Israeli high tech sprinted out of the starter's blocks in June: "Globes" calculates that Israeli startups raised over $100 million within two days. The largest financing round was by WalkMe, which raised $50 million.
WalkMe facilitates better navigation by web surfers within Internet sites. The company enables website owners to devise user-friendly tools to help surfers understand the website's structure. Founded in 2011, the company has raised a total of $92.5 million to date.
WalkMe is managed by CEO Dan Adika, who founded the company in cooperation with president Rafi Sweary, CPO Eyal Cohen, and Yuval Shalom, who has since left the company. Adika explained to "Globes" how the WalkMe service works.
"The idea is to give better service, reduce technical support costs for the website, and enhance the surfers' interaction and involvement," Adika says, "In order to use the WalkMe product, a browser add-on is needed, and a short piece of code must be installed on the home page. This is a simple interface that makes it possible to add instructions for various actions on the site. For example, on a bank website, instructions can be added for operations such as ordering checkbooks, producing previous credit card printouts, etc.
"The websites have to see what are the most frequent questions asked of their customer service, and to create guides for them. The great advantage is that the interface for adding the guides is simple, so that technicians are not needed at every step in order to generate the guides."
Adika added, "It's like a GPS device that tells you where to go, and guides you from place to place."
Commenting on his company's latest financing round, Adika stated, "Our exceptional business results in the past year led us to decide to execute a much more aggressive expansion plan for 2016 and beyond. The only thing preventing WalkMe from selling in the range of hundreds of millions per year is scaling our business infrastructure, and that is exactly what this investment lead by Insight Venture Partners empowers us to do.” The company's product has already been installed at large customers, including Kimberly Clark, Stanley Black & Decker, and Adobe.
Insight led the current round, with participation from previous WalkMe investors, including Scale Venture Partners, Giza Venture Capital, Gemini Israel Ventures, and Mangrove Capital Partners. According to figures from the IVC database, the current round was held at a $125 million company value. WalkMe currently has 300 employees, including 175 in Israel, and is growing rapidly. The company says that it opened two new US branches over the past year: one in New York and one in North Carolina.
WalkMe's financing round is the largest so far by an Israeli company in June. Other June financing rounds were by EarlySense, a company developing a sensor for monitoring patients in hospitals and at home, which raised $25 million, big data analysis company Signals Group, which raised $10 million, and others.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on June 2, 2016
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