Author: OurCrowd

OurCrowd’s portfolio company Curiyo featured on Mashable

OurCrowd portfolio company Curiyo was featured in Mashable, a popular website covering  the top social media news. Curiyo is a browser plugin that helps deliver relevant content to users curious to know more about a word or phrase on a site, without forcing users to leave the page they are on. USA Today is trying out a new content discovery tool to keep readers from leaving the site. The newspaper has tapped Curiyo, a startup founded by Bob Rosenschein, who created Answers.com and sold it to AFCV Holdings for $127 million in 2011. Curiyo lets you click on a word or name to find out more about them. The idea is to discourage readers from navigating away from the page they’re reading to research on Wikipedia or elsewhere. Rosenschein says publishers are interested in the idea, especially since it doesn’t slow the site down (“It’s a line of Javascript!”). Curiyo raised $550,000 from OurCrowd investors in December 2012 and $230,000 in a follow-on funding round in February 2014. Read more on...

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Success Stories of Women in the Startup Nation

OurCrowd launched a new webinar series called ‘Teach-In Tuesdays’. In this series, we’ll explore investing in early-stage Israeli companies, identify and explain influential tech trends, stay up-to-date with the crowdfunding industry, and examine actionable insights from our own experience running OurCrowd’s investment platform. Yesterday, we held a webcast as part of the OurCrowd Teach-In Tuesdays series on the recent progress of women entrepreneurs, why we are seeing more women-led enterprises and what it will take to encourage more women to take the entrepreneurial plunge. Additional topics covered in the webcast: About the advantages of being a woman in the male-dominated Israeli tech scene Personal experiences from the trenches Sage advice from experienced woman entrepreneurs Featured experts: Evelyn Rubin, Business Development Partner at OurCrowd. Evelyn Rubin joined OurCrowd after more than a decade of experience in Israel’s venture capital and technology industries. Previously a Senior Editor at Seeking Alpha, Evelyn was formerly a Senior Associate at JVP, a leading international venture capital fund in Jerusalem.   Ranit Fink, Chief Business Development Officer at Cellrox. Mrs. Fink has 7 years of experience in software development and project management in technology companies. She...

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OurCrowd’s portfolio company Webydo featured on TechCrunch

Leading technology website, TechCrunch, featured OurCrowd portfolio company Webydo. The company provides graphic designers a powerful set of design tools to build and maintain websites with little technical knowledge. Webydo, a software as a service startup that gives web designers the tools to circumvent a more traditional website creation process by excising the need for them to do any manual coding by automatically converting their design into a hosted HTML5 website, has closed a $7 million Series B funding round. The round was led by equity-based crowdfunding VC platform OurCrowd, along with Magna Capital Partners and a group of unnamed strategic investors from the US and UK. The new round brings Webydo’s total funding to $9.7 million. The business was founded back in 2010. Webydo raised $1,292,500 from OurCrowd investors in December 2013. Read more on TechCrunch...

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OurCrowd’s portfolio company Zula featured on Fox Business

OurCrowd’s portfolio company Zula, a startup that aims to revolutionize team communication for an increasingly mobile world, was featured on Fox Business, a leading American business news television channel. In the interview, Zula’s Founder and Chairman Jeff Pulver discusses T-Mobile’s music concept, Amazon’s new phone and his new venture. Zula raised $385,000 from OurCrowd investors in May 2013 and $407,022 in a follow-on funding round in June 2014. View the video on Fox Business here. Watch the latest video at...

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OurCrowd’s Portfolio company Consumer Physics featured on CNN

OurCrowd’s portfolio company Consumer Physics, developer of  the world’s first affordable molecular sensor – the SCiO –  that fits in the palm of your hand, has been featured in CNN’s 2014 top 10 inventions list. A new handheld gadget called SCiO takes the guesswork out of analyzing your food. The device, about the size of a cigarette lighter, can be used to scan almost any food or beverage, analyze its chemical makeup and send the data wirelessly to your phone. SCiO contains a tiny optical sensor, called a spectrometer, which reads the molecular fingerprint of an object by shining an infrared light on it. The gadget then sends the data to the cloud for analysis and forwards the results to your phone, all in seconds. An accompanying SCiO app displays fat, protein and carbohydrate levels down to the milligram. Seeded by OurCrowd and top tier Silicon Valley VC Khosla Ventures, Consumer Physics raised $3,300,000 from OurCrowd investors in its 2nd round of funding in May 2014. Read more on CNN...

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