Israel’s fintech arena is celebrating Payoneer‘s latest funding round — a whopping $180 million investment. The digital payments company, which is transforming the way businesses send and receive cross-border payments, announced it has completed the first closing of a significant growth equity financing led by TCV and existing investor Susquehanna Growth Equity.
Payoneer is one of Israel’s biggest fintech players. President Yuval Tal and former CTO Ben Yaniv Chechik founded the Petah Tikva-based company in 2005. It has raised $235 million to date including the latest financing round.
Payoneer said proceeds from the latest financing will be used to accelerate global growth and to enhance an already strong and debt-free balance sheet.
“Payoneer’s scale and global reach, along with its proprietary compliance infrastructure, allow it to differentiate itself in the field of international payments. We think Payoneer’s superior growth trajectory, increasing profitability and huge addressable market make it an ideal investment,” said Nari Ansari, Principal at TCV.
Meanwhile, Aqua Security, the platform provider for securing virtual container applications, just announced a $9 million in Series A funding, led by Microsoft Ventures.
Cybersecurity luminary and investor Shlomo Kramer was announced to be joining Aqua’s Board of Directors. Aqua’s seed investors TLV Partners and Kramer also participated in this round of funding, bringing Aqua’s total investment to date to $13.5 million.
“We are thrilled to receive such strong endorsement of our technology and customer success,” said Dror Davidoff, CEO and co-founder of Aqua. “Security has become a key enabler in container adoption, and I look forward to working with Microsoft as we expand our footprint, helping our customers to unlock the benefits of this new technology.”
Aqua was founded in late 2015, and launched its platform for general availability in May 2016. Aqua is based in Israel and San Francisco.
And container lifecycle management platform, Codefresh, has announced $7 million in funding. The investment was led by Carmel Ventures and included Hillsven Capital, Streamlined Ventures and UpWest Labs.
Codefresh — at the forefront of bringing Docker and other containers to the enterprise with a CI/CD platform built for Docker from the ground-up– says this new round will allow it to extend its leadership in the container-based development market.
“We founded Codefresh to address a huge pain-point we had seen first-hand: the need for a development, testing and deployment platform that was built from the ground up with microservices in mind, and treats containers as first-class citizens,” said Raziel Tabib, CEO and co-founder of Codefresh. “This new capital will help us take microservices architectures mainstream.”
Meanwhile, Reporty Homeland Security has announced a $5.15 million Series A funding round. Led by former Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Barak, who gave the Tel Aviv-based startup over $1 million in seed money, the latest funding comes investors from the US, Asia, Europe, and Israel.
Reporty is an app that enhances first response to emergency events through real time video and audio. Users can transmit critical information to dispatchers in real time from the scene of a medical emergency, crime incident, fire or natural disaster.
Reporty says it will use the funds to continue to develop the solution and bring it to market in 160 countries.
Another security firm to pull in a multi-million dollar investment recently is SecBI, a developer of advanced cybersecurity threat detection solutions. SecBI, which was founded in 2014 in JVP Cyber Labs in Beersheva, closed a $5 million Series A funding round by Orange Digital Ventures, Connecticut Innovations, Amichai Shulman and existing investor JVP.
Proceeds of the round will be used to launch SecBI’s advanced software solution product and increase its marketing and sales footprint in North America and Europe.
“SecBI identifies all the stages of the cyber kill chain, including malware infection in the network, command and control communication, and exfiltration. It also leverages unique big-data and machine learning technology, ingesting raw event data rather than relying on SIEM systems,” said Yoav Tzruya, partner, JVP. “SecBI offers earlier detection, comprehensive automated incident discovery and superior investigation and forensics.”
And Folloze, an Account Based Marketing (ABM) Sales Platform, announced $7.3 million in funding co-led by Canvas Ventures and NEA.
Folloze – a Palo Alto/Tel Aviv outfit –enables B2B sales teams to use marketing techniques to engage, develop and win their top target accounts.
“The rate at which Folloze is being adopted by the largest and most sophisticated global enterprise sales organizations is truly impressive,” said Gary Little, Partner at Canvas Ventures. “Sales organizations typically don’t trust the value of marketing generated leads. In contrast, companies adopting Account Based Marketing are using Folloze to create highly personalized sales campaigns for Account Executives tasked with penetrating named major accounts.”