photo by Dealbreaker

From WeWork to NoWork, Israeli High-Tech Sets New Records…

A weekly brief ☕️ of the most interesting things we’ve seen in tech in Israel, Sweden, and beyond — 6th of April 2020 📅

🗞Noteworthy news

• NoWork? — WeWork has been in tight shoes after Softbank’s announcement that they will be backing out of its offer to buy shares worth $3Bn. The move is a blow to shareholders like Adam Neumann, the company’s co-founder, and venture capital firms that had hoped to cash out of the troubled office space company.x
• On-Demand Doctors anywhere (🇮🇱) — Travel medicine startup Air Doctor has raised $7.8M in series A funding, led by Kamet Ventures and joined by Axa Group and Phoenix Insurance.
• The Place for your Favourite Podcasts (🇸🇪) — Stockholm-based Podme, a platform for listening to premium podcasts ad-free, raised $2Mn in Seed from Gorilla Capital and Schibted.
• Israeli High-Tech Setting Records (🇮🇱) — Israeli hi-tech companies raised about 2.74 billion U.S. dollars in funds in the first quarter of 2020, setting an all-time record.

🤓What we’ve been reading over the past week

• Lifespan 👴 👵 — David Sinclair (P.hD.), a biologist and professor of Genetics (Harvard Medical School), demystifies aging in this book and explains how much of what we know about aging is wrong. It also offers a compelling overview of how advanced aging research is, enabling us to make the age of 90 the new 70 rather sooner than later.
• Seed is the new A 📈— Great article by Peter Wagner from Wing on how Seed rounds grew to be the new A rounds. Filled with great content and graphs on where the state of Seed and Series A is standing. For example, in 2019, 67% of seed companies are generating revenue compared to 9% in 2010.
• The Ultimate Investment Memo 📑 — Ali Tamaseb from Data Collective VC does an extraordinary job in this article to outline a template of the most important items to include in an investment memo. We decided to create a google doc of the template for our own purposes that you can find here.

😮 New Funds

• $9.6Bn growth fund (🇮🇱) —New York-based venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners has raised $9.5 billion for its 11th fund, its largest growth equity technology fund to date, the firm announced Friday. In Israel, Insight has invested more than $1.3 billion to date across more than 15 active deals.

📆 Virtual Conferences and Events this Week

• Fundraising for Startups —The event has several slots during the upcoming weeks and will be taking attendees through how to best bootstrap your business, the best way to reach out to investors when fundraising, the psychology of an investor, the most important term sheet items, the crowdfunding process and much much more… register here.
• Coronavirus: Survival strategies for startups and small businesses — The event has several slots during the upcoming weeks and will walk you through the best strategies and workarounds for a startup during these times, the change in customer behavior and how to adapt the sales strategies accordingly, and how to best use the downtime to innovate the product… register here.

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