In 2015, the Israeli tech ecosystem was rocked by a reprt on the high failure rate among Israeli startups. The study by IVC claimed that only 4% of startups have succeeded overall and that of the current crop of active companies, only 2.5% could be considered successful based on revenues of $100 million or 100-plus employees. This rose to 6% if the criteria included a valuation of $50 million or more or companies that were sustained by sales and did not need to raise capital anymore.Even with the birth of so many unicorns in the last two years, critics have pointed out that these only represent around 1% of the total number of startups while most companies have made little or no contribution to investors' returns.

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Israeli startup Varada, which develops data lake analytics solutions, is being acquired by U.S. company Varada. The companies did not reveal the size of the deal, but Calcalist has learned that it is estimated to be in the region of $60 million and includes both stock and cash. Starburst, which develops an analytics engine for data, raised a $250 million Series D funding round at a $3.35 billion valuation in February of this year. The two companies announced a partnership in March 2021, which ultimately led to the acquisition.

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Israeli venture capital firm Team8 officially opened this year's Cyber Week with an event that took place in Tel Aviv on Sunday. The event, which included international guests and cybersecurity professionals, showcased the country and the industry as a powerhouse in relation to Startup Nation. Opening remarks were made by Niv Sultan, star of Apple TV's ‘Tehran', who also moderated the event. She then welcomed Gili Drob-Heinstein, Executive Director at the Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center (ICRC) at Tel Aviv University, and Nadav Zafrir, Co-founder of Team8 and Managing Partner of Team8 Platform to the stage.

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The BARD (U.S.-Israel Binational Agricultural Research and Development Fund) approved $6.5 million of funding for grants and fellowships for joint Israel-U.S agriculture research and development earlier this week. In total, 21 research projects will receive financing as BARD will also grant six postdoctoral fellowships through the Va'adia-BARD fellowship program, two graduate student fellowships, and a BARD senior research fellowship that supports an American scientist conducting research in Israel.

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"Even before Covid, we made sure that our employees are being taken care of and we put their well-being at the top of our priorities,' explained May Binstock Oron, Head of Employer Branding at WalkMe. 'All employees, and we have over 1,200 employees worldwide at 10 different sites. All of them, no matter their position, get five days off in addition to the mandatory days according to the law.'According to Binstock Oron, employees who take advantage of the RefreshMe program tag WalkMe on Instagram - an account that she herself manages - highlighting all the ways that they rest when they have time for themselves.

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"We have to educate people for jobs that have not yet been created, to use technologies that have not been invented yet, to solve social problems we can not yet imagine. Simple training for a job is no longer enough.' Prof. Andreas Schleicher, Director of Education and Skills at the OECD and one of the organization's senior executives, explains in a special interview ahead of the Calcalist "Academia that Works" conference in collaboration with the Edmond de Rothschild Foundation on May 24 at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv.

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The risks in using NFTs and the ways in which to make them a legitimate part of the economy were at the center of a recent conference co-organized by Reichman University and M. Firon law firm. Some of the questions the conference attempted to answer included whether NFTs will remain a digital bubble used exclusively for trading in artworks, Twitter tweets, and famous film scenes. Alternatively, will it become an integral part of the economy? Regardless of the outcome, the participants discussed ways to regulate NFTs so traders and collectors do not remain in the dark and the need for new paradigms with regulation that can help develop the Israeli industry.

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'Being an entrepreneur, on one hand, I see everything with very optimistic eyes,' explained Liad Agmon, Managing Director at Insight Partners. 'You come to me with a pitch for an idea and I can immediately imagine how it can become a world-changing company. On the other hand, I also recognize how difficult it is to go from an idea or an early-stage company to a growth-stage company. So it comes with both sides of the brain, the part that gets super excited but also the part that recognizes the years of challenges and hard work.

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The Israeli innovation sector is extremely crowded, often resulting in several startups targeting the same solutions. This is most evident in cybersecurity, but another such sector is demo experience platforms built to help SaaS sales teams, with startup Demostack announcing on Tuesday that it has raised $34 million in its Series B financing round. The round was led by Tiger Global Management with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Amiti Ventures, GTMfund, Operator Collective, and StepStone.

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Team8 announced on Sunday the appointment of Hadar Siterman Norris as a new Partner at Team8 Capital, the group's venture capital fund. Siterman Norris will join Managing Partners, Sarit Firon and Liran Grinberg, with the aim of expanding the group's fintech investments. Team8 Capital revealed that it has raised $160 million to date and invested in 12 companies. The fund's portfolio companies have raised a total of $500 million, and according to Team8 they are aggregately valued at approximately $3 billion.

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Product: AI language proficiency assessmentsFounders: Eitan Noiman, Chanan Kupietzky Before we even begin our interview, the first thing Eitan Noiman, co-founder and CEO of Speak, an Israeli startup developing an AI-based online test of English proficiency, does is apologize for his accented English.Noiman's story, and that of his co-founder Chanan Kupietzky, begins in the IDF's elite Duvdevan unit, where the pair served together for five years and became close friends. While Kupietzky comes from an American family and speaks English like a native, Noiman doesn't.

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Company name: Pick a PierField of business: FintechCompany description: Pick a Pier is a digital infrastructure for the recreational boating industry.Founders: Asaf Cohen, Idan Cohen.Amount raised: $4 millionInvestors: Sarit Firon, Eyal Waldman, Micha Kaufman and more Pick a Pier was part of the Israeli startup squad that participated in Calcalist's Mind the Tech London 2022 conference. Calcalist's "Dream Team" to London included early-stage startup companies in the fields of Fintech, Cyber, E-Sport & Gaming, Data & AI, and Retail & E-Commerce.

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Lightricks, which develops a platform for content creators and developers of leading photo and video editing tools, announced the acquisition of Popular Pays, a Chicago-based software company that connects brands with creators. The sum paid by Lightricks was not revealed but is estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars.'This announcement is a first step in Lightricks' strategy to become a single resource for creators and brands alike, bringing together advanced tools and monetization opportunities for creators and providing brands access to the largest community of content creators across the globe, large and small,' Lightricks said in a statement.

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'The sophistication of cyberattacks has grown rapidly, and with it the risk to users, companies and countries,' said Guy Caspi, founder and CEO of Deep Instinct, speaking at Calcalist's Mind The Tech London conference, of which his company is one of the sponsors."Each of you has probably been hacked, whether directly or through your employer or the service you use," Caspi warned. "The known threats are easy to stop, but their mutations create a huge challenge to the ability to respond in time, and produce more complex and dangerous attacks.

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Over the last month or so, many of our conversations, be it with other funds, startups or other collaborators, have begun with a discussion on what the Venture Landscape will look like in 2022. The main impetus for these discussions has been, as you would expect, the sharp declines in valuations of publicly traded SaaS companies of late: The Nasdaq Emerging Cloud index has lost over 25% of its value in the last 6 months, with many significant names down by 50% or more. Multiples have reverted from record-highs back to their long-term trend: in fact, forward revenue multiples in high-growth cloud companies are now essentially back to where they were in mid-2019 or the first couple months of 2020.

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