Latest / Israel Tech Daily / Paragon heads for Nasdaq, Bluevine sells for $340 million, and OpenWeb files for insolvency

Transcript

Paragon heads for Nasdaq, Bluevine sells for $340 million, and OpenWeb files for insolvency · Israel Tech Daily

• 0:00
  Tamar: Paragon, the Israeli spyware maker founded by veterans of Unit 8200, is heading for Nasdaq at a valuation of one and a quarter billion dollars.
• 0:09
  Eli: And on the very same day, its CEO told investors he's leaving to start something new.
• 0:20
  Tamar: Hello, and welcome to the very first episode of Israel Tech Daily. It's Monday, the twenty-eighth of September. I'm Tamar.
• 0:28
  Eli: And I'm Eli. Every morning we take the last day of news from Israel's tech industry, the rounds, the exits, the launches and the trouble, and explain it in about six minutes. Every source is linked in the show notes.
• 0:42
  Tamar: Today: Paragon's SPAC deal, a three hundred and forty million dollar exit for Bluevine, and a painful end for OpenWeb. Let's start with Paragon.
• 0:51
  Tamar: Globes and CTech report that Paragon has signed a definitive agreement to merge with Bold Eagle, a special purpose acquisition company listed on Nasdaq. The deal values the business at one point two five billion dollars before new money comes in.
• 1:05
  Eli: A bit of history helps here. Paragon was founded by former prime minister Ehud Barak with senior veterans of 8200, including Ehud Schneorson, who commanded the unit, and his deputy Idan Nurick. In late 2024 it was sold to AE Industrial, an American defense investor, for up to nine hundred million dollars.
• 1:26
  Eli: AE merged it with one of its portfolio companies, REDLattice, a cyber firm in Virginia. It's that combined company going public now.
• 1:34
  Tamar: And Paragon is most of it. According to Globes, the two companies brought in two hundred and sixty-seven million dollars over the past year, and Paragon supplied more than two hundred million of that. It has around six hundred and fifty of the combined seven hundred and fifty employees, in Israel.
• 1:51
  Eli: The deal comes with three hundred and thirty-five million dollars of committed capital, anchored by Loomis, Sayles and Company. And it's worth remembering what Paragon sells. Like NSO, it lets governments covertly install surveillance software on phones. It stopped serving Italy's government after a scandal over the surveillance of Italian journalists.
• 2:11
  Tamar: Now the twist. Globes reports that CEO Idan Nurick will step down in about two months to found a new, yet unnamed cyber company. US funds are already lining up, including Sequoia's Sean Maguire and Omri Casspi's Swish Fund, at a valuation in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
• 2:30
  Eli: Globes says the founding team isn't settled yet. Schneorson is expected to join at some point, but the timing hasn't been set. Investors are backing the name before the company even exists.
• 2:41
  Tamar: Next, an exit. Valley National Bancorp, the parent of the American bank Valley National, is buying the Israeli-founded fintech Bluevine for three hundred and forty million dollars. That's seventy-five percent cash and twenty-five percent stock.
• 2:56
  Eli: Bluevine was founded in 2013 by Eyal Lifshitz and Nir Klar. It runs a digital bank for American small businesses, with about one hundred and seventy-five thousand active customers and around two point one billion dollars in deposits. Its headquarters are in New Jersey, but it has an R&D center in Tel Aviv.
• 3:15
  Tamar: About one hundred and eighty engineers and R&D staff move to the bank, and Lifshitz becomes Valley's head of small business banking.
• 3:23
  Eli: There's an Israeli thread on the buyer's side too. Valley bought Bank Leumi USA in 2022 for one point two billion dollars, and it has been working with Israeli startups and venture funds ever since. CTech notes the bank expects its tangible book value to dip by about five percent, and to earn that back in roughly three years.
• 3:44
  Tamar: Now the hard story of the day. OpenWeb, the company behind the comment sections on many big news sites, has opened insolvency proceedings and asked the court for a stay of proceedings. TheMarker reports that CEO Jim Daly told employees in a letter on Monday.
• 3:59
  Eli: It's a steep fall. OpenWeb started in 2012 as Spot.im, raised about four hundred million dollars, and in 2022 it was valued at one and a half billion. Calcalist reported the filing too. We'll follow what the court process means for its staff and its publisher customers.
• 4:16
  Tamar: One launch to finish the big stories. Base44, the AI app builder Wix owns, has released Base Code, and CTech says it's a direct challenge to Claude Code and Cursor.
• 4:27
  Eli: The pitch is that it runs in the cloud instead of on a developer's laptop. You connect your GitHub repositories, an agent learns the codebase and sets up the whole environment, and then a product manager or designer can ask for a change in plain English. The change goes out as a pull request, so engineers still review it.
• 4:46
  Tamar: Base44's chief product officer, Yoav Orlev, told Calcalist the difference is that everyone sees the changes live, instead of one developer seeing them on one machine.
• 4:56
  Eli: Now the quick round-up.
• 4:57
  Tamar: Ibex Investors has closed eighty-seven million dollars for its second secondary fund. It buys existing shares in mature Israeli tech companies, which gives founders, employees and early investors a way to cash out before an exit.
• 5:11
  Eli: Noa Argamani, who was held hostage in Gaza for two hundred and forty-six days, has joined Vine Ventures full time. CTech says the fund manages about five hundred million dollars. Her job is helping Israeli startups break into the American market.
• 5:26
  Tamar: Maris-Tech, from Rehovot, says it has won a ten million dollar order for video systems on next-generation military aircraft. It's the company's largest contract ever, and follow-on orders could take it to about fourteen million.
• 5:39
  Eli: And Nvidia has launched a safety platform for AI agents, with a monitor called Sentry that can stop an agent that goes beyond its limits. According to BigGo Finance, Sentry runs on BlueField chips developed at Nvidia's Israeli R&D center.
• 5:55
  Tamar: One thing to watch. OpenWeb's court filing. The next few days should show whether there's a buyer or a rescue plan, and what happens to its employees.
• 6:04
  Eli: And whether the Paragon news changes anything for Nurick's new company. We'll be on it.
• 6:09
  Tamar: That's Israel Tech Daily for today. If this was useful, follow the show wherever you're listening, and read our startup profiles at Startup to Follow dot com.
• 6:18
  Eli: Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow morning.