Winners and Losers of the Week: the Israeli Tech Industry Takes the Cake

Selection of this week's winners and losers by CTech's Editor

This week’s winners are:

Online gaming company Playtika for its acquisition of Finnish game publisher Seriously. Seriously is known for its game Best Fiends, which has been played by more than 900 million people, according to the company. The acquisition is estimated at approximately $275 million. Read more Another winner is Israeli predictive analytics company Mintigo that was acquired by New York-listed business performance management company Anaplan. Mintigo has raised $51 million in equity to date and the deal was valued at "tens of millions of dollars.” Read more

This week’s losers are:

Ontario-headquartered phone-maker Blackberry for shutting down its Israeli development center. Blackberry established the development center following its acquisition of secure file-sharing company WatchDox in 2015 for an estimated $100 million. Read more

Another loser this week is low-cost LiDAR startup Oryx Vision for deciding to shut down its operations. Oryx developed a light detection and ranging camera system (LiDAR) for autonomous cars, and has raised $67 million to date. Read more

This week’s data point: 8.7%

In Israel, tech workers accounted for 8.7% of the national workforce in 2018 - up from 8.3% in 2017. Tech employees earned nearly 2.5 times the average wage of non-tech Israeli employees. Read more

This week’s top deals:

Fintech startup Pagaya secures additional $115 million asset-backed security. Read more

Tel Aviv venture capital firm F2 Capital raises second, $75 million fund. Read more

Music education startup JoyTunes raises $25 million. Read more

Cybersecurity startup Axonius raises $20 million. Read more

Digital lender Salaryo raises $5.5 million in debt financing and equity. Read more

Biobeat receives FDA greenlight for blood pressure monitoring wristband.Read more

Israeli health logistics company Novolog acquires appointment booking company Odoro Global. Read more

New York-based firm FfVC backs construction site marking drone startup Civdrone. Read more