US venture capital and private equity fund Insight Partners has bought a stake in Israeli mobile games company Moonactive for $125 million, at a company valuation of $1.25 billion. The stake has been acquired from existing shareholders and no new money has been invested in the company.
Moonactive was founded in 2012 by Samuel Albin, the son of prominent Israeli businesspeople Galia and Mickey Albin. Other well-known shareholders in the company include David Alliance, Gigi Levy-Weiss, Or Ofer, Guy Gimzo, Singulariteam Fund, Jonathan Kolber, and Roy Oron. The company has 280 employees, most of them at Moonactive's Tel Aviv development center. The company also has a development center in Kiev, Ukraine. The company has hired 200 employees over the past year, half of them in product development.
Moonactive is best known for the Coin Master smartphone social game. The game can be downloaded for free and the company's business model is based on purchases to upgrade the game and the capabilities of its players. Moonactive says 2019 revenue was $500 million and the company is profitable.
New York-based Insight Partners was founded in the 1990s and opened an office in Israel last year - its first overseas office. In recent weeks, major investments in Israel include the acquisition of a controlling stake in cybersecurity company Armis as a company valuation of $1.1 billion and participation in the $100 million financing round of business analytics company Sisense, at a company valuation of $1 billion.
Insight cofounder and managing director Jeff Horing has been responsible for several of the most outstanding and intriguing deals in Israeli tech in recent years. Last year Insight bought the investment portfolio of Genesis Partners for hundreds of millions of dollars and Insight also has holdings in four other Israeli unicorns - JFrog, Lightricks, Monday and Walkme.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on January 26, 2020
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