September 2011
Events
Dov Moran – Lecture to portfolio executives
Dov Moran, a serial entrepreneur who founded M-Systems and Modu and is today the founder and CEO of Intoetv, gave a lecture to Giza's portfolio executives on August 31st in the offices of the TechLoft, a soon to be opened "open-house" for start-ups. With an experience of almost 30 years as an entrepreneur in the industry, Dov shared a lot of his valuable insights about the industry and entrepreneurship, and his philosophy, based on a "people's first" approach. He is a strong believer in AQ (Adversity Quotient), which is required from entrepreneurs as an additional quality to the well-known IQ and EQ qualities. The meeting at TechLoft was a first in a series of lectures which will take place in the future, where entrepreneurs share thoughts and ideas with their fellow members from the community.
Elka Nir – Keynote speaker at Intel conference focusing on Medical applications
Elka Nir, Managing Director and head of life sciences sector at Giza, was invited to present as the keynote speaker at the Intel Embedded Applications for Medical Devices conference held in Tel-Aviv in June. The conference was attended by many CEOs and industry leaders. Ms. Nir presented in the opening presentation the unmet needs, trends and challenges in the medical devices area. She mentioned the strong connection between the IT and MT (Medical Technology) and the opportunities for innovative solutions that address unmet needs.
Jonatan Russo – New addition to the Giza team
Jonatan Russo joined Giza in July as an Analyst in the Internet sector. He is responsible for transaction initiation, sourcing deal flow and evaluation of Internet companies. Formerly, Mr. Russo served as a Software Engineer and Integration Manager at Modu. Prior to that, Mr. Russo served as a Team Leader in one of IDF's elite technological units. Mr. Russo holds a BA in Computer Science from The Interdisciplinary Center, Hertzeliya, and is a graduate of the Zell Entrepreneurship Program.
Portfolio News
Acquisition
Pathway
Bayer HealthCare announced in September that its affiliate, MEDRAD, Inc. has acquired Pathway Medical Technologies, Inc., of Kirkland, Wash., a Giza IV portfolio company. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed. With this acquisition, Bayer HealthCare is strengthening its MEDRAD Interventional business by expanding its presence in the field of vascular intervention technologies.
"The combination of MEDRAD and Pathway Medical Technologies underscores our strategic commitment to the treatment of patients in the growing interventional field," said Dr. J?rg Reinhardt, Chairman of the Board of Management of Bayer HealthCare.
New Investment
Mintigo
Giza Venture Capital led a $9 million investment in a Series B round in a Big-data analysis company Mintigo Ltd., joined by Sequoia Capital and private investors. Mintigo will use the funds to expand its customer acquisition services in the U.S. market.
Mintigo develops customer-acquisition engine that crawls the Web looking for potential customers with a high receptiveness to the products offered by a company. Mintigo, founded in June 2009 by veterans of an IDF elite intelligence unit, has more than 25 employees in offices across North America, Europe and the Middle East.
Using unique Big Data analysis and scanning the entire potential market, Mintigo offers a powerful Customer Acquisition solution with unparalleled targeting accuracy and prospects conversion levels. This is achieved by focusing on highly-receptive prospects that match unique Customer Code™- the specific business customers' profile that is singular to its industry, products, services and business model. The result is a large-scale set of triggers that are unique and indicative of highly-receptive prospects.
Mintigo's Customer Acquisition solution has shown remarkable results, doubling clients' sales conversion rates.
Giza V Portfolio
Soluto
Soluto, the creator of 'Anti-Frustration Software' and the PC Genome knowledgebase, announced in June that it has secured US$10.5 million in Series B funding. Index
Ventures led the round with participation from existing partners Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), Giza Venture Capital, and Proxima Ventures.
Saul Klein, Partner at Index Ventures, will be joining Soluto's board of directors.
VisionCare
VisionCare Ophthalmic Technologies, Inc., a developer of advanced visual prosthetic devices, announced in September that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has established a billing code for the Implantable Miniature Telescope (IMT™ by Dr. Isaac Lipshitz) under the Hospital Outpatient Prospective Payment System.
The new pass-through code, effective October 1, 2011, will enable outpatient facilities to obtain reimbursement for the telescope implant for covered procedures.
In August, VisionCare Medical had a very successful FDA inspection, with no required actions, for the second time in a row.
WinBuyer
WinBuyer, a developer of comparative pricing applications for online retailers, announced that it will participate in the Shop.org Annual Summit, the premier gathering for online and multi-channel business, taking place in Boston, Massachusetts in September. WinBuyer will present a personalized demonstration of its new WinBuyer 2.0 platform, offering turnkey solutions for delivering sustained revenue growth for online retailers.
TaKaDu
TaKaDu, a world leader in Water Infrastructure Monitoring, together with Logica, a business and technology service company, announced in September that Logica will offer TaKaDu's Water Infrastructure Monitoring to UK Water Companies, in order to enable utilities to reduce water loss and drive efficiency and savings, gain greater visibility and control over their networks, and identify potential issues such as leaks, bursts and inefficient operations. This will enable them to reduce the impact of leaks on customers' water supply, better plan maintenance, control costs associated with water loss, reduce energy bills and better target capital investment spend.
In September, TaKaDu released their first research report, covering the connection between water tariffs and water loss rates. The report was released in conjunction with "Summer Davos", where Amir Peleg, TaKaDu's Founder and CEO, participated in two panels about Water Management and Entrepreneurship.
Giza IV Portfolio
Altair
Altair Semiconductor, the world's leading developer of ultra-low power, small footprint and high performance 4G LTE chipsets, announced in August that its TD-LTE chipset, integrated in a commercial USB dongle, achieved record-breaking download speeds of more than 100Mbps in a live over-the-air demonstration. The demonstration used a commercial eNB in a standard TD-LTE configuration), which is being used by carriers in numerous worldwide markets.
In June, Altair has opened a new office in India, the world's fastest-growing telecommunications market, to be headed by industry veteran Salaj Sinha. The new facility will handle all Indian operations and provide business and technical support for prospective and current customers. Salaj has a long and successful track record of leading the development of various telecom products, and most recently served at the Chief Technology Officer at Teracom Ltd., one of India's fastest growing telecom companies.
CellGuide
CellGuide, a fabless semiconductor, IP licensing and design services company, together with Baolab Microsystems, a developer of innovative technology called NanoEMS that enables MEMS to be created inside the CMOS wafer using standard manufacturing techniques, announced in August that CellGuide will add Baolab's recently launched 3D NanoCompass™ IC to their GPS chip, to create the CLIOX-C, the world's first fully integrated GPS and compass device.
This further enhances the GPS system by providing immediate tunnel-exit and dead-reckoning features to assist in situations where the GPS signal is intermittent or not available.
Lucid
Lucid, a fabless SoC and virtualization software provider, demonstrated in June for the first time at Computex 2011 its Virtu™ Universal® GPU virtualization software, on notebooks, All-in-One (AiO) and desktop PCs, based on both Intel® and AMD integrated graphics processing units (GPUs). Virtu Universal is a new product that builds on the capabilities of the popular LucidLogix Virtu™ GPU virtualization software for Intel based motherboards.
Virtu Universal dynamically allocates graphics resources between integrated and discrete GPUs on Intel second-generation Core processors and AMD Brazos and Bulldozer platforms, allowing the systems to take full advantage of the processing power provided by both GPUs.
Continuity
Continuity Software™, the world's leading provider of disaster recovery (DR), high availability (HA) and private cloud monitoring and management solutions, announced in August that it has entered into a strategic partnership agreement with SVA System Vertrieb Alexander GmbH, one of Germany's foremost systems integrators (SI). Under terms of the agreement, SVA will expand its broad data center infrastructure solutions portfolio with Continuity Software's RecoverGuard™ software, enhancing SVA's Integrative Disaster Recovery (IDR) solution, in order to provide SVA clients with the most comprehensive customer-proven solution for ensuring data protection, application availability and disaster recovery across physical, virtualized and cloud computing environments.
Xeround
Xeround, the Cloud Database Company, announced in June the general availability of their cloud database service for MySQL applications. During the nine-month beta period launched in September 2010, more than 2,000 users have tried Xeround, with many already using the service in live production environments. Xeround's cloud database is now commercially available on Xeround's Amazon EC2 datacenters (in the United States and in Europe,) the Heroku cloud platform, and will soon expand to Xeround's Rackspace datacenter, with support for additional cloud providers planned in the near future.
BioLineRX
BioLineRx (NASDAQ: BLRX) (TASE: BLRX), a biopharmaceutical development company, announced in September that it has signed a worldwide, exclusive license agreement with Ramot at Tel Aviv University Ltd., the technology transfer company of Tel Aviv University, for the development and commercialization of BL-7050, a novel, orally available treatment for neuropathic and inflammatory pain.
BioLineRX will be presenting at the 2011 Rodman and Renshaw Annual Global Investment Conference in New York.
IceCure
IceCure Medical, a medical device company providing physicians with minimally-invasive solutions for women's health, is expanding its sales activities in the US and has already installed more than 10 systems at several sites with highly positive feedback from the users.
The company has also sold several systems and multiple probes to its strategic partner UMS, a leader in providing mobile medical services.
Three additional patents of IceCure were approved and issued by the US patent office, and the company has received the regulatory approval to market and sale systems in Israel, expending its potential markets.
Giza III Portfolio
Flash Networks
announced in July that it has successfully completed interoperability testing of its Harmony Mobile Internet Services Gateway with the Alcatel-Lucent 5780 Dynamic Services Controller (DSC), a 3GPP policy charging and rules function (PCRF) platform.
This interoperability will allow Flash Networks to offer smart traffic management solutions and monetization services for mobile operators as they continue to cope with high bandwidth content over faster networks, such as 4G Long-Term Evolution (LTE) networks.
Flash also announced in July the results of live tests measuring the effect of data optimization on radio access network (RAN) resources. In a recent experiment conducted on a European operator's HSDPA network, Flash Networks' Web & Media Optimization solution reduced cell power consumption by 25%, throughput by 30%, timeslot usage by 20%, and code shortage by 30%. In addition, Flash Networks' optimization successfully freed-up 40% of bandwidth on a fully-utilized cell, enabling the operator to service more subscribers with the same radio resources while providing them with better quality of experience.
SURF
SURF Communication Solutions, an industry leader in multimedia processing, announced in July that Devoteam Teligent, an international technology consulting firm, has selected SURF's open media processing platform as its development infrastructure for the delivery of value added services to a major Russian mobile operators.
Can-Fite
Can-Fite Biopharma Ltd (TASE: CFBI), an Israeli biopharmaceutical company with a pipeline of small molecule oral drugs under development for autoimmune inflammatory, ophthalmic and liver diseases, announced in June that it has signed an agreement to spin off its ophthalmic indications to a US based public company, Denali Concrete Management Inc. According to the agreement, Can-Fite shall grant a sublicense for the CF101 clinical development in the ophthalmology field to an Israeli subsidiary fully owned by Denali Concrete Management Inc. ("Denali"). Upon conclusion of the transaction, Can-Fite will become the main shareholder of Denali.
In August, Can-Fite BioPharma announced that it has commenced patient enrolment in a phase 2/3 clinical trial of CF101 for the treatment of Psoriasis. This clinical trial will be conducted in 17 medical centers in the United States, Europe and Israel under an open IND.
UltraSPECT
UltraSPECT, a leading provider of image reconstruction products, announced in August the sale of more than 10 Wide Beam Reconstruction (WBR) software solutions to nuclear pharmaceutical supplier PCI for placement at customer medical facilities throughout Arizona. PCI is a member of United Pharmacy Partners, Inc. (UPPI), a nuclear pharmacy network consortium that recently signed a multi-year distribution agreement for the leasing and/or non-exclusive sales of UltraSPECT's Cardiac and Bone imaging applications in the US.
Contact
Vered Digmy
Director, Investor Relations
Giza Venture Capital
Ramat Aviv Towers, 12th floor
40 Einstein Street,
Tel Aviv, Israel
Tel: +972-3-6402336
Fax: +972-3-6402319
http://www.gizavc.com
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