Roi Carthy is the Managing Partner at Initial Capital.
Previously, Roi has worked at companies such as Soluto, Zend Technologies and 888.com.
Roi has been covering the Israeli startup scene for TechCrunch since 2007.
Born in Israel, Roi has spent many years abroad living in both the US (Boston, Olivet, DC) and in Europe (Budapest, Zurich).
Today, Roi works out of Tel-Aviv and lives in near-by Givatayim.
Loyalize, a social TV audience platform, has been been acquired by Function(X) for $5M in cash and stock. The company intends to integrate Loyalize into Viggle, a television loyalty product designed for iOS devices.
Loyalize was founded by serial-entrepreneur Shahar Smirin whose current flagship project is GetTaxi, which former TechCrunch Editor Sarah Lacy called ‘Way Beyond Uber‘.
Smirin, along with his GetTaxi co-founder, Roi More, are also the founding duo of Vigoda.ru, a major daily deal site in Russia and the Ukraine with expected revenues for 2012 in the range of $200-250M.
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Our industry lauds cutting-edge UX. Look no further than the exceptional work of Path. One either swoons over it, or one is blind. But what if that sends a wrong signal? Don’t get me wrong, I feel very strongly about the importance of UX, but since I’ve played around with NewsFlash, a feature-stripped free news app for iOS (iTunes link), I’ve asked myself whether more often than not users work for the UX, instead of the other way around. → Read More
A year ago, Mangrove Capital Partners invested $1.75 million in SohoOS and its small-business management service. Today the company is announcing that Morgenthaler Ventures is leading a second round of financing to the tune of $8 million (it’s also the firm’s first investment in an Israeli-based startup). All existing investors, including Mangrove Capital Partners, Kima Ventures and The Time are participating in the round as well.
Joining Mangrove’s Michael Jackson on the company’s board will be Morgenthaler Ventures’ Mark Goines, whose previous experience of running TurboTax, GM’ing Inuit’s consumer division, as well as backing the likes of of Mint.com as an angel investor, should come in handy for SohoOS as it begins to double down on user acquisition. → Read More
Back in May, my6sense raised another $1.1 million to continue pushing its digital intuition technology to market.
Today, the company is releasing a brand new product called ‘Smart Magazine’ which can be best described as a Flipboard for iPhone with added digital intuition that helps brings relevant content to its users ‘automagically’.
Except that the company elected to forgo iOS and launch on Android and Windows Phone instead. Both versions are free and can be downloaded, here. One thing to note is that the Android version is exclusive to all Samsung Galaxy models. In three months, it’ll be free available in the Android Market store. → Read More
The hottest deal in Israel is turning out to be a company whose name I first heard only a few of months ago. I can’t go to any industry networking event these days without being asked what I know about the company, which has managed to keep a low profile since its founding a couple of years ago.
Why are VCs in hot pursuit for a company they know so little about? First and foremost, because it’s playing in what is already and what will only grow as a lucrative performance marketing playing-field: Facebook.
By all accounts, the company developed an engine that does this really, really well. Second, it bootstrapped itself to $5M in annual revenues for 2011 and is expecting to nearly tripple that in 2012. Finally, it’s about to bet the entire house on a shift to a SaaS solution.
This company is Adotomi. → Read More
With no shortage of products and services that target small businesses in a generic way, some verticals really do need dedicated solutions. Personal trainers are one such group.
Never having really thought about it myself, I asked a few of my friends to find out what tools their personal trainers use to manage their day-to-day operations. The answers ranged from old-school methods like notebooks and written invoices, to techier methods that peaked at Excel and emails.
Coachya, founded by husband and wife team Avi and Michal Grabinsky, is bringing to market a management suite that bundles a number of key features trainers need, into a single one-stop-shop solution. To be more specific, it seems perfectly suited for personal fitness coaches, or any other kind of coach that provides workout schedules to individual athletes (customers).
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I love finding services that bring value to small businesses. Viewbix falls squarely into that category.
ViewBix comes from the founders of Qoof, who gave agencies and advertisers a way to easily create interactive videos. The need for customization, however, tended to bring a lot of friction to the selling process.
For SMBs, it was pretty much completely out of scope. This was frustrating for Qoof’s founders, who were noticing growing demand in that vertical. → Read More
SohoOS is on a tear. Users are growing at a rate of 30% month-over-month, just recently shooting past 400,000. And soon, the company will make a hard bet on a brand-new design — a complete revamp — aimed at singeing it into the backbone of the small businesses it serves.
Some background: SohoOS offers small businesses a utility suite of applications, for example, invoicing, CRM, and inventory management. The startup, which I’ve been following since its debut, closed a $1.75 million financing round led by Mangrove back in January. → Read More
Humanity has poor taste. Correction: The worst. For proof, look no further than the person sitting next to you … That’s right, wait until their phone rings and blasts the latest Shakira mega-hit (Full respect to bf Gerard Piqué. Visca Barça!).
Coupled with humanity’s bad taste, is humanity’s uncountable urge to spend money on said bad taste, and in the case here, booty-shakin’, Colombian-sung god-awful ringtones. Waka Waka indeed.
Thing is, and here’s a little gem they don’t teach you at business school, where there is bad taste, there is money. Usually, a bunch of it. → Read More
What can I say, I just dig Kutiman. I first covered the work of the Israeli-born artist back in 2009 with the release of ‘Thru You,’ a seven-track music project created by splicing and dicing YouTube clips.
It was back in March when I covered the release of a new, jazzier sounding tune of his called, ‘My Favorite Color‘.
Well, he’s back with another one of those block rockin’ beats… This time Kutiman unleashes his splice-and-dice style upon democracy. Clip after the jump. → Read More
In my previous post about Mobli, I claimed it would be the break-out photo sharing app of the year. I went to say that like Instagram, it has something special in between the pixels. I backed that up with a starting figure — users were spending an average of 33 minutes on the site. (The latest stat the company shared with me is that on average, there are 3.4 pictures added per user per day.)
Stats aside, today Mobli is kicking it up in a major, major way by introducing a new breed of photo filters that not only put every other photo app’s on the defense, they set a new bar for user convenience and possibilities for brands. → Read More
It’s one thing to hear praise for an app from geeks, it’s another when you hear it from ‘normal folks’. Onavo falls in this category.
The free data-shrinking app which we’ve praised in the past runs quietly in the background and dramatically reduces data consumption. I myself keep it running all the time, and on a recent trip abroad to San Francisco it helped me save in the neighborhood of 75% of my potential data consumption. Seeing as I was running on a roaming plan, this meant I could email, tweet, and use mapping apps with far greater freedom.
Today, Onavo is announcing it’s first venture into the Android waters. → Read More
In the four weeks since the social protests have begun in Israel, hundreds have been killed, dozens of women have reportedly been raped, a number of children tortured, and countless districts have been looted. The authorities have imposed a complete lock-down on all cellular networks. All access to Facebook and Twitter has been blocked. Little information is going in, or out.
Except the absolute, complete opposite. → Read More
Generally speaking, video producers have a much easier time producing content than monetizing it. This is because the monetization side of the equation has two x-factors that are hard to get right. The first being the ‘with what to monetize’ factor–that is, the mechanism that facilitates the billing aspect of the user-flow. The second, being the ‘how to monetize’ factor– this being the model(s) under which the content is charged for.
Enter Cent2Cent, an Israeli company with a video monetization solution that is versatile enough for both high-end tv broadcasters (NBC is a client), and low-end bloggers. And with over 200,000 paid transactions to date, they might be on to something, too. → Read More
There’s something about Instagram that you can’t quite put your fingers on. It’s just a fantastic, sticky, launch-a-few-times-a-day kind of app. There’s really nothing you can point to that makes it any better than the bazillion other photo sharing apps. In fact, it even under-whelms features-wise.
But, but … there’s just something about it. Something in-between the pixels that makes it resonate with users.
And that’s exactly what Mobli has, too. → Read More
It was a couple of months ago that BiteHunter.com beta-launched itself as an aggregator for dining deals. Easily described as a “Kayak for restaurants,” BiteHunter is designed to help users locate dining deals, a problem which has been been addressed quite well for verticals such as travel, but quite poorly for dining, at least on an aggregated basis.
Today BiteHunter is announcing a new iPhone app (iTunes Link) that expands its dining deal search across the US, from the initial markets of New York, San Francisco and Chicago. → Read More
It was only a few shorts weeks ago that we reviewed Onavo, the must-have iOS app that significantly shrinks data consumption. We were so impressed with the app’s ability to save users money on their data usage plans, that we went so far as to say that every iOS user should download it.
Today the company is announcing a $3M Round A led by Sequoia Capital, with participation of Magma Venture Partners. → Read More
When we think of smartphones and geo-location the two main use cases that come to mind are mapping and check-ins. These are fine and dandy, but what if you could use smartphones to keep tabs of where your child is? Footprints lets you do just that.
The new app (iTunes link), available for both iPhone & iPad, tracks the location of the device and shares it with family and friends. These can then know in real-time a person’s exact location. The app can have several use cases, but the parent/child one seems the most compelling.
What about privacy? With more and more parents shelling out the cash to equip their tweens and teenagers with iPhones, I don’t see why a basic requirement couldn’t be running Footprints in the background. As my father put it when I grew up, our household was run as a totalitarian democracy. Ergo, he buys my iPhone, he gets to run whatever app he likes in the background. Parenting rocks. → Read More
There’s really no better way to describe Onavo other than a must-have app for any and every iPhone user on a data plan. I’ll go a step further: I think it’s the very first app one should install.
Why? Because Onavo shrinks your data usage (and thus, your bills). All you need to do is install the free app and you’re done. The app will then run in the background and do its thing and all you have to do is continue consuming data as you do today… Surfing the web, emailing, tweeting, using maps, etc. → Read More
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