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Monday.com celebrates its IPO at the Nasdaq, June 10, 2021.
Source: Nasdaq

In April, Insight Partners’ Jeff Horing hopped on a flight to Israel for a breakfast with tech CEOs. It was also an opportunity to pay a visit to his firm’s first international office, which had opened less than two years before.

Now, CEOs from two of those companies are visiting him in New York. They’re actually coming to ring the bell on the Nasdaq, as Israel’s high-growth companies line up to hit the public markets.

Last week, collaboration software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor Monday.com held its IPO and closed on Friday with a market cap of $8.2 billion. This week, fellow Israeli software company WalkMe, whose technology is designed to simplify enterprise software and applications, is scheduled to go public with a valuation of up to $2.6 billion

Insight is the biggest investor in both. The firm owns a 43% stake in Monday.com and controls 32% of WalkMe. Its combined ownership in the two companies is currently worth about $3.9 billion.

“For a long time, Israel has been the start-up hub, a hive of activity,” Horing wrote in an email, in response to written questions. “But these start-ups are scaling successfully at a more rapid pace.”

Money is flooding into Israeli tech. The country’s start-ups raised $5.37 billion in the first quarter, more than double the amount a year earlier and 89% above the fourth quarter, which was a record period, according to a report from IVC and law firm Meitar.

Game developer Playtika, based in Herzliya, went public in January and has a market cap of $10.6 billion, making it the fourth most-valuable publicly traded tech company in Israel, according to FactSet. Monday.com ranks fifth and WalkMe is poised to crack the top 10.

For Insight, the launch of an Israeli operation in late 2019 marked the firm’s first office opening outside the U.S. since its founding in 1995. But Insight had been investing in and around Tel Aviv for over two decades.

Horing said the firm did its first deal in Israel in 2000. He highlighted Enigma, a developer of software to manufacturers, and Shunra, a network virtualization company that was acquired by Hewlett-Packard, as two early investments.

“I’ve always loved visiting Israel and have many memories at tiny market restaurants eating incredible food, arguing for hours over different technologies and SaaS strategies,” Horing said. “My team and I spent countless hours flying back and forth to Israel, often spending weeks at a time getting to know entrepreneurs and working alongside our portfolio companies.”

Prior to Monday.com, Insight’s marquee investment had been in website creation software company Wix, which went public in 2013. Insight co-led a $40 million round in 2011 and had a 12% stake at the time of the IPO.

Wix’s stock price has since multiplied 17-fold, giving the company a $15 billion market cap, second only to Check Point Software among Israeli tech companies.

“Wix was a foundational investment for Insight in Israel,” Horing said. Wix co-founder Avishai Abrahami is also on Monday.com’s board. Along with Abrahami and Nir Zohar, Wix’s operating chief, “we’ve co-invested in many Israeli deals over the years,” Horing said.

Acquiring an Israeli firm’s portfolio

The most glaring detail on Monday.com’s cap table is the size of Insight’s stake.

Typically when a venture-backed company goes public with a multibillion-dollar valuation, the top firm would hold no more than 30% of the outstanding shares, often much less.

Insight took a unique approach to get to 43%. In February 2019, seven months before opening its Tel Aviv office, Insight purchased the majority of a fund portfolio held by an Israeli firm called Genesis Partners, whose partners were leaving for other ventures.

Within that fund, which closed in 2009, Genesis had invested in Monday.com’s seed and Series A financing rounds. Insight first came in as part of the $25 million Series B in 2017.

After acquiring the contents of the Genesis fund, Insight was able to merge the two firms’ holdings, building a stake that’s now worth $3.1 billion. Genesis was also an early investor in two other Insight-backed companies: online music learning company JoyTunes and business intelligence company Sisense.

Monday.com co-founder and co-CEO Roy Mann told CNBC that Insight was tapping into a big change happening in Israeli tech.

“They had a very strong conviction in Israel and the Israeli ecosystem,” Mann said in an interview after the IPO. “The whole industry matured to a level where entrepreneurs want to build big companies and want to hold them for a long time. Insight was early on to recognize that and really go and back a lot of amazing Israeli companies.”

Horing joined co-founders Mann and Eran Zinman in ringing the Nasdaq’s opening bell on Thursday. The company also had 250 employees come in from cities across the U.S.

Horing will have the opportunity to do it again this week for the WalkMe IPO. In 2017, Insight led a $75 million investment in WalkMe. By following on over the course of two more financing rounds, Insight built up a 32% stake that’s worth $750 million at the top end of WalkMe’s IPO range.

Horing said Insight now has 80 “operating experts” in Israel working with portfolio companies and has expanded in Tel Aviv to take over the space formerly occupied by JFrog, which went public on the Nasdaq last year.

As for what Horing finds most exciting coming out of Israel these days, he said there’s no shortage of opportunities to put money to work.

“Israel is firing on all cylinders,” he said. “Of course cyber is a strong sector but it is much broader to a wide group of SaaS, infrastructure, fintech, gaming, and ad tech.”

WATCH: JFrog CEO on the company’s public debut and outlook

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Trump says a 25% tariff ‘must be paid by Apple’ on iPhones not made in the U.S.

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Trump says a 25% tariff 'must be paid by Apple' on iPhones not made in the U.S.

US President Donald Trump (r) and Apple CEO Tim Cook speak to the press during a tour of the Flextronics computer manufacturing facility where Apple’s Mac Pros are assembled in Austin, Texas, on November 20, 2019.

Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Images

President Donald Trump said in a social media post Friday morning that Apple will have to pay a tariff of 25% or more for iPhones made outside the United States.

“I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone’s that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else. If that is not the case, a Tariff of at least 25% must be paid by Apple to the U.S.,” Trump said on Truth Social.

Shares of Apple fell more than 2% in premarket trading.

Production of Apple’s flagship phone happens primarily in China, but the country has been shifting manufacturing to India in part because that country has a friendlier trade relationship with the U.S..

Some Wall Street analysts have estimated that moving iPhone production to the U.S. would raise the price of the Apple smartphone by at least 25%. Wedbush’s Dan Ives put the estimated cost of a U.S. iPhone $3,500. The iPhone 16 Pro currently retails for about $1,000.

This is the latest jab at Apple from Trump, who over the past couple weeks has ramped up pressure on the company and Cook to increase domestic manufacturing. Politico previously reported that Trump and Cook met at the White House on Tuesday.

Cook gave $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and attended the inauguration in January. Apple has announced a $500 billion spend on U.S. development, including AI server production in Houston.

Apple declined to comment for this story.

Trump has made public criticisms of other major U.S. companies, including Walmart, during his trade war push, but the levies on a specific consumer product is a new step. The exact legal mechanism for the tariff is unclear.

As Apple is caught in the U.S. president’s crosshairs, the company is also seeing weak demand in China. On Friday the company hiked trade-in incentives for iPhones in China.

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Apple raises trade-in prices for iPhones in China to spur demand in key market

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Apple raises trade-in prices for iPhones in China to spur demand in key market

People stand in front of an Apple store in Beijing, China, on April 9, 2025.

Tingshu Wang | Reuters

Apple on Friday raised the amount of money people can get off their next iPhone in China by trading in their old device, rolling out further incentives to spur demand in a crucial market.

The iPhone 15 Pro Max now has a trade-in value of up to 5,700 Chinese yuan ($791), an increase from 5,625 yuan previously. For reference, a brand new iPhone 15 Pro Max starts at 7,999 yuan in China. The iPhone 15 Pro model can now be traded in for up to 4,750 yuan, up from 4,725 prior.

There are also trade-in value increases across other models too.

Apple has looked to offer discounts over the last year, especially around holiday periods in China. While the latest hikes are not huge, they signal Apple’s ongoing desire to galvanize sales in the world’s second largest economy, where it has faced falling market share and declining sales amid tougher competition from local rivals.

In the first quarter of the year, Apple’s China shipments fell 8% year-on-year, while the company’s share of the smartphone market in the country declined from 15% to 13%, according to data from Canalys. Apple also reported this month that sales in its Greater China region, which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan, fell slightly on an annual basis.

But Apple’s China headache goes beyond sales to questions over its supply chain and products. While U.S. President Donald Trump has paused most tariffs on China for now, there is still an ongoing discussion about whether chips and other electronics may receive a special duty.

Apple, which makes around 90% of its iPhones in China via its manufacturing partner Foxconn, has been looking to move more production to India — though Trump has also voiced displeasure with that. The White House leader said this month that he told Apple CEO Tim Cook he doesn’t want the company building products in India and would rather them make devices in the U.S.

Apple’s biggest challengers number Xiaomi and Huawei, with the latter seeing a stunning revival in its home market over the last 17 months thanks to breakthroughs in chips and aggressive launches of new devices.

Xiaomi, which was the biggest player by market share in China in the first quarter, has meanwhile been ramping up its presence in the high-end device space to directly compete with Apple. On Thursday, the company launched the Xiaomi 15S Pro smartphone that contains an in-house developed chip — something very few companies in the world have managed to do successfully.

Xiaomi has also committed nearly $7 billion to develop more chips over the next 10 years, signaling its ambition to compete with Apple and Huawei.

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BYD beats Tesla in European EV sales despite EU tariffs in ‘watershed moment,’ report says

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BYD beats Tesla in European EV sales despite EU tariffs in 'watershed moment,' report says

Though the difference between the two brands’ monthly sales totals is relatively small, the implications of BYD beating out Tesla “are enormous,” says Felipe Munoz, global automotive analyst at JATO Dynamics.

Jaap Arriens | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Despite incurring a higher tariff rate than Tesla, Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD sold more pure battery electric vehicles in Europe for the first time ever last month — a “watershed moment” for the region’s car market, according to a report from JATO Dynamics.

New car registrations data from the automotive intelligence firm shows that BYD’s Europe volumes rose 359% in April from last year as the company continues its global expansion efforts.

Over the same period, Tesla reported yet another monthly drop, with total volumes down 49%, JATO said. That follows protests against CEO Elon Musk and the company in the region. JATO’s data comes from 28 European nations.

BYD’s success in the EU comes despite the economic bloc’s imposition of punitive tariffs on battery EVs made in China last October. The EU attributed the move to unfair trade practices.

The punitive tariffs appeared to be favorable to Tesla, assigning its made-in-China vehicles a 7.8% duty compared with BYD’s 17%. Other Chinese EV makers were given tariffs as high as about 35%. The EU also has a standard 10% car import duty.

Emerging battleground

Felipe Munoz, global automotive analyst at JATO, said the difference between the two EV makers’ April sales was relatively small, but that the implications of BYD beating out Tesla “are enormous.”

JATO added that BYD is also beating well-established European car brands across the region, outselling Fiat and Seat in France, for example.

“This is a watershed moment for Europe’s car market, particularly when you consider that Tesla has led the European BEV market for years, while BYD only officially began operations beyond Norway and the Netherlands in late 2022,” Munoz said.

BYD’s growth comes even before production begins at its new plant in Hungary, which is expected to become the center of European production operations.

“Europe is emerging as a central battleground between BYD and Tesla,” Liz Lee, associate director at technology market research firm Counterpoint Research, told CNBC. She added that the region is expected to experience higher electric vehicle market growth this year than China, which already has high EV penetration.

The tariffs have provided more impetus for Chinese EV makers like BYD to localize manufacturing in the region, according to Lee. Tesla is also reportedly working on plans to expand its manufacturing base in Germany.

JATO’s report said that while tariffs had an initial impact on the sales of Chinese automakers, the companies have mitigated it by expanding and diversifying their European line-ups with the introduction of plug-in hybrids.

“China is not only the world leader in BEVs; its automakers are global leaders in plug-in hybrid vehicles too,” Munoz said. 

Battery EVs run entirely on electricity, while hybrid vehicles combine an electric battery with an internal combustion engine. Hybrid vehicles have not yet been targeted by EU tariffs.

Meanwhile, there has been growing demand in the region’s EV segment, with JATO data showing that registrations of battery EVs and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles are up by 28% and 31%, respectively, despite declines among internal combustion engine vehicles. 

Registrations of all electric vehicles made by Chinese automakers in April rose by 59% year on year, reaching almost 15,300 units in April, the report added.

Ahead of the EU’s tariff decision last year, Rhodium had predicted that tariffs would need to be as high as 55% for the European market to be unattractive for Chinese EV exporters.

In March, it was revealed that Tesla, which only sells pure battery vehicles, fell behind BYD in total annual sales. 

Tesla’s shares have fallen over 10% over the same period amid blowback from Musk’s involvement with the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump. The CEO recently committed to leading Tesla for the next five years. 

BYD shares were up 3.9% in Hong Kong trading on Friday and have surged about 78% year to date.

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