Google set up a funding program two weeks later for Israeli entrepreneurs, part of an acceleration in U.S. technology companies’ backing in late 2011 that has included Apple Inc. buying a company in the country for the first time, according to business newspaper Calcalist.
The foreign investments are important to Israel, where the high-tech industry accounts for 47 percent of manufactured exports, and could be a new source of innovation for giants like Google because of the Mountain View, California-based company’s strength in technology startups.
Money from Google and others is making up for a decline in local financing that Avi Sasson, Israel’s state research-grant provider, says could hurt industry growth.
Venture Capital Slump
“The minute the Israeli venture-capital funds aren’t helping in the early stage, there won’t be a new generation of companies for the foreign investors to invest in three or four years down the road,” said Koby Simana, head of the Israel Venture Capital Research Center, in an interview. “Israeli startups won’t exist if there is no Israeli venture capital.”
Of the $522 million raised by Israeli technology companies in the third quarter, $96 million came from domestic venture- capital funds, a drop of 40 percent from the second quarter and 12 percent from a year earlier, according to the research center. The proportion coming from Israel, at 18 percent, was the lowest since the center started covering the industry in 1999, Simana said.
Many Israeli venture capital funds, hurt by the global recession, have been unable to raise money, and 2012 will be “crucial” for their recovery, Simana said. “For some, it will be a make or break year because they haven’t raised funds since 2007 or 2006 and if they don’t raise any money this year or next, many will cease to operate,” he said.
State Funding
The Israeli government’s annual research-funding allocation has been cut by 1 billion shekels ($262 million) over the past decade, Sasson, who oversees the Ministry of Industry and Trade’s development financing for local companies, said this month at a conference in Tel Aviv. That represents a decrease of 56 percent to a yearly budget of about 800 million shekels.
Israel, with a population similar to Switzerland’s at 7.7 million people, was dubbed the “startup nation” in a 2009 book of that name by Saul Singer and Dan Senor. It has 64 companies on the Nasdaq Stock Market, the most of any country outside North America after China, with 56 percent focused on technology.
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