February 10, 2016

Seven of the 13 newest graduates of the Microsoft Ventures Israel Accelerator, which operates as part of Microsoft’s R&D center, raised nearly $9 million in funds or investment offers during the mentoring program.

The hot startups are developing solutions in various fields such as the Internet of things (IoT), e-commerce, UAVs, tourism, media, advertising and marketing, medicine, agritech and IT.

OwnBackup, a leading cloud-to-cloud backup and recovery vendor, announced the close of a $3.5 million Series A financing round led by Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors with participation from Oryzn Capital, at the February 4 graduation from Microsoft.

The Accelerator program is designed to take startups to the next stage in their development and prepare them for the global market.

“We were excited to work with the OwnBackup team over the past four months to help them achieve their vision and connect them with enterprises around the globe,” said Navot Volk, managing director, Microsoft Ventures Israel.

The ratios of capital raised by Microsoft Ventures Israel’s Accelerator are among the highest in the world, according to a press statement.

The previous six batches consisted of a total of 70 companies, 83 percent of which raised a total of $136 million (an average of $2.1 million per company).

In addition, three companies that graduated from the program have already made exits: Kitlocate, which was sold to Yandex; Appixia, which was sold to Wix; and Conferplace, which was sold to Meda Group.

Some 350 companies from Israel and 27 other countries applied for the seventh batch of the Microsoft Ventures Israel Accelerator, including companies from the US, the UK, Singapore, Spain, India, Pakistan, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Mexico, France, Turkey and China.

Keep these companies on your radar.

DiACardio (a software company revolutionizing the practice of “Ultrasound of the heart” evaluation); Securithings (IoT Security Platform, which easily integrates with IoT manufacturers and platforms to protect against illegal access to devices); Axonize (a complete backend solution for IoT businesses); Servicefriend (hybrid Interactive Text Response (ITR) supported by AI); and Pixoneye (predictive personalization of mobile users through Image understanding technologies).

FarmDog (precision agriculture solutions for small and medium-sized farms through an IoT-driven insights platform); Missbeez (an on demand platform and a marketplace for beauty services); and ClusterTV (online platform for linear TV media buying and the first to offer behavioral targeting on TV) are also good names to remember.

And, don’t overlook Ownbackup (the only cloud to cloud backup & restore solution built for the enterprise); Arbitrip (algo-trading concepts for the hotel rooms market to help enterprises save money); Precepto (autonomous flight solutions for drones based on computer vision technology); Deepsense (cognitive software that provides operational intelligence and deep semantic insights); Testim.io (reinvents web testing by providing a SaaS designed for modern apps).

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