Winners and Losers of the Week: Headlines From This Week’s Mind the Tech Conference

This week, CTech and Calcalist hosted one of the leading technology conferences in Israel - Mind the Tech TLV. Many industry executives and prominent businesspeople spoke at the conference and were exclusively interviewed for CTech.

Here are some of the compelling headlines from the conference:

Privacy is essential to free and true communication, says Snap exec. Read more

More Israeli companies will IPO in 2020, says Viola Ventures’ Danny Cohen. Read more

IBM exec explains what it takes to trust decisions made by AI. Read more

Facetune developer Lightricks considering IPO within 2 years, says CEO. Read more

Don’t embark on a funding round while pregnant, Papaya Global CEO says. Read more

AI helps generate insights from the abundance of online data, says Cobwebs CEO. Read more

More headlines from Mind the Tech TLV. Read more

On the darker side of this week’s news, there were some less encouraging headlines:

The delays in grant payments promised by Israeli government investment arm the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA) is leading some dependent startups to let employees go. Israel's political limbo is delaying the approval of the government budget, meaning the government's tech investment arm is almost $60 million short in promised grants. Read more

New York-based online lingerie retailer Brayola Fitting Technologies has filed for a stay of proceeding with the Tel Aviv district court over a debt of $7.43 million. Brayola cited a decline in business activity due to competition and a decrease in profitability. Read more

Intel is looking to sell its connected home division, which employs around 1,000 people worldwide, including some 300 people in Intel’s development center in Israel, according to a Bloomberg report. with annual sales of about $450 million, the division develops semiconductors that provide wireless connections in home routers and gateways. Read more

Israel-based automotive chip company Valens Semiconductor has shut down one of its audio-video projects and fired 30 of its 300 employees. According to the company’s CEO Dror Jerushalmi layoffs were part of a reorganization process meant to bring the company to profitability within the next two years. Read more

This week’s data point: $144,000

Multinationals operating in Israel spent on wages an average of approximately $144,000 a year per employee in 2017, while local startups spent $97,000 on average, according to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics. On average, most of a startup’s R&D expenditure in 2017, 59.4%, went toward wages and adjacent expenses, according to the report. Read more 

This week’s top deals:

Cybersecurity company Cymulate raises $15 million. Read more

Data analytics startup Coralogix raises $10 million. Read more

Salesforce to nearly double Israeli R&D operation by 2022, says exec. Read more

Japan's Olympus Corporation to open innovation office in Tel Aviv. Read more

Pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca launches digital health program in Israel. Read more

Japanese insurer Sompo partners with Israeli private hospital chain Assuta on cybersecurity. Read more