Israel Startup News

Microvascular Eye Technology, a 2004-formed subsidiary of Micromedic Technologies, has received EU CE Mark certification for its treatment for varicose veins. The new tool, originally developed for eye application, is “SpiderCan”, a miniature syringe that can be used on small blood vessels.

Another Micromedic unit, Bio Med Technologies, also has good news: it’s marker for diagnosis of cancer of the head and neck have successfully completed preliminary trials.

Maayan Venture’s portfolio company TGE Tech has “developed and patented a system whereby unrecycled refuse can be converted into fuel with a special patented device that turns garbage into gas - syngas, a well-known element that has some of the properties of gas, oil and coal,” according to Israel21c. The technology addresses a huge environmental problem — trash — whlie at the same time supplying “green energy”. While not as efficient as oil or coal, the electricity provided by TGE can be sold at a premium as part of government incentive programs.

A pilot program near Tel Aviv has been setup and a much larger program in Israel is being planned that will convert up to 200 tons of garbage per day into electricity. More systems are being planned for some South American and European countries.

Check out the full article here.

WorkLight Inc., a startup that provides web 2.0-style access to a wide variety of enterprise applications and databases, today announced that it has closed a series B round of funding totaling $12 million led by Pitango Venture Capital, Israel’s largest VC. Founded in 2006 by CEO Shahar Kaminitz and CTO Yuval Tarsi, the company was initially backed with $5.1 million from Genesis Partners, Index Ventures and Shlomo Kramer.

Worklight’s flagship solution is a server-based software product that allows companies to leverage consumer tools such as RSS, iGoogle and. Facebook behind the corporate firewall, working with internal IT controls for completely secure use by enterprise employees. Most recently the company announced Workbook, a secure Facebook overlay that enables collaboration, access to enterprise applications and knowledge sharing using the popular social networking application.

The round triggers renewed commitment from Genesis Partners, Index Ventures and Shlomo Kramer, a world renowned security expert and Imperva CEO.

Check out the press release.

Foamix Ltd., a 2003-founded Israeli developer of dermatological foam medications has signed a deal with dermatology specialist Galderma to develop an innovative dermatological  foam jointly.  The foam will be used to treat atopic dermatitis, a disease which affects about 10% of infants and 3% of the total population in the United States. It’s main symptom is itchy and rashy skin that can spread from area to area.

The development of the foam product will be directed to fortify the skin barrier by delivering a very high concentration of barrier-enhancing oils in an easy-to-apply formulation. Poor adherence to maintenance treatment for atopic dermatitis and parental anxiety about using topical steroids are common features seen among children with atopic dermatitis, and therefore, foams, which do not need extensive rubbing for spreading and absorption, offer an improved treatment modality for this disease.

Foamix CEO Dr. Dov Tamarkin said his company is “very proud to partner with an industry leader such as Ferndale.”  “Foam offers properties that increase usability, encourage compliance and boost user satisfaction. Foamix foams are alcohol-free and they can be designed to provide skin barrier properties, which are crucial for effective atopic dermatitis treatment, while using delicate, FDA approved ingredients, to ensure the safety of the patients.”

Foamix is not backed by venture capital. It was founded with a $5 million from its founders and private investors. The company already has several million dollars revenue from cooperation agreements.

For more see the press release.

Webware reports on Sightix, an Israeli startup developing a social network search engine now in beta that takes the identity of the searcher and their preferences into account when performing the search. According to the sight, “Sightix is providing a unique search service specifically to Social Networking Sites (SNS) which filter search results through the user’s social graph. As such, each user’s who search will receive different, individually personalized and relevant results relating to the social entity that they are looking for.”

CEO Ari Gottesmann gives Webware this example: “Say you’re searching for a nightclub. The clubs your friends talk about will get a higher relevance than your friends of friends. It’s much more likely that this ranking will yield results that work for you than searching a general engine that doesn’t give extra weight to your friends’ recommendations.”

The tool is not intended to be used as a destination search page itself, but rather be embedded as a search engine in other social networking sites. The site will be launched May 1 on Israel’s social networking Shin 1.

Evogene and Compugen have both made headlines today. The two companies are related - Evogen was spun off of Compugen six years ago as an independent startup. Evogen will receive NIS 7.2 million from venture capital fund AquAgro. The ag-biotech startup develops improved plants for the agricultural and biofuel industries through plant genomics. A few weeks ago I wrote a post about the Evogene partnership with Rehovot-based CBD Technologies to collaborate on the improvement of cotton fiber properties.

Compugen announced yesterday its discovery of a blood-based biomarker for the diagnosis of lung cancer. The dual-listed firm (Nasdaq:CGEN) is involved in the identification and licensing of molecular level biomarkers and processes using computational biology tools. The discoveries are used in therapeutic and diagnostic products, for which it receives royalties.

According to webware, tech-support startup Fixya will announce a partnership with Best Buy whereby “customers wanting to perform their own fixes (or trying to dig others out of trouble) can go to the Best Buy Web site and access http://geeksquad.fixya.com from the “Customer Service” tab. They can search by product, SKU, manufacturer, or product category, or post a new query and receive community troubleshooting” for free. This is sure to boost traffic on Fixya’s site, which already claims over 6 million views per month. The site also boasts more than 30,000 “geek” contributors.

InterCure Ltd., a medical device company (TASE: INCR), announced yesterday that its RESPeRATE hypertension treatment device, clinically-proven to significantly lower blood pressure, will launch into full-scale retail distribution in the UK this May through leading pharmacy chain Lloyds.

“The full-chain launch of RESPeRATE at Lloyds Pharmacy clearly demonstrates the broad appeal of our effective and truly natural device-guided breathing therapy for hypertension,” said Erez Gavish, president and CEO of InterCure. Sixteen million adults in the UK suffer from high blood pressure. Left untreated, it may lead to heart attack, stroke and kidney or heart failure.

Founded in 2005 and based in Ness Ziona, Perytons provides developers, implementers and field engineers with analyzers for standard and proprietary wireless communication protocols. The startup announced today an enhanced version of it’s multi-antenna multi-channel 802.15.4/ZigBee analyzer based on Integration Associates EZLink 802.15.4 USB dongles. The tool provides the capability to analyze and track multiple network sessions that coincide in time in a user friendly manner. “We are excited to provide our customers a feature rich, user friendly analysis tool with very high reliability needed for analyzing sophisticated wireless networks.” - Yaron Soffer, Perytons Founder and CEO.

Mazor Surgical Technologies, a 2001-founded provider of the SpineAssist, a miniature surgical assistance system for a wide range of spine procedures, has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. Mazor has received exclusive, worldwide licenses to two patents for the development of permanent implants for the spine.

CEO Ori Hadomi predicts that the product, which has already undergone a feasibility study, can reach market within a year. He adds that the product will open a new market to the company - orthopedic implants - and that it can also boost sales of Mazor’s own SpineAssist product line.

Finally, check out this Globes article about a Israel Venture Capital Research Center survey that shows that high tech start-ups in Israel have not been affected so far by a possible global slowdown, and that in fact venture capital funding is at a seven-year high.

Leviathan Energy Ltd., is an Israel-based cleantech startup that aims to offer the least expensive electrical energy generation on the market by developing clean energy from waves, water, tidal, and wind. They take their name from the bible: “The Leviathan is mentioned in the Bible as a huge and powerful sea creature and is commonly translated as a whale. We chose this name as a reminder of the enormous energy present in nature.”

According to Jonathan Shapira over at Cleantech Investing in Israel, the two-year-old startup and Maple Leaf India PVT “have signed a letter of intent for a $50 million-plus contract to provide clean electricity for India.

The letter of intent covers three points: (1) Leviathan Energy will provide aerodynamic improvement technology for the development of Maple Leaf’s 450 MW wind farm in Kerala, India. The wind farm itself will provide over 900,000 homes with electricity and prevent the emissions of 450,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from entering the environment. (2) The parties will cooperate on development and implementation of Leviathan’s ocean wave energy technology in the Indian Ocean. (3) The parties will partner to manufacture Leviathan’s Wind Energizer for local use in India.

Raul Goldemann of MATIMOP, director of the India-Israel program, said, ‘We had a successful trip to India, and found tremendous interest in Israel technology.’”

The new startup has a one page website with a description of its core products.

So you live in a three-story brick building somewhere in Brooklyn and you wanna let you’re friends in Tokyo know exactly where you live. Why not email them a Google Map with your face plastered on the roof of the building itself?

Or you’re a business, let’s say a bar, and you want to provide directions on your website. Why not put your roofarena map on your site with your logo on the actual spot where the bar is located?

Sound cool? If everything goes according to the founder of roofarena Shay Sharon’s plan, the whole (inhabited) world will be covered with pictures of people and businesses buying and selling rooftops. I had a chance to interview him about the launch of his cool site:

So what’s the basic idea behind Roofarena? Why would somebody want to buy a rooftop and put their picture on it?

In our vision, Roofarena is a site combining the one million dollar homepage, social networking and a virtual real estate market. One million dollar homepage was a great gimmick and a huge success but was missing any type of user experience. There was no reason for the user to come back and we thought it could be nice to try and bring the world of social networking into those pixels and maybe create, in the long run, a market place for those roofs.

Can you give me a little background on the team, and how you came up with this idea?

Started out as an idea of selling virtual real estate, like an online sim-city, and then we started to realize the potential behind it. The fact that you own a piece of virtual space that has geographical presence means you will have ‘neighbors’, you can form ‘neighborhoods’, as well as the commercial potential of reselling your property as an investment. The team is a group of entrepreneurs with extensive experience in the software market. We have Beta’d using self funding and are only now considering the option of bringing in some external capital.

So I can see putting my own pic on a roof as a novel thing to do, but what other applications do you have in mind for roofarena, i.e. businesses that put their pic up on a roof to advertise their store, or using the roofarena map to give directions etc…?

The most obvious reason for buying a roof is to advertise your business. We hope the buzz around it will attract businesses to get a roof and ride the PR this site will might get. Our main goal and the initial idea was to create geographic communities like what Geocities was suppose to back in the late nineties and just like the real world, allow individuals to buy, sell and rent those roofs.

Will the site be incorporated into other sites, such as Facebook, using a widget?

Facebook is definitely one of the first integration we really want to do. We feel that Facebook, myspace and other social networks along with roofarena can make what Geocities tried more than ten years ago to create.

Do you plan to extend the service beyond Manhattan?

Of course. I have great plans on my apt in San Francisco where I used to live… But first we take Manhattan…

Will users be able to sell their roof, perhaps even make a profit by selling later at a higher price as the service becomes more popular?

Assuming the site will become popular, there is no reason why one will not be able to buy a roof and sell it later on or even rent it to someone else. We believe it is possible to create a virtual real estate market.

Other than the initial selling price of a roof, what other revenue-generation methods are possible with a site like yours?

In the future, the site will offer many more services and affiliations to our ‘residents’. There are several business models we are considering around these new services. Still remains to be seen.

See you on top of the world…

Thanks!

Check out roofarena for yourself.

Today Israel’s innovators made all kinds of headlines from cleantech to medical devices to software security.

Let’s start with TechnoSpin. The four year old startup has raised $8 million from US VC 21 Ventures. They develop and produce rotors for small wind turbines which, it claims, are cheaper to produce and more easily assembled than competitor’s products, and can be operated on 80% of the earth’s surface - not just in high-wind areas. TechnoSpin also develops wind turbine gears which produce torque that is then converted into electrical power. Check out an interview with the CEO, Maxim Rakov.

Next on the list is Gizmox. This 2006-formed web application design startup announced today that it has reached an agreement to market its software through Microsoft marketing platforms. The Maayan Ventures portfolio company will use its Ajax-based environment for running web applications to enhance Microsoft’s Visual Studio environment development partnership program.

Then there’s Endogun Medical Systems. The 2004-founded graduate of Meytag Technology Incubatorand now Biomedix Incubator portfolio company has announced FDA approval for its internal soft-tissue fastening solution. This procedure, a key element of many Minimally Invasive Surgeries (MIS), is difficult to perform. Endogun’s technology, apparently, makes MIS procedures more safe, effective and simpler to perform.

Finally, Applicure Technologies released a statement via email that it has signed an agreement with British Trafalgar Capital Management for an investment of up to $5 million over a three year period. The four year old company, which is still negotiating with other investors in Israel and abroad for additional financing, creates software-based products for web application security and database compliance.