Tag: M&A

Full Steam Ahead: Mid-2014 Israeli Mergers, Acquisitions and IPOs [Infographic]

The Israeli startup ecosystem is chugging along full steam ahead, on pace to make 2014 a record breaking year. So far, 37 Israeli companies have either floated on public exchanges worldwide or have been acquired by large multinational corporations. In addition to the successful exits, 335 Israeli high-tech companies attracted $1.6 billion in venture capital funding, an 81% increase from 2013. Here is another OurCrowd infographic breaking down the first half of 2014 in numbers....

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6 Tips on How You Can Invest in the Next Billion Dollar Exit

2013 was a record year for the Israeli high-tech sector as the value of M&A deals and IPOs reached an eight-year high of $7.6 billion. Although there were several exits in the hundreds of millions of dollars (the average exit was for $170 million, the highest in decades), most of that sum was for a small number of mega-exits in high-tech. Of the 45 Israeli exits last year, Google’s acquisition of popular social driving app Waze for about $1 billion made the most headlines. Why Waze was valued over $1 billion What was the big deal about Waze? Well, for starters, it’s not every day you hear about titans like Google and Facebook going head to head in a race to buy out a company. Furthermore, the lucrative deal is one of the largest high-tech acquisitions in Israeli history. Google’s acquisition of Waze put Israeli technology back on the front stage of the international startup scene, signaling new growth for Israeli high tech that was clearly evident in the months following the deal. Until recently, most investors thought it would be impossible to build a billion dollar consumer company in Israel. The Google-Waze deal opened...

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2013: The Startup Nation’s year in review

From the billion dollar acquisition of Waze to a plethora of IPOs in the industries of agriculture, science, technology, and social media, Israeli startups have been turning heads and smashing records after a very successful year in 2013. Global presence According to Cornell University’s 2013 Global Innovation Index Rankings, Israel ranked 14th of 142 countries in innovation, in addition to earning the number two spot among startup ecosystems worldwide, second only to California’s Silicon Valley. Startups developed in Israel seem to be instant sensations on various global markets. Despite Israel’s meager population of just over 8 million, the less-than sizeable nation-state has more companies listed on the NASDAQ’s exchange than any country after the United States and China . 2013 has been a year of momentous growth in the Israeli startup world — the third quarter of 2013 alone attracted $660 million investor dollars raised by 162 companies, the largest single-quarter performance in well over a decade. High tech success 2013 was a prodigious year for high-tech startups in Israel. While Waze took the cake with its billion-dollar acquisition, other...

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It’s been quite a year in the Startup Nation! Need a reminder? Check out the top high-tech stories of 2013

2013 has turned out to be a very successful year for Israeli high-tech with a lot of high profile mergers and acquisitions, venture capital investment and initial public offerings. Here are the top high-tech stories from Israel 2013! [View the story “Startup Nation 2013: Top high-tech stories out of Israel” on...

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Make turn at next exit: a roadmap for startup investing

Angel investors as a whole have done exceptionally well lately.  A recent study by Prof. Robert Wiltbank that made noise in the angel scene claims that angel investors make 2.5x their investment in just 3.5 years when diversifying properly – which, if you think about it, is a ridiculous nearly 30% year over year return and more than double the returns of the S&P 500 over that same timeframe. How do angels make money? Angel investors make money when a startup they invested in exits, but what exactly qualifies as an exit? From an investor’s perspective, an exit is an event where the investor realizes gains or losses from original investment through a liquidation event, public offering, or a merger.  Sometimes exits are highly profitable events where investors receive a 20 or 30 times return on investment– in the VC/investing world these are called home-runs.  However, more often than not, returns from individual startup exits are more modest, or negative, and as such don’t receive press attention.  Finally, there are also those exits that startups are notoriously famous for producing and every investor should...

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