Every day in the Start-Up Nation is frenzied with investment activity.
Israeli companies have already raised more than $11.2 billion in the first six months of the year, surpassing the total raised for all of 2020. Thursday’s activity included two companies signing SPAC mergers for US IPOs, and several significant investment rounds.
Payoneer, which provides online payment solutions, will go public on the Nasdaq market under a special purpose acquisition company merger with FTAC Olympus Acquisition at a $3.3b. company valuation. The Petah Tikva-based company, which has operated since 2005, will begin trading under the ticker symbol PAYO once the transaction closes, the company said. The company’s payment platform is used by millions of small businesses, marketplaces, and enterprises in 200 countries to streamline global commerce.
An SPAC, or special purpose acquisition company, is a shell company with no assets that can be created and floated on the market, and later get filled in by merging with an existing corporation. This method allows a company to go public relatively quickly while skipping a lot of the heavy bureaucracy that goes into filing for an IPO.
Separately, Innovid, a Ramat Gan-based ad delivery and measurement platform for connected TV, also said it had entered into a SPAC merger agreement with ION Acquisition Corp to go public at a $1.3b. valuation. The combined company will operate under the Innovid name and will trade on a US national exchange starting in the fourth quarter of the year, it said.
Innovid has spent the past decade focused on developing the technology infrastructure for the creation, delivery and measurement of TV ads across multiple TV platforms, and currently serves more than 40% of the top 200 US TV advertisers, it said.
Innovid employs 370 people, 85 in Israel and the rest in the United States, Argentina, Europe, Australia, Singapore and Japan, the company said.
Meanwhile, Firebolt, which says it provides the world’s fastest cloud data warehouse, said it completed a $127 million Series B funding round, bringing its total funding to $164m. The funds will enable the company to capitalize on high demand from tech companies building data applications and interactive analytics over big data, and will be used to further expand its product, engineering and go-to-market teams.