by Hailo

Israeli Chips, Blitzfailing, and the case for Pre-Seed…

A weekly brief ☕️ of the most interesting things we’ve seen in tech in Israel, Sweden, and beyond—9th of March 2020 📅

🗞Noteworthy news

• Israeli Chips ( 🇮🇱)— After the widely publicized acquisition of Habana Labs by Intel for $2Bn in December ’19, another Israeli AI Chip manufacturer, Hailo, raises $60Mn in Series B for global expansion.
• Buy Now; Pay Later (🇸🇪)—Months after Klarna’s latest round, raising $460Mn at a $5.5Bn valuation, Alipay’s owner announced it’s taking a minority stake in the payments platform.
• Friction-Free Parking (🇮🇱) — sPARK Parking Technologies gets acquired by Arrive for an undisclosed amount in order to build out Arrive’s first R&D center in Israel.
• Enterprise Blockchains 🌍— ConsenSys and EY have announced the formation of Baseline Protocol, a project aimed at enterprises built on top of Ethereum. The project has garnered support from 12 other companies and organizations, including Microsoft, AMD, ChainLink, and MakerDAO.

🤓What we’ve been reading over the past week

• Blitzscaling 📈 — A clear overview of how iconic companies such as Google, Facebook, and many others went on to grow at astronomical rates while blitzscaling. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and partner at Greylock, dissects this growth strategy, defining it as prioritizing speed of growth over efficiency.
• Blitzfailing 📉 — The flip side of fast-growing or blitzscaling startups and the top reasons why they go off the rails. A great article by David Sacks, the founder of Craft Ventures.
• Crunching the numbers 📟 — How the shift of seed rounds led to the creation of the pre-seed round. Notation Capital’s view on the novel investment category: its risks, rewards, and some neat slides.

😮 New Funds (incl. Feb-2020)

• $120M for Israeli deep-tech startups ( 🇮🇱) — Israeli venture capital firm Grove Ventures announced in February that it secured $120 million in total commitments for the Grove Ventures II Fund (Grove II). The firm is led by serial entrepreneur and investor Dov Moran, the founder of M-Systems Inc., the company that invented the USB flash drive (bought in 2006 by SanDisk Corp. for $1.6 billion).
• $210M to back visionary Israeli entrepreneurs ( 🇮🇱) —The Tel Aviv-based VC firm TLV Partners, announced in February the closing of its 3rd early-stage fund at $150M in addition to its $60M growth opportunity fund. TLV Partners was founded in 2015 by Rona Segev and Eitan Bek. The company has since backed 30 companies and over 70 founders.
• €250M for disruptive proptech companies 🌍— A new European venture capital (VC) fund dubbed A/O PropTech launched in February promising “permanent capital” investment for disruptive proptech companies in the U.S., Europe, and Israel. The fund is a “first of” investing approach which is structured more like a corporate shareholder arrangement, rather than your typical VC fund.

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