Tech Buzz: Kaltura rises 20% after Nasdaq IPO, Tailor Brands raises $50m.

The stock will trade under the symbol KLTR.

Founders of Bookaway (photo credit: Courtesy)
Founders of Bookaway
(photo credit: Courtesy)
After raising a record $11.9 billion in the first half of 2021, Start-Up Nation continues its red-hot streak.
On Wall Street, cloud video platform maker Kaltura is set to begin trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market Wednesday afternoon, raising an estimated $150 million at a $1.3b. market cap in one of the largest IPOs in the video-tech sector this year.
The stock was priced at $10 per share for the offering, less than originally expected. The Ramat Gan-based company has more than 1,000 customers, including Fortune 100 companies, universities and leading media and tech companies, and had 2020 revenues of some $120m. The stock trades under the symbol KLTR, and rose 20% on its first day of trading to $12.
On the investment scene, Tailor Brands, which has a one-stop-shop platform to help launch and brand small businesses, said Thursday it raised $50m. in a Series C funding round led by domain name giant GoDaddy, its first investment in Israel. The company said its business grew 27% during the pandemic, and that it will use the funds to provide a broader set of capabilities on its platform by increasing investment in R&D and expanding marketing efforts. The Tel Aviv-based company has raised a total of $70m. since its founding in 2015, it said.
Yoobic, which offers a digital workplace for frontline teams, closed a $50m. Series C funding round led by Highland Europe. The Herzliya-based company’s app gives retail associates, restaurant staff, fieldworkers and all types of frontline employees a single centralized mobile hub to support their daily task management, deliver digital training, and enable seamless communication with peers, supervisors and HQ. The company has raised $80m. since its founding in 2014.
Oktopost, which makes a fully integrated platform for B2B social-media marketing, employee advocacy and revenue attribution, secured a $20m. investment from London-based firm Expedition Growth Capital. Prior to this round, the Tel Aviv-based business had raised less than a million dollars and grown profitably since its inception in 2013.
Bookaway said Wednesday it secured $35m. in Series B funding, backed by global investors Aleph, Corner Ventures, Entrée Capital and a group of angels led by Elad Kushnir. In less than four years, Bookaway has grown from a small Tel Aviv travel start-up to a leading portal for ground transportation operating in Asia, Latin and Central America and Eastern Europe including the Balkans.
They have plans to expand further into the Latin American market while also entering the American and Chinese markets. The company said it will look to use the investment to acquire other brands and expand its global coverage.
Lightico, whose next-generation digital completion platform is used by major companies in the insurance, automotive, telecom and financial industries to help millions of their customers eliminate roadblocks to deal completion, said it added $15m. to its Series B funding round led by Capital One Ventures, bringing the total round to $27m. Lightico’s Digital Completion Cloud allows companies to gather eSignatures, collect documents, perform ID&V, accept payments and more in an app-free, secure manner, the Tel Aviv-based company said.
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Sweetch, which offers a hyper-personalized engagement platform for chronic conditions, raised $20m. in Series A round of funding led by Entrée Capital. The funds will be directed toward developing its artificial intelligence and emotional intelligence behavioral science technology that engages individuals to achieve their health goals with the right message in the right tone, time and real-world context, the company said.

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NoTraffic, which makes an autonomous traffic management platform that uses AI to help cities run their transport networks, raised $17.5m. in a Series A round led by Nielsen Ventures and VEKTOR Partners, a venture capital firm focused on mobility disruption. The Tel Aviv-based company was founded in 2017 to give city planners more insight and control over their traffic infrastructure and future-proof this infrastructure to support the rise of autonomous vehicles and other shifts in digital mobility.
Jones, a commercial real estate start-up whose trusted vendor network makes work easier for tenants and property managers using software and artificial intelligence, said it raised a $12.5m. in a Series A round led by JLL Spark and Khosla Ventures. Founded in 2017 by Israelis, Jones is based in New York with its R&D team in Tel Aviv. The company’s clients include some of the largest real estate firms in the US, it said.
This week also saw several acquisitions. Cybereason, which said last week it raised $275m. at an estimated valuation above $3b., announced the acquisition of empow, a security analytics company based in Tel Aviv. The acquisition adds a number of innovative cybersecurity technologies to Cybereason’s cyber defense platform, the company said. Industry sources believe the deal was worth tens of millions of dollars.
Two-year-old DevOps company Apolicy was acquired by Sysdig to provide a Kubernetes automation solution for orchestrating policies and risk management. The Apolicy team, which is based in a moshav near Netanya, will join the Sysdig team, and its product offering will be incorporated as part of the Sysdig Secure DevOps Platform. The value of the deal was not disclosed.