Our first monthly tech news roundup in April was a big hit. Here’s your monthly roundup for May, featuring some of the industry’s most significant stories, developments, and trends—with a focus on the IOD community and our home base in Israel.
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From the IOD Community
IOD Launches ODX
Experience IOD’s new custom content service, the On-Demand Experience Marketplace, (ODX). With our simple, self-service platform, you can curate deep tech content tailored to the industries and topics you’re targeting—cloud, DevOps, cybersecurity, AI/ML, vertical-specific content like insurtech and medtech, and much more.
And we aren’t stopping with tech content. ODX hand picks the most talented and experienced service providers too including SEO, UI/UX, branding and design, and video and podcast production.
IOD Founder Ofir Nachmani on Navigating Crisis
IOD is international and multicultural, working with colleagues and partners across the globe—in Ramallah, Egypt, Turkey, Europe, the United States, and more. We believe in connecting communities and people; we hope that the recent ceasefire will continue and that peace will prevail. Read Ofir’s full position and sentiment here.
Funding Rounds, IPOs and Exits from Stealth…
Fraud Prevention Leader Forter Raises $300M
Forter is now a unicorn! 
While, Forter has been seemingly profitable until now boasting some of the leading companies in the world using their technology – it’s interesting to see that they decided to go for the round F – and with it attained unicorn status. Wondering what’s coming next in the pipe based on this huge round, and another big win for the Cloud Nation.
Israeli Startup Wiz Gets $120M from Salesforce
Asaf Rappaport’s nascent startup is continuing to make waves with a SECOND huge funding round, this time led by Salesforce in less than two years since they’ve been established. We’re following this one to see whether Wiz will have similar success to Adallom.
SimilarWeb Celebrates IPO 14 Years in the Making
Israeli unicorn SimilarWeb demonstrated its digital marketing savvy, getting the word out about its successful IPO with a campaign that included billboards, banners, and videos across multiple channels and sites. Not only was this a big win for the company as a whole, but its employees individually, and their employer branding equity.
We wanted to celebrate our #IPO by thanking our staff as loudly as we could.
— Similarweb (@Similarweb) May 25, 2021
Their reactions are just the cherry 🍒 #staffappreciation pic.twitter.com/O2K9FTIslW
PlanetScale Launches the Database by Developers for Developers
With one of the best teams in the industry—led by former Dropbox, YouTube, and GitHub engineers—PlanetScale promises a dev-first database that, quite simply, you can’t outgrow. So far, it looks sleek and very promising and as to its fundamental value proposition… we so hope it delivers!
Which leads me to this anticlimactic announcement…
TimeScale Raises $40M in Purple Ocean
Timescale, yet another database claiming to be the category-defining database in a purple ocean, raised $40M. We’ll just drop this here, so you don’t think we missed it, but…I guess, it has yet to be determined whether niche players like Timescale will have what it takes to take on highly hyped and well-funded databases like PlanetScale.
Cloud, Cloud, Cloud…
Dr. Werner Vogels on S3’s Enduring Consistency
Amazon’s CTO goes deep on S3, one of the most robust, dependable deep storage solutions in the cloud and data ecosystem.
It’s definitely worth the longer read (10 minutes)—great for lunch or the weekend—and delivers the insight that one would hope for, along with providing a great history lesson—from originating vision to 15 years later today.
Record-Breaking Q1 Cloud Growth
The Big Three and others continue to experience unprecedented growth in cloud services, especially remarkable for such mature and large companies.
And while AWS is the clear leader in market share, the action and intrigue is in seeing if Microsoft or Google can close the gap, and which smaller players continue to prosper. Sit back and enjoy, because the pie is getting a lot bigger too.
