Top 5 most promising AI startups in Israel - 2024
Exodigo, Pinecone, FundGuard, Robust Intelligence, and D-ID were the highest ranked AI companies in this year's list of the 50 most promising Israeli startups
This month Calcalist published its annual list of the Top 50 Most Promising Israeli Startups. One sector that continued to thrive was AI. Many of the companies featured this year are superstars in their own right, but we wanted to highlight the top 5 companies that made a splash in Startup Nation this year.
Exodigo
Sector: Underground mapping using AI | Established: 2021 | Founders: Jeremy Suard and Ido Gonen | Employees: 216 in Israel, the U.S., and the UK | Funding: $118 million from Greenfield Partners, Zeev Ventures, Square Peg, 10D, JIBE, National Grid Partners, Waxman Govrin Geva, Tidhar, and Israel-Canada
Exodigo, which has already raised over $100 million, was founded by alumni of the IDF’s intelligence units. They veered from tradition by opting not to establish yet another cyber company, as most army intelligence graduates do, but to develop an AI solution for underground mapping, produced through simulation of multiple sensors, 3D imaging, data fusion, and a proprietary AI platform. Its technology allows for subterranean infrastructures and various subsoil features to be identified on a map without the need for time-consuming and costly digging operations.
Pinecone
Sector: AI | Established: 2019 | Founder: Edo Liberty | Employees: 150 in Israel, Europe, and the USA | Funding: $140 million from Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ Growth, Menlo Ventures, and Wing Ventures Capital
Since introducing the vector database in 2021, Pinecone’s innovative technology has disrupted the $9 billion search infrastructure market and made the company a critical component of the fast-growing $110 billion Generative AI market. Its vector database lets engineers work with data generated and consumed by Large Language Models (LLMs) and other AI models, making it an important infrastructure technology for building commercial AI products that are scalable, reliable, and accurate.
FundGuard
Sector: AI-based cloud | Established: 2018 | Founders: Lior Yogev, Yaniv Zecharya, and Uri Katz | Employees: 120 in Israel, Great Britain, Canada, and the USA | Funding: $150 million from Key1 Capital, Euclidean Capital, Hamilton Lane, Blumberg Capital, Team8, Citi, State Street
FundGuard has developed a cloud-native SaaS platform for investment management and administration that is powered by AI. FundGuard helps asset managers and their service providers to manage mutual funds, ETFs, hedge funds, insurance products, and pension funds, supporting digital transformation, operations automation, AI-based insights, resiliency, and migration to the cloud.
Robust Intelligence
Sector: AI | Established: 2019 | Founders: Yaron Singer, Kojin Oshiba | Employees: 65 in the U.S., Japan, and Israel | Funding: $34 million from Tiger Global and Sequoia
Robust Intelligence develops an AI Firewall that envelopes the organization’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) model, monitoring and correcting data that causes mistakes and risks in real time. The product inspects the data before it is entered into the AI model using advanced machine learning techniques, alerting and correcting the data in real time, thus preventing the model from erring.
D-ID
Sector: Artificial Intelligence | Established: 2017 | Founders: Gil Perry, Sella Blondheim, and Eliran Kuta | Employees: 90 in Israel and the U.S. | Funding: $48 million from Pitango, OurCrowd, Macquarie, Maverick, AXA Ventures, Y Combinator
D-ID's main business today is "the humanization of bots", so that we feel more comfortable talking to them. The human digital market is huge and is estimated at half a trillion dollars. The company focuses on the niche of marketing and sales, and sells companies a solution that produces characters that look and sound completely human. D-ID is of course aware of the ethical problems that its technology may produce and for that purpose, they recruited an advisory committee made up of experts in the field.
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