Successful startups become ‘scaleups’, a state that is generally defined (by the OECD) as when a company achieves an average annualized return of at least 20 percent during a three year period and which has 10 employees or more at the beginning of the period. Most scaleups originate as high-tech start-ups.
One region that is seeing scale-up growth is Israel. This year, five Israeli startups have raised funding rounds of between $10-$20 million, putting them into the scale-up category. A Forbes survey of Israeli technology businesses charts a growing group of “scale-ups” that are remaining independent for longer, and which are raising larger rounds than the types of funding seen before.
As an example, is the industrial cybersecurity firm Radiflow which has raised $18 million in a Series B funding, with the main contributions coming from ST Engineering (based in Singapore) together with Israeli technology entrepreneur Zohar Zisapel. Zisapel founded the RAD Group of companies with his brother, Yehuda. These firms have been described as “the world’s most successful incubator” of telecom-related start-ups by Business 2.0 magazine.
A second example is Viz.ai, which is a healthcare company that uses artificial intelligence focused on time sensitive conditions. The company has moved from a start-up to a scale-up by securing $21 million in Series A funding, with the top contribution coming from Kleiner Perkins, an American venture capital firm headquartered on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park in Silicon Valley.
Viz.ai has designed computer aided triage software designed to detect and triage urgent stroke cases. The software has recently gained approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The software analyzes brain scans for large vessel occlusions. Data is stored on a cloud and analyzed scans cane be sent to a neurovascular specialists around the world.
A third scale-up success case study is AnyVision, which specializes in facial recognition technology. The firm has raised $28 million in a Round A. The company develops computer vision technology intended for facial and body scanning, to assist with homeland security applications.
