13 Damboritz at Yigal Arnon agrees: “There is no question that in Israel it’s mainly cyber today. Nonetheless, we see companies growing beautifully also in other spaces such as FinTech and SaaS, and I am not disqualifying any deep tech company from making a good unicorn run. If I had to guess what would be the next up and coming verticals, I would probably guess we are going to see more and more interesting food-tech and ag-tech companies catching the investor eye but who really knows what the future holds.” Hanan Haviv, partner and head of High-Tech at Herzog Fox & Neeman (“Herzog”), said: It is fair to assume that with declining valuations in public markets, especially for companies that recently became public, and the general sense of anxiety in the markets, the next wave of unicorn will be more "humble." Even without that, start-ups and the next generation of unicorns have plenty of challenges to go around. The commercial challenges start with finding “The Right” Idea/need, gaps in skills and business management, heavy competition and of course one of the biggest challenges is hiring andmanaging a team- finding hardworking, resourceful, and skilled professionals may very tough especially with the Israeli tech sector suffering a chronic shortage of tens of thousands of skilled employees. At the end, all of it boils to execution at the right timing. Damboritz at Yigal Arnon: “The commercial challenges that companies are going to find, I believe, are the need to scale quickly and justify the tremendous amounts of money invested in them. In terms of regulatory challenges, we obviously see an increasing requirement to meet global privacy and data protection standards. These are issues that didn’t interest investors just a few years ago, and today are the first questions companies are being asked. However, with innovation being so fast, we mainly see the strong ventures challenging the regulator to keep up with their innovation, forcing the regulator to understand the innovative advancements and adopt relevant policies.” “In terms of the regulatory challenges, lawmakers and regulators often have good intentions when they propose new rules and regulations,” says Haviv at Herzog. “However, the accumulation of regulation over the past If the unicorn club is to grow, what commercial, financial or regulatory challenges do unicorns face?
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgzNzA=