“I can imagine Israeli megacorns sometime in the future”

“I can imagine Israeli megacorns sometime in the future,” said Natalie Refuah, a partner at Viola Growth. “Just this year we had between 30 to 40 new companies turning into unicorns, now most of them are not ready for an IPO, and they will have about two to three years to get ready for an IPO, so the question is are they going to park for this time until they reach the IPO stage or will they come back to the market and raise capital. I looked at some of the companies that decided not to go public although they reached a unicorn position in 2019, 2020, like Synk and Gong, Next Insurance, Rapyd, and all of them since did two or three more rounds of at least $200 million expanding their valuations."

Refuah spoke at a panel alongside Saagar Kulkarni, a Partner at Stripes Group, which was hosted by CTech’s James Spiro at Mind the Tech NY 2021 conference on Tuesday. “If we look at the charts and we see there is a steady increase of amounts of capital that is going into Israeli companies at all stages, and especially at early stages we also see an increase,” she went on to say. “So there is more money that is going into earlier-stage companies that are getting used to spending more capital, continue to fuel growth, which boosts evaluations, so I think we are going to see the early growth continue to grow, and companies will come back to the market sooner than expected for additional funding.”

Kulkarni explained his firm's point of view when looking at the Israeli ecosystem, saying that “in our portfolio, Israel has been, aside from the U.S., the number one geography we invested in over the last three years, it started with monday.com and others since then. And I think it is a couple of things we always admired about Israeli companies and why we invested in so many.”

“I think first is the technological foundations, better technological experts and talents than almost anywhere in the world. And I think when you par it with the second aspect which is that from day one you have to build a global product, you have to go for an international market that is not your own so they are prepared from day one to scale internationally. And last, I think you have very highly ambitious founders,” he said

Watch the full panel in the video above