Winners and Losers of the Week: Gaming Company Moon Active Tops This Week's List

This week’s winners are:

Gaming company Moon Active, after New York-based venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners bought a 10% stake in the Israeli company. The stake was acquired at a company valuation of $1.25 billion. Moon Active develops games for iOS, Android, and Facebook and it is the developer of popular mobile game Coin Master, which has been downloaded by tens of millions of users. Read more Nasdaq and Tel Aviv-listed Gilat Satellite Networks for being acquired by Nasdaq-listed Comtech Telecommunications Corp. for approximately $532.5 million. The company’s largest shareholder is Israel-based private equity firm FIMI Opportunity Funds, which holds a 34% stake, followed by Mivtach-Shamir Holdings with 9.7% ownership. Read more

This week’s losers are:

Israeli tech and innovation entrepreneurs after the government investment arm the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA) announced it would not approve grants to new projects in the first quarter of 2020. Israel's political limbo has postponed the approval of the government budget, including the IIA budget to support new grants. IIA's annual investment budget amounts to NIS 1.6 billion (approximately $461 million) per year and is typically used to support the local expansion of R&D operations by large companies, and for startups in fields where venture capital funding is lacking. Read more

This week’s data point: 17%

17% accounts for the percentage of Israeli companies with female CEOs, which jumped from 5,400 in 2016 to 8,700 in 2017, out of 50,000 CEOs overall. In percentages, that is an increase from 12% to 17% within a year, resulting in one out of six CEOs being a woman. However, the improvement may be the result of more female entrepreneurs founding and heading their own small companies, rather than changes in the general selection process. Read more