Companies from all over the world are continuing to consider Israel as a viable option for investment in the high-tech sectors. This has been proven again as it has been reported by The Wall Street Journal that corporate giant Microsoft has signed a letter of intent for investing over two hundred million dollars in the purchase of the Tel Aviv firm Equivio. Both sides are very quiet at this time on the purchase but it sends the message to others that the State of Israel is open and ready for business from International firms.
The rumors about the above potential transaction first surfaced weeks ago according to the Law Technology Review. Equivio is a world leader in the platform for predictive coding and text analytics and has a flagship product called Zoom. There are currently two highly specialized versions for both information governance and e-discovery. The algorithms generalize samples of texts marked as relevant to the issue at hand to apply the sorting logic to groups of texts, such as legal documentation.
This groundbreaking technology is used by many in the legal field that provides litigation support services to law firms and corporate legal departments. The purpose of the software is to extract data that is relevant from huge quantities of data in a short period of time. This is a huge timesaver when it comes to getting what is key in legal documents. As of this writing, Equivio has over eighty clients outside of Israel that use this technology with high-level groups on board such as the U.S Department of Justice, KPMG, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, and the Federal Trade Commission. You can see why Microsoft is interested in acquiring this Israeli company with a strong list of posted clients such as these.
The company is located in a suburb of Tel Aviv The firm was founded only ten years ago in 2004 by Amir Milo, CEO, and Yiftach Ravid, VP of Engineering along with Warwick Sharp, VP of marketing and business development. In addition to the offices in Israel, the firm also has a customer support center based out in Maryland in the USA.
.We will see how this all transpires over the coming weeks, but it is a good sign for the Israeli hi-tech industry
