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2013 was Tel Aviv's annus mirabilis: foreign companies spent $6.45 billion (£3.82 billion) buying Israeli firms, including maps startup Waze which sold to Google for $966 million, and internet-based voice service Viber, bought for $900 million by Japanese tech giant Rakuten. A total of 622 Israeli tech firms raised a sum of $2.3 billion, the largest amount since 2000, according to the business data company IVC-Online; and IBM announced plans to launch its first global accelerator in Tel Aviv, following Microsoft's pilot in 2012.
The tech community's biggest strengths? "The army'sfocus is gathering predictive intelligence, so there's a lot of education in machine learning, machine vision and big-data analysis," says Eden Shochat, cofounder of Face.com and now a partner at venture capital fund Aleph. "These kids have built multiple mission-critical systems by the age of 22 - it's hard for anyone else in the world to match that."
12 HaOmanim, 6789731
One of Tel Aviv's most successful consumer startups, Fiverr runs an online marketplace for "gigs" - freelance services such as graphic design, copywriting, translation and animation. Founded by Shai Wininger (above, left) and Micha Kaufman (right), Fiverr has more than doubled its size in the past year and has more than three million gigs offered in its community. Initially, every service was offered for $5 (£2.95) but over the last year the range of prices has gone from $5 to $8,000 (more than 60 per cent of Fiverr's transaction volume is for services higher than $5). The recently redesigned site now offers data analytics for buyers and sellers. "Since we launched the new site, we have seen a 50 per cent increase in demand from small- and medium-sized businesses," says CEO Kaufman. It has also launched ioses and androids apps and aims to be available in seven languages - a Spanish version has already been released - by the end of 2014.
30 Haim Levanon St, 6139001
Space IL was cofounded by engineers Yariv Bash, Kfir Damari and Yonatan Winetraub with the mission to land an Israeli spacecraft on the Moon by December 2015. The team, which is competing for the $30 million Google Lunar XPrize, is building a 140kg nano-spaceship; if it lands on the Moon, it will be the smallest craft to do so.
Funding has come from philanthropists, as well as $26.4m from US casino mogul Sheldon Adelson.
17 Atir-Yeda St, Kfar-Saba 4464313
Pebbles Interfaces' motion sensors and software can be embedded into smartphoness, PCs or smart TVs to turn them into gesture-controlled objects. With its mission of "naturally interfacing with every object, real or virtual," it has now set its sights on the affordable consumer-electronics market. A 2013 funding round raised $11m from investors such as Chinese smartphones and tablet maker Xiaomi.
1 HaBarzel St, 6971001
Founded in 2012 by alumni of the Israeli Intelligence Corps, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) security company monitors the activity of its customers' SaaS applications, detecting unauthorised access and protecting data in real time. Since its official launch in November 2013, it says it has attracted one million customers, who each pay $5 to $10 per month. It has raised $19.5 million from Index Ventures and other investors.
13 Zarhin St Building C, Ra'anana 4366241
Founded in 2011 by Benny Schnaider and Rami Tamir, Ravello Systems is an enterprise startup that is developing a virtualisation OS to help companies move their IT services and applications to the cloud. It describes itself as "the first cloud application hypervisor provider." In 2013 it raised $26 million from Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners.
32 Habarzel St, 69710
Launched in 2007, eToro is a social investment network that aims to bring transparency to financial trading. Users can display and share the stocks, currencies and commodities they are investing in with others via its ioses and androids apps. They can also follow traders, with eToro acting as the broker. A joint paper with MIT Media Lab suggested that copy trades are more profitable than manual trading, with 26 per cent more positive gains for copy traders in the last year.
5th floor, 7 Totseret Ha'aretz St, 6789104
Taboola is one of the two biggest companies in the paid content recommendation space - the other is fellow Israeli company Outbrain - and both are likely to go public this year. It serves up about 3.5 billion links daily to videos and articles around the web on news websites such as Time, the BBC, and The New York Times; it has about 350 million monthly users and annual revenues of more than $100 million.
47 HanesIIm St, Ra'Anana 43583
Seeking Alpha signs up financial experts to share investing ideas and advice through articles, and charging users a subscription for access. It has more than 7,000 contributors and covers over 3,000 stocks; as of February 2013 it had three million users. Earlier this year, researchers analysed 100,000 Seeking Alpha articles from between 2005 and 2012 and found that they predicted stock returns above what was evident from Dow Jones news articles.
32 Rothschild Blvd, 66882
BillGuard is a personal-finance security company that uses the power of the crowd to fight fraud and errors on users' debit and credit cards. "We helped Target consumers find over $1 million in fraudulent charges on their cards after its data breach last year," claims CEO Yaron Samid. The BillGuard app, which was ranked the number-one personal finance app by Apple, is currently US only, but plans are afoot to launch it in other markets.
1 Hamenofim St, 46725
Plarium specialises in social games such as Total Domination and Stormfall: Age of War. It has more than 600 employees in Israel and the Ukraine (where R&D is based), and revenues are upwards of $100m. It's tipped by some to be Israel's next billion-dollar company - if it goes public in the next year.
Read about the other startup cities around Europe here:
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
