Is MCE Systems the Next Israeli Unicorn? Co-founder Yuval Blumental has led the company thirteen years in the innovation desert to reach the multibillion-dollar promised land with a one-of-a-kind tech platform that now saves telecom giants from a business melt-down
By John Stanly
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Venture Capitalist Aileen Lee coined the term "Unicorn' in 2013 for companies that shot-up to a $1 billion valuation or higher directly from a startup phase. At the time of its creation, the term alluded to the rarity of such companies in the world. Not anymore. There are hundreds of Unicorns globally with over 50 of them originated in the holy-land of Israel that holds the global record for most Unicorns per capita.
Successful IPOs and SPAC deals such as Monday.com, Lemonade, Playtika, ironSource, Fiverr and JFrog have paved the way for other Israeli companies with game-changing technologies to take center-stage of the Unicorn frontier.
Unicorns are not born – they are made.
MCE Systems' Co-Founder and CEO, Yuval Blumental, was considered by many Israeli opinion leaders as "the one that has lost his mind'. In a "Doom's Day' like fashion, Yuval was foretelling the upcoming death of Telecom companies for the better part of the past decade. The expected cause of death was prognosed as simply "staying behind within the technology race and becoming technologically complacent' to the point of total failure to meet the market needs of the mobile operators' technically savvy mobile users.
MCE calls it "Digital Transformation Readiness" and has built an entire economic model to describe the level of any individual Telco's readiness for the digital services age with level "5' describing complete alignment with market needs and level "1' pertaining to a soon-to-be-announced time-of-death for the mobile operator under review.
Yuval's model considers hundreds of macro-economics and micro-consideration parameters in its analysis, but its real benefit lies in the ability to both criticize as well as plot a course out of the looming predicament.
MCE has spent over 13 years in preparing and building an entire technological and consulting ecosystem in anticipation of the telco-catastrophe (who does that?!). Their extensive platform is claimed to save mobile operators from themselves and provide them with the required back-to-business defibrillator jolt.
As stated, no-one took Yuval and his prophecies seriously as his repetitious warnings became muffled by the apparat growth of Telcos over the years, but then, like in all good prophetic stories, the "village crazy' reveals himself as the possible "unexpected' savior.
With a sudden massive declines of ARPU and skyrocketing churn within the global Telco industry, the vast majority have understood that their level of readiness for the digital services transformation was literally non-existent, and they just may pay with their corporate lives for this general oversight.
MCE has become an overnight target of pilgrimage for top-tier mobile operators that have come (finally) to listen over the past two years. In parallel, class-A industry executives joined the company with a clear FOMO settling-in across the industry. Teresa Ostapower (SVP AT&T), Mike Sutcliff (former CEO Accenture), IU Kim (former President SK Telecom), Robert Hackl (SVP Sprint) and others, have pledged their support by joining the cause of Yuval's global Telco-Ais in the past year alone.
The math is simple. MCE's DTR solution enables up to $10 per mobile-user per month in recovered ARPU and accumulated loss-prevention at an acceptable $1 of cost per each such salvaged monthly user income block. This is MCE's 1 dollar, and at 6 billion mobile subscribers globally, MCE's TAM (being the only available solution provider in this arena) represents a potential multibillion-dollar income per annum even at a fractional market penetration.
Major Telcos such as Vodafone, Telefonica, AT&T, Sprint, and O2 have already bought into the MCE lifeline and with these numbers on the table it remains only to see if this unique company is indeed another Israeli Unicorn in the making.
