March 2020 Wrap 🗞
The Wrap is our monthly article covering the most relevant events and (pre-)seed deals across Sweden and Israel. We decided to create The Wrap series to enable anyone to get a comprehensive overview of the most interesting deals and events worth tracking.
Although it has been a turbulent month, with VC funds expected to wind down investment operations, startups in Israel and Sweden still managed to raise over $2.4Bn in March 2020.
Notable Events 💸
- Mar-4: Mavenoid raises €7.1M in series A funding to ramp up its efforts to deliver a fully automated product support solution, combining machine learning and human knowledge to get products working again. The round was led by Mosaic Ventures alongside Creandum and Point Nine Capital.
- Mar-4: 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.
- Mar-4: sPARK Parking Technologies gets acquired by Arrive for an undisclosed amount in order to build out Arrive’s first R&D center in Israel.
- Mar-5: Hailo 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.
- Mar-8: Modularity, a startup developing credit card payment clearing technologies for android devices, has been acquired by fintech company Nayax for an undisclosed amount.
- Mar-11: Perimeter 81, a two-year-old, Tel Aviv-based aimed at simplifying secure network access in the age of remote work and cloud networks, raised $4.5M in a Series A extension round led by Toba Capital.
- Mar-16: Checkmarx, founded in 2006 and a global leader in application security and provider of software security solutions for DevOps, has been acquired by Hellman & Friedman, a global private equity firm, for $1.2Bn. The acquisition aims to bolster the company’s growth, enabling organizations to deliver secure software quickly, by making security intrinsic to software development.
- Mar-17: Swedish Algae Factory, a 6-year old, Gothenburg, Sweden-based startup developing a novel algae cultivation and wastewater treatment system, has recently raised $5 million in their latest investment round from Chalmers Ventures, Aqua-Spark, Almi Invest Greentech, Formica Ventures, and Gladium AB.
- Mar-17: Loops Education, a startup striving to make learning more accessible and engaging, gets acquired by Skooler for an undisclosed amount. Loops’ acquisition will enable Skooler to extend its functionality and further develop itself as a powerhouse for K-12 education.
- Mar-19: Quantum Machines, a start-up developing control and operation systems for quantum computers, raises $17.5M from Battery Ventures, Harel, Meron Capital, Avigdor Willenz and TLV Partners.
Notable (Pre-)Seed Deals in February from Israel and Sweden 🔎
1. Convizit (🇮🇱)
Description: Convizit provides unparalleled visibility into user journey patterns, enabling companies to unlock the goldmine hiding in user behavior data. With instant deployment and zero ongoing maintenance, Convizit’s AI technologies automatically capture, tag and analyze a never-before-available wealth of user activity data, empowering marketers, product managers, and site owners to glean new and valuable business insights from user behavior data.
Founding Date: 2017
Founders: Daniel Bashari, Daniel Plotkin
Last Funding Type and Amount: Seed round, $5.000.000
Investors: Pitango Venture Capital, Jumpspeed Ventures
Comparables: Reactful, Clicktale, Justuno
Our Thoughts: Convizit takes a refreshing approach to a problem that touches every single business, from startup to corporate. Giving any business the ability to understand user behavior patterns in the most complete and accurate way thus far, highlights their Convizit’s ability to be an attractive player in this gigantic market. Beyond that, the product analytics market is expected to double in size by 2024. We will definitely be tracking them.
Further reading: Crunchbase, PR Newswire
2. Superwise.ai (🇮🇱)
Description: Superwise.ai enables business and operational teams to take ownership of the health of their AI environments. Its AI Assurance platform includes AI performance management, bias detection, explainability, and AI analytics capabilities.
Founding Date: January 2019
Founders: Ofer Razon, Oren Razon
Last Funding Type and Amount: Seed round, $4.500.000
Investors: F2 Capital, Capri Ventures
Comparables: AWS Sagemaker, Microsoft Azure Machine learning
Our Thoughts: The ability for any firm to determine whether an application based on AI and ML models remain fit for their assigned tasks is crucial. In that sense, Superwise.ai is treading upon a niche market that is steadily growing, addressing the needs of enterprises that have bet the business on AI-powered processes.
Further reading: Crunchbase, Venture Beat
3. EmbeDL (🇸🇪)
Description: EmbeDL is helping companies in their journey of bringing prototype deep learning models to production. The company develops software that optimizes AI and Deep Learning models to make them faster and more energy-efficient without compromising accuracy and precision. The software also evaluates which hardware is best for the specific model.
Founding Date: 2018
Founders: Hans Salomonsson, Devdatt Dubhashi
Last Funding Type and Amount: Seed round, $700.000
Investors: Chalmers Ventures, Stoaf III SciTech AB, Butterfly Ventures, Circus Future, and Almi Invest
Our Thoughts: In a similar fashion to Superwise.ai, EmbeDL offers an exciting alternative to existing players’ full-fledged offerings for deep learning development. By going beyond software and looking at hardware optimization as well, EmbeDL takes a unique position amongst the niche players in the space. The latter also speaks for its current achievements and pilots with Intel, IBM, etc.
Further reading: Crunchbase, BreakIt (in Swedish)
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