It has been a good year so far for our Israeli-based portfolio companies with four exits totaling more than $1.2 Billion. Early this year, Altair was acquired by Sony Semiconductor for $212M, which was the first acquisition ever for the Japanese company in Israel. Then Oracle announced the acquisition of virtualization company Ravello Systems, and Cisco confirmed it had acquired Israeli chip designer, Leaba Semiconductor. Last month, Cisco announced intentions to acquire cloud security startup, CloudLock for $293M. It might seem like the only common factor between these four Israeli-based startups is that they were backed by Bessemer Venture Partners and happened to be acquired around the same time. All four companies operated in different fields (semiconductor, cyber security, hybrid cloud, and communications), were at various stages of their revenue lifecycle, had different products and GTM approaches, and even had a 10-year gap between their launch time.
But a closer look reveals that there are several core capabilities that all four companies possessed. These are the strengths that helped pave the way for their success. These are also the attributes we look for in many of our global investments but even more so in our Israeli ones:
