Winners and Losers of the Week: Marketing Company AppsFlyer Tops This Week’s List

This week’s winners are:

 

This week’s winner is marketing company AppsFlyer, for raising $210 million at $1.6 billion valuation. AppsFlyer’s software tracks and analyzes the performance of marketing campaigns on mobile apps, enabling app operators to know how their most profitable users reached the app. The round was led by growth equity firm General Atlantic, with participation from existing investors Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing (PCI), Qumra Capital, Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners (DTCP), Magma Venture Partners, and Pitango Venture Capital.

Another winner this week is online lingerie retailer Brayola Fitting Technologies. A Tel Aviv court approved Brayola’s sale for $1.1 million to undergarment retailer Delta, after the company ran into financial trouble, leading to a stay of proceeding in November. Delta intends to use the platform developed by Brayola to sell its own brands, according to Isaac Dabah, the controlling shareholder of Israeli loungewear and undergarment retailer Delta Galil.

This week’s loser is Israel’s business sector, after two global indices demonstrated how the country is losing its reputation as an innovation nation and becoming more corrupt.

Israel came in sixth on Bloomberg’s list of the World’s Most Innovative Countries for 2020, down one place from its 2019 ranking. Israel ranked first for research and development intensity, second for researcher concentration, fifth for high-tech density, and seventh for patent activity. The country also ranked 15 for productivity and 31 for value-added manufacturing.

Israel’s ranking on the Corruption Perceptions Index published by Berlin-based nonprofit organization Transparency International has dropped in 2019 for the third year in a row. In 2016, Israel was ranked the 28 least corrupt country in the world, dropping to 32 in 2017, 34 in 2018, and 35 in 2019.

This week’s data point: 27%

More than a quarter of Israeli homes, 27%, are smart homes, according to the 2019 annual report on internet usage in Israel, released on Tuesday by Israel’s largest telecom, Bezeq. According to the report, 6.6 million people, about 72.5% of Israel’s population, have an internet connection.