For the past two years I’ve been holding onto the belief that Israeli entrepreneurs should devote particular focus on the opportunities available to products and services that cater to Small & Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs). Slowly but surely, more and more companies have indeed started targeting this space, the most notable being Kampyle, SohoOS, and Clarizen.
Today, Chicago-based but Israeli-founded Future Simple is announcing a $1.1M round led OCA Ventures with participation by the I2A Fund, as well as angel investors.
Founded in 2009 by Uzi Shmilovici, Future Simple has already launched two SMB products: PipeJump, a small business CRM, and QuoteBase, a project/job quote generator that is claiming thousands of users. The investment will be used to bolster the management team, market the current products, as well as develop additional ones.
As an interesting side-note that proves yet again that startup entrepreneurship is (a wonderful) disease, Shmilovici was co-founder at Netcraft, an Israeli design firm that was acquired by a local portal last year. His co-founder at Netcraft, Joey Simhon, is today co-founder and CTO at Do@, a stealth startup which Robert Scoble noted on Quora: “[the] first company since Siri that makes me think that search still can be greatly improved on mobile will launch a compelling new mobile search product.”
