September 22, 2016, Updated September 23, 2016

As the week wraps up in Israel, the startup community is raising toasts to big funding rounds and a buyout of groundbreaking technology solutions.

CA Technologies has announced its signing of a definitive agreement to acquire BlazeMeter, a leader in open source-based continuous application performance testing. While terms of the agreement were not disclosed, reports say the deal is worth $100 million.

“BlazeMeter has redefined performance testing with its simplicity, fast-deployment SaaS model, and rapid time-to-value,” said Ayman Sayed, president and chief product officer, CA Technologies. “The acquisition will reinforce our leadership position in agile testing, and our efforts to democratize performance testing as organizations accelerate their DevOps journey to drive speed and quality in the delivery of new software updates and innovations.”

BlazeMeter’s solution allows developers and performance engineers to test earlier and more often in the application lifecycle.

“Developers and performance engineers want to consume software that is easy to try, easy to buy and easy to maintain,” said Alon Girmonsky, Founder & CEO, BlazeMeter. “The combination of CA Technologies and BlazeMeter will provide organizations with a cost-effective, modern load testing solution that keeps up with the pace of enterprise change for the new testing community of agile developers.”

Yaron Saban, CEO CreditPlace. Photo by Osnat Krasnansky
Yaron Saban, CEO CreditPlace. Photo by Osnat Krasnansky

BlazeMeter was founded in 2011 and has offices in Tel Aviv and Palo Alto.

Meanwhile, OurCrowd raised a l’chaim yesterday for its Series C funding round of $72 million.

“It’s a real achievement for a crowdfunding company that was just founded a little over three years ago. It’s the largest round we are aware of for crowd funding platforms worldwide,” Jonathan Medved, CEO of OurCrowd, told ISRAEL21c.

The week also saw big investments into Zeekit, a B2C platform and mobile app that reinvents the way consumers browse, share and shop from their mobile devices. Zeekit raised $9 million in a Series A round.

“We’re creating a new shopping experience by making both online and in-store shopping fun, social, simple and risk-free,” said Yael Vizel, Zeekit chief executive officer and cofounder, who was inspired to create Zeekit by mapping technologies used for intelligence missions as a Captain in the Israeli Air Force. “Our first-to-market technology is unlike any other visualization technology that exists in the market.”

Zeekit recently partnered with Rebecca Minkoff during New York Fashion Week to make it easy for those viewing runway styles either on-site at the Rebecca Minkoff show, online at the Rebecca Minkoff website, or through   the Zeekit app to be able to tap the product, virtually try it on, share it with friends and purchase it.

Also this week, Datorama, a global marketing analytics innovator, announced a $32 million in Series C funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. In addition, Marker LLC and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors also participated in the round.

Datorama said it use the new funding to accelerate the company’s research and development in the artificial intelligence field, which will further elevate its machine learning capabilities.

“This is a very pivotal moment for Datorama,” said Ran Sarig, co-founder and CEO, Datorama. “Although we’re extremely proud of our achievements and monumental growth in the exceedingly complex MarTech market, we’re not going to rest on our laurels. In this next stage we’re going to focus on the further development of our best-in-breed solution, and we’re going to continue to push the boundaries of machine learning and how it’s applied in the marketing analytics capacity. We can’t wait to show you what’s next.”

Mobilize network relationship management platform announced yesterday that it closed a $6.5 million Series A funding round.

In the past year while still in stealth mode, Mobilize worked with leading brands such as Microsoft, Docker, Etsy, MakerFaire, The United Nations, MasterCard, Salesforce, and Prezi as design partners. These companies as well as just over 100 others have adopted Mobilize to allow over 5,000 network managers to manage over a quarter of a million global partners.

Mobilize recently launched a self-service version of the platform to enable all organizations to benefit from the power of an optimized group management platform.

“There are over a billion groups active today. Group communications solutions such as Google, Yahoo and Facebook have not evolved to meet their needs for situations where the communications are mission critical and not just casual chatter,” said Ajay Chopra, general partner at Trinity Ventures. “The Mobilize team has seized on this business opportunity and taken group communications to the next level with a well-thought out platform optimized for effective group communication. Think of this as ‘Slack for external communications’ to actually get stuff done! The company’s rapid adoption by leading brands was proof to us of this unmet need.”

Tipalti, provider of leading supplier payments automation platform, announced a $14 million funding round led by SGVC.

Tipalti – the supplier payments automation solution that streamlines all phases of the payment workflow in one holistic cloud platform — said it plans to use the new round of funding to aggressively accelerate the company’s growth.

“We are truly ecstatic to invest in Tipalti and add them to our growing portfolio of marquee Fintech companies who are changing the B2B payments and business finance landscape,” said Dovi Frances, Managing Partner SGVC. “I am looking forward to helping the company accelerate their already significant growth trajectory and to watching them completely transform the way finance departments run their supplier payment operations.”

“Thanks to this new funding round, we will expand our product, team and business to increase our market leadership position as the supplier payments automation solution of choice for finance organizations at global enterprises,” said Chen Amit, CEO and co-founder of Tipalti. “We look forward to Dovi Frances joining our board of directors and contributing with his extensive experience in the Fintech world.”

And CreditPlace announced a $1.6 million for its Peer-to-Peer (P2P) investment platform that enables investors to buy outstanding receivables owed by large and stable companies, SOEs and government ministries.

“The company plans to use the capital raised to expand its foothold in the Israeli economy by making the immediate payment revolution accessible to new clienteles,” said Yaron Saban, CEO CreditPlace.

“CreditPlace is reducing credit time in the Israeli economy, helping companies and businesses improve their cash flow and creating an alternative low-risk high-yield short-term liquid investment for private investors.”

More on News