20 Months of Startups

Preface – Assumptions and Data   

2020 has been an incredibly eventful year, to put it bluntly, and surprisingly busy. Across our “portfolio” we have had 3 exits, and 2 failures across the past 20months: incredibly good! This is thanks to our flexible interview process, alongside our continuous deal flow.

The startup ecosystem has kept growing in Israel, and we would love to highlight the quality of the companies we have been sourcing for our oversea customers. For that purpose, we will investigate all the funding rounds that our companies have undergone through across the past 20 months.

For the analysis below, we will be following these assumptions:

• The companies that will be included in our data, are all the data points available from the 143 companies from which we have a certain, trackable data for closing the round.
• For all the companies, we will be evaluating the following criteria and their trends across the past 20 months: number of rounds, Sizes of the rounds across the 59 companies, the average round sizes, and the average amount investment.
• All the monetary values are presented in USD.
• All the fund data is what is publicly available, hence a shortage in some of the numbers. They also represent ther latest available fund.

Overview – Across three years

 Since inception, our numbers show above-average standards for our startup’s selection.

In every category, except than the average round size, have increased across every year of operation.

This coincides with an increase in the deal flow channel quality and an ever-increasing expertise of the Israeli ecosystem.

The avg round size decreased by $0.5m between 2019 and 2020, which is expected given the increase of bridge rounds due to COVID-19. Despite that, the month-by-month changes tell a more granular view.

Total rounds – The Activity

The historical data starts in July 2019; and shows growth until February 2020 at the advent of COVID. Nonetheless, after the initial hit, there are fluctuations until January – which coincides with the Vaccination program and the easing of the lockdowns.

As shown in the next tables, it is not just the number of deals increasing, the quality is also climbing.

Average Raise – The Success Stories

Our portfolio shows great performance in these difficult times and shows great recovery speed. The trend, unsurprisingly, mimics the total round size above. Nonetheless, the trends show strong recovery; with rounds started during the late 2020 leading to high rounds in early 2021. This is just the first 2 months of 2021 – we predicted a strong year ahead, as the ecosystem speeds up.

Conclusions

We have grown a large and varied cast of startups, in a large deal flow portfolio. We have a proven track record in identifying strong ventures, strong CEOs and, above all, companies that despite the difficulties in the past months, have recovered excellently, with only 2 closures – but most importantly, 3 exits!