2019 was without doubt a year in which Israel's tech sector came of age. The best evidence of this is that nine new unicorns were created during the year bringing the total number of unicorns in the country to 20.
A unicorn is a privately held company with a valuation of at least $1 billion. A unicorn is a sign of a tech eco-system's maturity because a decade ago every Israeli startup dreamed of an exit - being acquired by a tech giant or a Wall Street IPO. But now the dream has changed into scaling-up to a growth company worth $1 billion.
Impressively Israel's 20 unicorns are more unicorns than France, Germany and Australia have together. Only the US, China and UK have more unicorns than Israel.
Among Israel's unicorns are taxi hailing company Gett, cybersecurity company Cybereason and team management systems developer Monday.
The pace of startups growing into unicorns is only heating up. In 2018, five Israeli startups completed financing rounds of $100 million or more including DevOps platform developer JFrog. In 2019,16 more startups have joined that club including fraud protection company Riskified, 3D imaging sensor company Vayyar Imaging, retail imaging company Fabric and insurtech company Lemonade. Even those who raised the money at a valuation of less than $1 billion are well on the way there.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on December 25, 2019
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