Latest / Israel Tech Daily / Affle buys Perion for $420 million, Intel's Kiryat Gat plant restarts, Bites raises $40 million

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Affle buys Perion for $420 million, Intel's Kiryat Gat plant restarts, Bites raises $40 million · Israel Tech Daily

• 0:00
  Noa: India's Affle is buying the Israeli ad-tech company Perion for about $420 million in cash. Three years ago, Perion was worth more than a billion dollars.
• 0:15
  Noa: Good morning, it's Monday, the second of November. I'm Noa.
• 0:19
  Eli: And I'm Eli.
• 0:20
  Noa: Today, the sale of Perion, Intel's Kiryat Gat plant restarts as workers worry about their jobs, and Bites raises $40 million to train frontline staff.
• 0:30
  Noa: Globes and CTech report that Affle, a digital advertising company from India, has signed a definitive agreement to buy Perion. Affle will pay $11.70 a share in cash, a premium of 34.5 percent over Perion's closing price on Friday, for a total of about $420 million.
• 0:50
  Eli: The context makes that number look small. CTech points out that Perion held about $228 million in cash, deposits and securities at the end of September. Globes says that in April 2023 Perion was worth about seven billion shekels on the market, and it has lost 82 percent since.
• 1:08
  Noa: The trouble started with Microsoft. According to CTech, in 2023 search made up 46 percent of Perion's revenue, and Microsoft's Bing brought in 85 percent of that. Then Microsoft changed how it pays partners like Perion.
• 1:23
  Eli: And it kept happening. Globes says Microsoft changed its Bing pricing again in February, then dropped some publishers in June, and Perion now expects Bing to be under 5 percent of its revenue in the second half. CTech says yearly revenue is projected to fall from nearly $900 million in 2024 to about $400 million this year.
• 1:44
  Noa: Chief executive Tal Jacobson says Perion will keep building its Perion One platform and its AI agent, Outmax, and will keep its brand inside Affle. The deal needs shareholder approval and U.S. antitrust clearance, and is expected to close in early 2027.
• 2:00
  Eli: There's also a go-shop period until the eleventh of December, when Perion can look for a better offer. If the sale goes through, Perion leaves Nasdaq and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, closing a story that began in 1999 as IncrediMail.
• 2:15
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• 2:36
  Noa: Back to the news. Yesterday we told you Intel expects the explosion at its Kiryat Gat plant to cost about $600 million in revenue. Today, Ynetnews reports that production at Fab 28 is resuming after a two-week shutdown, and that some workers there fear layoffs.
• 2:53
  Eli: Intel is Israel's largest tech employer, with about 8,000 people here, according to Ynetnews. One employee told the site it isn't an atmosphere of doom and gloom, but fears of layoffs are coming back. Another said the mood is good and staff believe the company will recover.
• 3:11
  Noa: The blast killed two workers and seriously injured a third. But sources at Intel Israel told Ynetnews that Friday's fall of nearly 30 percent in the stock came mainly from a weaker forecast tied to PC sales, not from the explosion.
• 3:25
  Eli: Intel's response points to third-quarter revenue of $16.5 billion, beating forecasts for the eighth quarter in a row, and 78 percent growth in its data center and AI division. Ynetnews adds that Panther Lake, a processor developed in Israel, now brings in almost a third of Intel's consumer processor revenue.
• 3:45
  Noa: Intel Israel has cut jobs before. Ynetnews says about 1,000 people were laid off around the turn of 2025, with more rounds after that. Today's report describes worry among staff, not any announced plan for new cuts.
• 4:00
  Noa: Next, a funding round. Bites, which trains frontline workers with short AI-made videos, has raised $40 million in a Series A led by PeakSpan Capital, Israel Defense reports. That brings its total funding to $55 million.
• 4:15
  Eli: Existing investors Vertex Ventures, Horizon Capital, Rittenhouse Ventures and Lyra Ventures also joined. Bites was founded in 2020 by Eran Heffetz, Tal Nagler Almog and Hagai Horovitz, and works from New York and Tel Aviv.
• 4:31
  Noa: It's built for people who don't sit at a desk. Each lesson lasts up to 90 seconds and arrives over WhatsApp, text message, Teams or Slack, in more than 150 languages. Customers include Unilever, Coca-Cola and Shake Shack.
• 4:46
  Eli: The company says clients typically get more than 90 percent of employees engaged within three weeks. Its next step, it says, is linking training to sales and HR data, so the system spots a weak area, makes a coaching video and measures whether results improve. The money goes to U.S. expansion, including banking and insurance.
• 5:07
  Noa: One more deal story. ServiceNow's chief executive, Bill McDermott, says the Israeli startup Sweep is helping it move large customers off rival CRM systems in weeks rather than years. CTech reports he said it on last week's earnings call.
• 5:22
  Eli: CTech reported in September that ServiceNow had bought Sweep in a deal estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars, though neither company disclosed a price. Sweep was founded in 2021 by Ido Gaver and Eran Kirshenboim, and had disclosed $46 million in funding.
• 5:39
  Noa: McDermott put it this way: we're talking like days, 30 days, 60 days for a serious company of serious scale. He called the deal a tuck-in.
• 5:48
  Eli: It's a pointed message in a market long dominated by Salesforce. CTech notes Sweep's software already worked across ServiceNow, Salesforce and HubSpot, with customers including Brex and LG Electronics. Two months after the purchase, ServiceNow is putting it at the center of its pitch to analysts.
• 6:07
  Noa: Now the quick round-up.
• 6:09
  Eli: Globes, citing media in India, says Israel Aerospace Industries is set to win a deal worth about $906 million to convert six Boeing 767 passenger jets into refueling aircraft for the Indian Air Force, with at least 30 percent of the work done in India.
• 6:26
  Noa: The Jerusalem Post reports that Fitch sees a higher risk of long political uncertainty after the election. The agency's most likely scenario is the Knesset dissolving in early January and new elections in early April, and the paper says a 2027 budget before then looks unlikely.
• 6:42
  Eli: Elbit Systems will show its unmanned underwater vehicles for the first time at the Euronaval exhibition, Israel Defense reports. They come from Elbit's purchase of International Submarine Engineering and will work alongside its Seagull surface vessels.
• 6:57
  Noa: And CTech profiles Coldi, a young Israeli startup whose AI voice agents make sales calls in more than 30 languages for brokers, insurers and debt collectors. It has raised $500,000 so far, and the company says it started calling in Hebrew in September.
• 7:14
  Eli: What to watch: the go-shop. Until the eleventh of December, Perion's board can look for a higher offer than Affle's, so if a rival buyer exists, we should hear about it in the next few weeks.
• 7:25
  Noa: This episode was brought to you by SkillSim. Recruiting leads screening hundreds of applicants can give each one an identical timed challenge and compare honest answers side by side, so check them out at skillsim.co.
• 7:38
  Noa: Follow Israel Tech Daily in your podcast app, and find more at startuptofollow.com.
• 7:44
  Noa: See you tomorrow morning.