The Birth of Israel's 'ScaleUp Nation' Era

June 2021 will go down in history as a landmark in the evolution of the Israeli tech ecosystem.

In 2009 my friends Dan Senor and Saul Singer famously coined the term “Startup Nation” in their NYT bestselling book by the same name, to highlight Israel’s prolific innovation economy. A nation the size of New Jersey producing more startups, more NASDAQ listed companies, and attracting more VC dollars, per capita, than any other country in the world, by a lot. The term stuck and perfectly captured Israel’s uniquely entrepreneurial culture and economy.?

That year Israeli startups raised a bit over $1B and enjoyed $2.6B in exits, mostly via M&A.

Fast forward to June 2021. I’ll avoid any emotion-driven tendency to embellish and just let the numbers speak for themselves.

Israeli tech startups in the month of June:

• 6 IPOs at $38.5B combined value. (12 IPOs counting the Tel Aviv Stock Echange)
• 9 New unicorns at $13B combined value.
• $2.4B raised from VCs in 66 deals ($36m avg)

To be clear, this was the last 30 days. ??

In the first half of 2021, 30 Israeli tech companies went public and 26 new Israeli-founded unicorns were born. H2 shows no signs of slowing down. Historically, large multinationals, 370 of which opened offices in Israel, gobbled up Israeli tech as soon as a startup showed signs of potential. We are now building our own multinationals and acquiring other companies. We’re in a new era of Israeli innovation and massive company scale-up across all sectors, from biotech and genomics to AI, quantum computing, and spacetech.?

For the past few years those of us deep in the Israeli tech ecosystem have been using the term “ScaleUp Nation” to describe the trending phenomena occurring around us; seasoned and even first-time Israeli founders are increasingly turning down life-changing exits popularized by ICQ in the late ’90s and setting their sights on a far more meaningful goal - enduring, massive impact. They’re going for legacy and they’re bringing an entire country with them. While we've known this for years, a month like June 2021 pushes global awareness far beyond our tech echo chamber. There's no turning back. We are the ScaleUp Nation. Hey Dan and Saul, time for a new book?

A huge congrats and big hugs to our new public company and unicorn founders, who also happen to all be TechAviv founders club members.

June 2021 IPOs:

1. SentinelOne ($10B) - Tomer Weingarten, CEO (Largest Cyber Security IPO in history)
2. Taboola ($2.5B) - Adam Singolda, CEO
3. ironSource ($11.1B) - Tomer Bar Zeev, CEO (Biggest IPO in Israeli history)
4. Payoneer ($3.3B) - Yuval Tal, Pres
5. WalkMe ($2.4B) - Dan Adika, CEO
6. Monday.com ($7.6B) - Roy Mann and Eran Zinman, CEOs
7. SimilarWeb ($1.6B) - Or Offer, CEO (ok so this was end of May but Or is just a gem so had to include)

June 2021 New Unicorns:

1. Innovid ($1.3B) - Zvika Netter, CEO
2. Transmit Security ($2.7B) - Mickey Boodaei, CEO (Largest Series A in cybersecurity history; $543M)
3. Hailo ($1B) - Orr Danon, CEO
4. JoyTunes ($1B) - Yuval Kamika, CEO
5. Claroty ($1B) - Amir Zilberstein, Chairman
6. Bringg ($1B) - Guy Bloch, CEO
7. NextSilicon ($1.5B) - Elad Raz, CEO
8. Verbit ($1B) - Tom Livne, CEO
9. Exabeam ($2.4B) - Nir Polak, Chairman

Full unicorn list: www.techaviv.com/unicorns

#ScaleUpNation Strong ????