfolio company BioCatch. The company has developed a novel form of authentication used by online businesses to continuously guarantee users are who they say they are, by analyzing their behavioral and cognitive responses.

Rather than focusing on stopping cybercriminals with walls, new technologies are emerging that work to identify cybercriminals instead. Take the relatively new startup BioCatch, which received $11.6 million in funding over three rounds. BioCatch’s technology works to identify patterns of user behavior in certain applications, creating user profiles that can then be matched to subsequent visits.

For example, if you visit an e-commerce platform and move your cursor in a certain pattern, or type at a certain speed, BioCatch will be able to determine, on future visits, whether or not the user with your login credentials is actually “you.” Account takeovers, remote access (RAT), and MitB malware attacks could all be potentially thwarted by this approach.

BioCatch raised $3,334,500 from OurCrowd investors in February 2014.

Read more on TechCrunch here.

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