The roller coaster of the Israeli ecosystem continues, and after April, which was one of the weakest months we've seen here in the last two years, followed by a two-month "correction", we're back at a downward spiral. This month, Israeli startups reported less than $700 million in fundraising, half of the amount raised last month.
Where are all the unicorns?
The market crisis is finally starting to take its shape as July had a very weak month. This month, 22 fundraising rounds were reported by Israeli startups worth a total of 688 million dollars, which is 6 million dollars less than what was raised in April, the ecosystem's weakest month in the last two years.
Though there was a mega-raising round for SundaySky of 100 million dollars, they also announced a partial acquisition, laid off employees and apparently have no plan to go public like was previously discussed. Apart from SundaySky, we didn't see any huge recruitment this month, and no company joined the unicorn club.
We also saw that the trend of investing in young startups compared to more mature ones continues, although the gap between the number of young companies that reported raising capital was relatively low this month (13 young companies VS 9 mature companies). This small difference may be due to the relatively low overall number of recruitments. Only time will tell.
Compared to the month of July in previous years, this July saw the lowest total recruitments in four years. Last year the ecosystem was still on fire and the Israeli startups reported fundraising a total of 2.4 billion dollars, in July 2020 though at the peak of the pandemic Israeli startups reported raising a total of 700 million dollars and in 2019 the Israeli startups reported fundraising of almost one billion dollars.
Only one exit was recorded this month, from Israel’s startup Databand, which was purchased by IBM for an estimated $100 to $150 million. In addition, Israel's Perimeter X announced a merger with an American company.
July 2022 funding recruitments
- Maolac raised 3.2 million for “adult” breast milk
- Aurora Labs raised $63 million with help from Porsche
- Wonder Robotics raised $4 million for better drone landing
- SundaySky gets $100 million along with an acquisition
- Amnon Shashua’s AI21 Labs raises $64 million
- Giantetic raised $7 million for crane arcade games
- Deci raised $25 million for AI model production
- ForSight Robotics raised $55 million to help cataract surgeons
- Virility Medical raised $10 million for erectile dysfunction
- Theator raised $24 million to create a “Netflix” for surgeons
- Fintech company Viably raised $21 million
- Frontegg raised $40 million
- Island raised $10 million from Cisco
- Bizzabo raised $35 million
- Diagnostic Robotics raised $45 million
- Uncaged Studio raised $24 million for a blockchain game
- Dot Compliance raised $23 million in a Series B round
- Balance raised $56 million for better B2B payments
- Phytolon raised $14.5 million for brighter colours
- Voyantis comes out of stealth with a $19 million funding round
- SPIRITT's app development platform raised $5.5 million
