Ecus Agri-Food raised $11m from private investors and gained a credit line from Corfo, the Chilean economic development agency, for $19m.

Sadara Ventures, Palestine-based venture capital firm backed by Cisco and Google, has led a $1m round in local travel agency Yamsafer.

Alongside Robert Bosch Venture Capital (RBVC) in the A round, were venture firms I2BF Global Ventures and Waarde Capital.

Teva still owns a minority stake in Alcobra, Globes added and said former Teva vice-president of innovative ventures, Aharon Schwartz, is now Alcobra's chairman.

In November 2010, RedHill Biopharma, an Israel-based biopharmaceutical company started the year before, raised more than $10m from a consortium including mutual fund manager Fidelity Investments' Biosciences venture capital (VC) team.

WPP said it regarded this decade as very much the decade of Latin America, particularly with the FIFA World Cup taking place in Brazil in 2014 and the Olympics in Rio in 2016.

Northgate Capital, which is majority owned by India-based financial services group Religare Enterprises, backs video marketing company TubeMogul, after deals backing US-based social data company DataSift in November and US-based IT infrastructure company Scale Computing in October.

Google launches Campus Tel-Aviv, a start-up incubator for pre-seed stage computing startups in Israel.