Multinational investment corporation Prytek is investing $12 million in Israeli startup TipRanks in a secondary deal in which it has acquired the shares of existing investors and entrepreneurs, thus completing an equity investment of $15 million, after investing $3 million in 2018.
TipRanks, founded in 2012 by CTO Gilad Gat and CEO Uri Gruenbaum, has developed an analytics platform based on natural language processing (NLP), which provides analyses and ratings based on textual information published on news websites, analysts surveys, corporate reports, and more. The company's service, which has become one of the world's leading research resource, has been integrated into a range of financial institutions, which include Nasdaq, Etrade, TD Ameritrade, Santander, and practically every bank and investment house in Israel. TipRanks covers the stock exchanges in the US, Canada and is planning to launch UK coverage in August.
TipRanks has 1.5 million monthly users who consume the service directly from the company's website and more than 20 million monthly users who utilize the platform via banks around the world. TipRanks has 50 employees in its Tel Aviv office.
TipRanks CEO Uri Gruenbaum said, "I am confident that the involvement of Prytek will accelerate our growth in markets which are not our core markets. In the two years we have worked together, TipRanks has leveraged Prytek's distribution channels, which has led to long term agreements with leading financial institutions in Eastern Europe."
Gruenbaum recounts how he became acquainted with the Prytek chairman Yair Seroussi when he was Bank Hapoalim (TASE: POLI) chairman. "Yair Seroussi was in fact the first person that opened the door for us to the world of banking and the world of B2B in general, before we met our focus was only the end customers. In 2013 Seroussi and the innovation team of Bank Hapoalim invited us to present them the service and after a while of studying our product and performing a due diligence they decided to integrate us into the bank's trading platform and later on they also decided to invest in us through Poalim Capital Markets. The integration into Bank Hapoalim led to most of the banks in Israel beginning to work with us as well as more than 50 financial institutions overseas."
Prytek, which was founded by Andrey Yashunsky, a Ministry of Defense veteran, focuses on fintech, edutech, cyber security, and human resources. Prytek has more than 300 employees, and nine offices with its main operations in Europe and East Asia. So far Prytek has invested in over 30 companies in Israel and around the world. Prytek's investments in Israel include HackerU, Ezbob, Hopon, Payme, Scanovate, OpenLegacy and more.
Prytek is distinct from other investment groups (the company is incorporated in Singapore and is not a fund) in that it invests for terms that are longer than venture capital funds, with the aim of building strong and stable companies with a more distant horizon, and does not focus on short term investments, which target a profitable exit. Prytek assists companies in growing rapidly and reaching their target markets, among other things by creating and ecosystem and collaborations between the companies themselves and by setting up regional networks of local offices for the benefit of its companies. Prytek's operational model is a technological conglomerate that allows the speeded up development and growth of several different technological fields at the same time. This model resembles the model of the tech giants such as Alphabet Inc., Amazon, and Salesforce, which divide up into - the alpha - which is the core business, and to investments in a number of fields (others bets) through which it looks to build new businesses.
Prytek operates through three units: the fintech unit which is headed by the UK company Delta Capita, which is a leader in Europe for outsourcing for banks for processes and services in the capital market sector. The beta unit (other bets), which is developing the next alpha sector, and the investments unit of Prytek, which invests in companies, in a similar way to CVC. The aim of the investment, as well as profit, is to receive access to technologies from which it is possible to build profitable business activities for the alpha and beta units.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on August 9, 2020 © Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2020