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Pitango Closes New $270M Fund Backed By Asian Money To Fuel More Startups Coming Out Of Israel
Another big step forward for Israel’s startup scene today. Pitango Venture Capital, the Israel-based investment company behind like Apple-acquired Anobit, Samsung-acquired Boxee and many others, has closed a $270 million fund, which it will use to back “Israeli companies and companies with an Israeli nexus” that may otherwise be operating in the U.S. and Europe, according to Chemi Peres, co-founder and managing general partner. He says a “meaningful portion” of the investment in the fund came from Asia, specifically investors from China, India, Korea, Taiwan, Japan and Singapore — many investing in Israel for the first time.
Peres believes that this is an indication of how investment strategies are evolving globally.
“We certainly see a growing interest from Asia in Israel that is reflected in more private groups investing in VCs, companies, making acquisitions and building R&D centers,” he tells me. “The collaboration model is becoming more westward than before, and we see less interest in creating joint ventures.” This fund was originally intended to total $250 million (we covered the partial close here) but was oversubscribed and so extended by $20 million.
The VC says it has already started to make investments out of the fund, backing Taboola, Magenta Medical, JethroData, SalesPredict, Ubimo, and Revizer.
The world of startups out of Israel has had a lot of attention of late, with acquisitions reaching into hundreds of high hundreds millions (and even billions) of dollars — IBM’s purchase of cybersecurity specialist Trusteer; Google’s acquisition of mapping startup Waze; and Intel’s acquisition of gesture-interface specialist Omek being some of the most indicative of the trend, and some of the more high-profile. But not every deal starts as a headliner.
Pitango is named after a semi-wild cherry that grows in abundance in Israel. “However, the ripest Pitango fruit are always a challenge to find, hidden way out of general view within dense foliage,” it notes on its site. True to that name, the company has sought out investments that may be otherwise under the radar. That’s been helped along by Pitango’s focus on core rather than consumer technologies (fabless semiconductor company Anobit is one example; Provigent and Dune Networks, acquired by Broadcom, are others); although it also invests in more consumer-facing startups, too, such as media player Boxee and grocery comparison site mySupermarket.
Peres says that Pitango’s key areas of focus in tech at the moment are around big data (business analytics, prediction, infrastructure among them); cloud and IT infrastructure, cyber security, internet infrastructure, applications and content and ad tech, “especially in video.” While Pitango also invests in life sciences, medical devices, biotech and nanotechnology, it says the main focus of Pitango VI will be technology ventures, and investments will run the range from seed to growth stage investments.
Currently, Pitango, which has been around since 1993, has some $1.7 billion under management.
LogEntries Secures $10M Led By Polaris Ventures To Scale Log Management For SMEs
Last year LogEntries secured a $1.1M seed round led by Polaris Venture Partners. Similar to Splunk, which has IPO’d, LogEntries collects and analyzes huge quantities of machine-generated log data, helping companies track their application logs. But unlike Splunk, which works with big enterprise or ‘the Fortune 500′, LogEntries wants to go after SMEs, or ‘the Fortune 5 million’.
To that end it’s now received $10 million in Series A financing, once again led by Polaris Partners, and participated in by Floodgate, RRE Ventures and new local Irish firm Frontline Ventures. It’s also named Andrew Burton as president and CEO. SaaS Veteran Burton previously held executive roles through two startup IPO’s. LogEntries will use the funds to accelerate product development and expand.
LogEntries claims to have no complex query language and can identify and alert on significant events in a company’s data. The real-time search solution works across the entire software stack and was founded by Dr. Trevor Parsons and Dr. Viliam Holub. It also plugs into Heroku.
Log management systems are notorious for requiring complex technical skills, but instead uses a “collective intelligence” model deal with the data and turn it into actionable insights. The real-time search solution works across the entire software stack was founded by Dr. Trevor Parsons and Dr. Viliam Holub.
Founded in 2010, LogEntries emerged from University College Dublin’s Performance Engineering Laboratory after a decade of joint research with IBM. With support from Launchpad, UCD’s Nova Innovation Center and financial support from Enterprise Ireland, LogEntries was incubated in Dogpatch Labs, Dublin. Polaris backs Dogpatch in Dublin and SF.
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