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.
With $450K behind it in funding, Israeli-based Qmerce is helping business large and small add social games to their communities, particularly on Facebook.
The premise behind Qmerce’s value proposition isn’t new. That is, branded social games aimed at driving user engagement via rewards, achievements and consequently, loyalty.
With over 40 customers to date, including Crocs and Pizza Hut (the Israeli franchises), and 300,000 games played, it looks like this upstart might be going somewhere. → Read More
This post is co-written with Daniel Cunha, my partner at Initial Capital.
In Part I, we outlined some of the challenges facing the Brazilian startup community as it sets-out to reap the massive opportunity the local market has to offer. In Part II below, we’re going to suggest a course of action, and how it could benefit through the experience of the Israeli startup industry.
Step One: The nascent Brazilian startup community must embrace the fact that it’s going to take approximately 10 years and a lot of work and coordination to become competitive with the likes of Silicon Valley & Israel (and there aren’t any guarantees).
There are no shortcuts. Accelerated 1/3/6-month programs are a great start, but they can’t produce an entire workforce, or accelerate the accumulation of plain old experience.
Let’s look at Israel for a moment… Traditionally, Israel’s forte has been enterprise technologies. The fact that it has been able to push out consumer startups in recent years is not taken for granted. It took thirty years to get to this point. Israelis know ‘consumer Internet’ doesn’t come naturally to them and that they are competing with the best in the business, namely, Americans. Getting to where it is didn’t come easy, and staying there will remain a continuous challenge. → Read More
Israeli-based Viewbix is announcing a Round A of $2M led by Canaan Partners, with participation by Longfellow Venture Partners.
Viewbix makes it really easy and quick to create interactive videos. These are videos that are augmented by various features such as eBay listings, Skype buttons, and Twitter feeds.
The company is also offering 250 TechCrunch readers a free trial of its premium version. Link after the jump. → Read More
Initial Capital was launched in 2011 as an investment firm targeting early stage startups in Israel and Brazil. The unlikely investment focus is the result of three friends — two Israeli and one Brazilian — turned professional investors.
Our Israeli investment network was rather mature when we launched, so we were able to hit the ground running and in the nine months since our launch, Initial has invested in six Israeli-based startups. In Brazil, however, we spent our first nine months developing a similar network from scratch. Slowly but surely learning and embracing the state of, and the challenges facing, the Brazilian startup industry.
A few months ago we embarked on a week long, 50-meeting tour across São Paulo, Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro. Our insights after the jump… → Read More
With a $4M investment, McCann Worldgroup has bought a 15% stake in Israeli incubator ‘thetime‘.
This move isn’t a particularly surprising considering ‘thetime’ was founded by Ilan Shiloah, who for the past 10 years has been chairman of McCann Erickson Israel. ‘thetime’ was also co-founded by angel investor, Nir Tarlovsky. Uri Weinheber, previously of Lab One, acts as the incubator’s CEO. → Read More
Slowly but surely, Microsoft Israel is making itself more and more relevant for the local startup community. In fact, we recently covered its latest major push, the Windows Azure Accelerator.
Then there’s the annual ThinkNext conference which has become one of the local tech community’s staple events. The more interesting portion of the event (in my opinion at least) is the demo area, where startups chosen by the the local Microsofties showcase their goods. So unless you happen to be at the event in the port of Tel-Aviv this afternoon, here’s what you’re missing out: → Read More
Not to miss an opportunity to make an impression upon hipsters, Mobli is going to squeeze all the juice it can get out of SXSW with a major app revamp, and a party in Austin to boot.
Mobli, which counts Leonardo DiCaprio as one of its investors ($4M funding to date), is dubbing the new version, ‘Mobli 2.0′. Personally I feel they should have gone with ‘The New Mobli’ — zing!
Besides a Pinterest-inspired interface, the new version packs a major upgrade to the camera, along with a set of features to edit, touch-up and enhance photos, all bundled under a new section in the app called, ‘Darkroom’.
Rebuilt from the ground up, the new camera now includes real-time tilt-shift and even real-time video filters. Focus can now be locked and white balance set. This is on top of the 18 brand-new photo filters, superimposed gridlines and a self-timer.
→ Read More
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.
→ Read More
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).
→ Read More
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
San Francisco, CA
