Riskified IPO: Entrepreneurs with no glass ceilings

Riskified successfully completed its Initial Public Offering on NYSE yesterday!

Co-founded in 2012 by Eido Gal (CEO) and Asaf Feldman (CTO), Riskified has very quickly made great strides in the fraud prevention market and crossed the $100M revenue bar only seven years after inception. It defined the online fraud prevention market and grew to be an essential link in every process of online sales. A strategy that proved to be scalable as sales of more and more products and services moved from offline to online. 

With this amazing growth, Riskified joined the impressive lists of Israeli companies that have recently achieved global market leadership, and in some cases, like Riskified, defined the market category which they lead. Defining a market, developing, and leading it to great magnitude, in size of hundreds of millions and more, is an achievement that not many can boast. It’s not only the pinnacle of success, but it also attests to new capabilities that were not part of the Israeli high-tech market, only a decade ago.

Abilities that enable a deep understanding of the market, development of a high-quality value proposition, while constantly fine-tuning the right product-market-sales fit. In the past, only Silicon Valley superstars had owned such abilities, but lately, we see more Israeli companies that share these characteristics, that are defining their target market and are successfully building it. These are the companies that are taking over the digital billboards and screens on NASDAQ and NYSE in the past couple of years. Noteworthy are Walkme…. Taboola (NASDAQ) for content discovery, Talkspace (NASDAQ) for online therapy, Wix (NASDAQ) for web development, Fiverr (NASDAQ) the online marketplace for freelancers, JFrog (NASDAQ) for software distribution, and many many more. Interesting to note that these Israeli companies do not operate in a void. With the maturity of the market, clusters of domains began to appear - with Forter successfully operating alongside Riskified and Outbrain offering similar solutions to Taboola. This is a healthy competitive environment, one which provides the market with with best in class solutions.

This is a new generation of entrepreneurs, all of which are oblivious to past glass ceilings. They are extremely confident in their abilities to build strong teams, talented enough to compete with the world’s best companies and with innovative startups from Silicon Valley. This inherent confidence, combined with the ecosystem that developed in Israel in the last decade, one that can fund, escort, and support growth companies to their IPO and beyond, is what generates the phenomenal success stories we see these days. Eido and Asaf are the perfect examples of this generation. Entrepreneurs that founded Riskified to creatively prevent online frauds, entrepreneurs that understood the customer needs and were not afraid to build an innovative business model and creative go-to-market strategy.

Entrepreneurs that recruited extremely talented employees, sometimes without the relevant experience but with great talent and passion, that paved their way growing and scaling the organization that proved it can live up to the founders’ vision.

This is how the legendary companies of Silicon Valley were born and this is how the new generation of Israeli companies is built. A generation with no glass ceilings, with no inferiority complex towards its Silicon Valley peers, a generation that will successfully pave its way in the ultra-competitive technology market. 

Erez Shachar is a Managing Partner at Qumra Capital and sits on the boards of directors of Riskified, Fiverr and Talkspace