Despite the High Holiday season during September, which normally slows Israeli activity to a crawl, it was an active month for acquisitions as evidenced by the six deals below, all of which involved foreign companies.
1. The headliner was Ireland-based medical-equipment giant Medtronic’s buyout of Mazor Robotics. Based in Caesarea and founded in 2001 as a spinoff from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Mazor pioneered robotic guidance systems for spine and brain surgeries.
2. Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce marketplace, acquired Israel-based Upstream Commerce, maker of cloud-based, real-time automated pricing and product assortment optimization solutions. The Upstream Commerce team will remain in Tel Aviv as one of Flipkart’s global centers for future data-science work.
3. Chicago-based Grubhub online and mobile food-ordering and delivery marketplace will pay approximately $150 million to acquire Tapingo, the Israeli-built platform for campus food ordering used by students at 150 American college, university and professional campuses.
“By joining forces with Grubhub’s network of over 85,000 restaurant partners that offer online delivery and pickup, we’ll continue to serve our loyal diners long after they graduate from college, which has always been our aspiration,” said Daniel Almog, Tapingo’s co-founder and chief executive officer. The company has offices in Tel Aviv, San Francisco and Denver.
4. Transcatheter heart-valve company Venus Medtech of Hangzhou, China, signed an agreement to acquire Keystone Heart, headquartered in Caesarea with U.S. operations in Tampa, Fla.
Keystone developed TriGUARD 3, the first cerebral embolic protection device designed to provide complete brain coverage for patients undergoing cardiac procedures. The company is currently enrolling patients in a U.S. trial hoped to lead to FDA approval. CE approval for Europe is anticipated by the end of this year.
5. DevOps technology leader JFrog, a multinational company based in California, is acquiring Dev and DevOps technology consulting company Trainologic of Herzliya. Trainologic CEO Gal Marder will head up JFrog’s new elite DevOps consulting unit based in JFrog’s Israeli office in Netanya.
6. Medical Surgery Technologies (MST) of Yokne’am Illit will be acquired by TransEnterix of North Carolina, a medical-device company digitizing the interface between surgeons and patients to improve minimally invasive surgery, for approximately $5.8 million in cash and 3,150,000 shares of TransEnterix common stock. The second tranche of $6.6 million, payable in cash or stock, is to be paid within one year of closing.
MST developed a software-based image analytics platform powered by advanced visualization, scene recognition, artificial intelligence, machine learning and data analytics. TransEnterix will transfer MST’s Israeli-based R&D team to a newly formed subsidiary, TransEnterix Israel.
