Israel's best-performing tech stock hasn't sold a single product

New York

OCCUPYING a small, second-floor space in the same office park as 3D printing giant Stratasys, a tiny Israeli upstart is trying to sell investors on a future in which physical objects materialise with the press of a button. Nano Dimension is nowhere near achieving that goal, yet somehow has become Israel's best-performing technology stock in 2015.

While Stratasys lost nearly three-quarters of its value last year, the much smaller Nano Dimension rallied 261 per cent. Not bad for a company with no customers or revenue.

This little 3D printing shop, with 44 employees and a market cap of 193 million shekels (S$70.6 million), has become a source of hope for Israeli entrepreneurs struggling to secure venture capital. That's because Nano Dimension took an unorthodox route to raise about US$18 million and become a public company, while managing to avoid the long, costly process of an initial public offering. Nano Dimension found its way onto the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange using what's known as a reverse merger. This involves a private company taking over a public one, bypassing the formalities of an IPO. "We're selling shares like any other public company," said Amit Dror, the chief executive officer of Nano Dimension. "It's just that it happens to be that our case is a public company that's pre-revenue." Reverse mergers have been around for decades, often with less-than-savoury intentions. They were made infamous by the 1980s pump-and-dump schemes portrayed in…