Google in Advanced Talks to Acquire Cybersecurity Startup Wiz for Whopping $30 Bn

Google's parent company, Alphabet, is reportedly in advanced negotiations to acquire the cloud cybersecurity startup Wiz for approximately $30 billion. This deal, if finalized, would mark one of the largest acquisitions in 2025 and significantly bolster Google Cloud's cybersecurity capabilities.

Wiz, founded in 2020 by former Israeli military officers, specializes in AI-powered cloud security solutions and has rapidly grown to become a major player in the industry.

Notably, Wiz had previously turned down an acquisition offer from Google in 2024, opting instead to pursue independent growth. However, renewed interest from Google has led to these ongoing discussions.

The cloud cybersecurity startup has received investments from several prominent entities. Among its key investors are Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Insight Partners, Cyberstarts, and Andreessen Horowitz. These firms have contributed significantly to Wiz's rapid ascent and impressive valuation in the cybersecurity sector.

Headquartered in New York city, Wiz has strong ties to Israel, as it was co-founded by a team of Israeli entrepreneurs, including Assaf Rappaport, Yinon Costica, Ami Luttwak, and Roy Reznik. These founders previously worked together at Microsoft, where they led the Azure Cloud Security Group. Additionally, they had earlier founded Adallom, another cybersecurity company, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2015.

Although Wiz is headquartered in New York City, it maintains a significant presence in Israel, with a substantial portion of its workforce based there. This connection highlights Israel's reputation as a global hub for cybersecurity innovation.

Google's potential acquisition of Wiz for $30 billion would be a landmark deal in the cybersecurity industry, significantly outpacing most recent acquisitions in terms of value.

Last year, Thoma Bravo's Acquisition of Darktrace for $5.3 billion, which was considered a major deal at the time. However, it pales in comparison to the scale of Google's proposed deal.

Another notable acquisition in 2024 was CyberArk's $1.5 billion acquisition of Venafi, aimed at enhancing its security offerings.

Sophos announced its intent to acquire SecureWorks for $859 million, focusing on expanding its managed detection and response capabilities.

Fortinet's Acquired Next DLP to bolster its secure access service edge (SASE) platform, though the financial terms were undisclosed.

Google's move to acquire Wiz would not only dwarf these deals in monetary terms but also underscore the growing importance of cloud security in the tech landscape. It reflects a broader trend of tech giants investing heavily in cybersecurity to address evolving threats and secure their cloud ecosystems.

Cloudera Acquiring Israel-based Octopai's Data Lineage and Catalog Platform

Cloudera has announced its plans to acquire Octopai, an Israel-based company specializing in data lineage and catalog platforms. This acquisition aims to enhance Cloudera's metadata management capabilities, providing enterprises with improved data discoverability, quality, and governance.

Founded in 2016, by Amnon Drori, Gal Ziton, and Itai Kahalani, Octopai is an Israel-based startup company founded in 2016 that specializes in automated metadata management. Octopai - Data Lineage and Catalog Platform Business is a unit of Octopai.

The acquisition will bolster Cloudera's ability to manage metadata across hybrid environments, ensuring that enterprises have a unified view of their data.

Octopai's platform enables quick and efficient data discovery within complex, hybrid environments. The integration will help trace data origins and transformations, improving data quality and governance.

The combined capabilities will support AI, machine learning, and predictive analytics initiatives by providing trusted data.

Octopai's automated solutions help enterprises comply with regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA through comprehensive data mapping.

The founders of Octopai, Amnon Drori, Gal Ziton, and Itai Kahaani, founded the company in 2016 out of frustration with the challenges organizations faced in understanding and managing large data systems. Their vision was to create an advanced automated data lineage platform to provide unprecedented visibility into data landscapes.

With this acquisition, Cloudera bolsters its rich metadata management with Octopai’s market leading data discovery and data lineage capabilities, enabling customers to understand and trust their data across not just the Cloudera platform but the entire enterprise ecosystem. Together, Cloudera and Octopai will help reinvent how customers manage their metadata and track lineage across all their data sources

This acquisition is expected to close before the end of November 2024 and will significantly enhance Cloudera's data management, governance, and AI capabilities.

Besides the recent acquisition of Octopai, Cloudera has been actively expanding its capabilities through strategic acquisitions. In 2021, Cloudera acquired Cask, a data engineering platform that helps organizations build and manage data pipelines more efficiently.

In 2019, Cloudera acquired Arcadia Data, a provider of a unified self-service data visualization and analytics platform.

In 2017, Cloudera acquired StreamSets, a data integration platform that simplifies the process of building and managing data pipelines.

NVIDIA Acquiring Israeli Startup Run:AI

NVIDIA has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Run:ai, a Kubernetes-based workload management and orchestration software provider. This Israeli startup focuses on promoting efficient cluster resource utilization for AI workloads across shared accelerated computing infrastructure.

The value of the acquisition has not been disclosed, but estimates suggest it could be around $700 million to $1 billion. This move reflects NVIDIA's commitment to enhancing AI infrastructure management and supporting customers in maximizing their AI computing resources.

Run:ai has built an open platform on Kubernetes, the orchestration layer for modern AI and cloud infrastructure. It supports all popular Kubernetes variants and integrates with third-party AI tools and frameworks.

As AI deployments become increasingly complex, with workloads distributed across cloud, edge, and on-premises data center infrastructure, managing and orchestrating generative AI, recommender systems, search engines, and other workloads requires sophisticated scheduling to optimize performance at the system level and on the underlying infrastructure.

Run:ai's platform enables enterprise customers to manage and optimize their compute infrastructure, whether on premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid environments. The company has built an open platform on Kubernetes, which serves as the orchestration layer for modern AI and cloud infrastructure. It supports all popular Kubernetes variants and integrates with third-party AI tools and frameworks.

NVIDIA plans to continue offering Run:ai's products under the same business model for the immediate future. Additionally, NVIDIA will invest in the Run:ai product roadmap as part of NVIDIA DGX Cloud—an AI platform co-engineered with leading clouds for enterprise developers, offering an integrated, full-stack service optimized for generative AI. NVIDIA DGX and DGX Cloud customers will gain access to Run:ai's capabilities, particularly for large language model deployments.

NVIDIA has been active in the acquisition space, expanding its portfolio to enhance its offerings. Some of the notable recent acquisitions by NVIDIA — OmniML (March 2023), Excelero (April 2022) and Bright Computing (February 2022).

Israel-based Rapyd Acquiring PayU's Global Payments Organisation (GPO) for $610 Mn, To Enable PayU Focus on India Fintech Biz

Rapyd, Israel's fintech-as-a-service startup, is acquiring PayU’s Global Payments Organisation (GPO) for a total cash consideration of $610 million. The transaction will enable PayU to focus on the large payments and fintech opportunity in India, announced the company.

The acquisition of PayU Global Payment Organisation (GPO) does not include PayU’s India, Turkey and Southeast Asia operations.

PayU is a payments and fintech business of Prosus, a Netherlands-based consumer internet group and a technology investor that operates and invests in markets with long-term growth potential.

PayU’s GPO business provides advanced ecommerce payment solutions for global merchants in over 30 countries across Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe and Africa. The business contributes around 30% of PayU's overall revenues. In FY23, total payment volumes for GPO grew 12% year-on-year to US$34bn. This is around 3x growth in 5 years.

PayU will now focus on the "rapidly growing Indian payments and credit business", according to a statement from Prosus, under its subsidiary PayU India, through which it is serving more than 450,000 merchants and more than 2m credit customers.

For Rapyd, the acquisition of PayU GPO expands its global reach, strengthening its position in key vertical markets including eCommerce, logistics and transportation.

PayU CEO Laurent le Moal, said,"PayU's payments business is one of the largest, fastest growing, and most profitable non-banking businesses in India, with 42% year on year growth in the last year alone." Overall, India's digital financial services opportunity remains large and underserved, providing healthy growth for PayU India".

According to the company's consolidated financial statement for 2023, PayU's India business alone generated $399 million in revenue in FY23, growing 31% year on year.

To recall, in October last year, Prosus had terminated a $4.7 billion deal to buy Indian payments firm BillDesk despite receiving approval from the Competition Commission of India (CCI).

Prosus is majority-owned by South African multinational Naspers, and through its subsidiary Prosus, Naspers has claimed to have invested close to $6 billion in Indian technology companies since 2005.

In July 2021, Prosus, along with SoftBank, led the $1.25 billion financing round of Swiggy and holds about ~ 38% stake in the Indian food delivery giant.

Golda, The Largest Israeli Ice-cream Franchise Chain With 130+ Branches, Launches Its Ordering and Delivery Experience Using DelivApp SaaS Platform

TEL AVIV, Israel, March 12, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Golda, the largest Israeli ice-cream franchise chain with over 130 branches in the country, launches its own delivery service using the platform of an Israeli startup DelivApp

“Today, delivery has evolved from a nice-to-have to one of our core offerings,” explains Yaron Golan, CEO of Anita Group & Golda Ice Cream. “Wolt and other third-party platforms did a great job educating consumers, but we could no longer ignore the economics. Golda chain operates at the forefront of innovation, and the launch of our new delivery app is our way to improve our service and allow millions of our customers enjoy exclusive benefits, for example, collecting bonus points in the digital wallet. The new app will also allow us to reach additional customers and continue growing our market share. While selecting a technology vendor, we conducted an in-depth due diligence in Israel and abroad. We chose DelivApp, their stellar platform and the team made the decision simple for us.”

Users of the new Golda app, enjoy an online ordering experience similar to the one Golda stores provide. The digital menu features a wide variety of flavors, toppings, yogurt and more. Digital customers benefit from special offers and promos, collect, and spend loyalty program bonus points. Those who prefer to order by phone can also do so easily via a call-center. Once an order is placed, it goes to a selected branch, from which it is automatically dispatched to Golda’s own courier fleet or to one of its partners such as Yango Delivery, Wolt Drive or a local provider. The entire process from ordering to delivery is powered by the DelivApp platform.

“Our mission is to allow businesses like Golda to establish themselves as digital brands and run online operations that are both delightful for customers and profitable for businesses,” says DelivApp’s co-founder and CEO Yan Zagatsky. “Today, this is critical more than ever: if you only rely on delivery aggregators, you compromise on your profit margins. Our product helps our customers to build a solution that is tailored to their unique needs, sell directly to their consumers, serve them well and win their loyalty.”

About DelivApp

DelivApp is a SaaS platform for managing and orchestrating on-demand food delivery. Headquartered in Israel, DelivApp serves restaurants and delivery fleets globally and provides them with a white-label marketplace ordering experience, loyalty program, merchant portal and app, dispatcher’s dashboard, courier app, consumer tracking functionality, access to external fulfillment options, and more.

About Golda

Golda, the largest Israeli ice-cream franchise chain, established in 2010 by the Avital family, who led the ice cream revolution in Israel, starting with the Anita Gelato chain in Tel-Aviv, which has become an international brand. Today, Golda operates more than 130 branches in Israel.

Contacts

Katya Rozenoer
Mobile: +972545439934
Email: katya-r@delivapp.com

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/3b7fcac6-cd61-4f89-8208-fa0eff9ca56e

Israel-based Wonder Robotics Launches Autonomous Drone Solution With a $4 Mn Seed Round

This new solution allows drones to land safely and autonomously, enabling commercial use of drones at scale

Wonder Robotics, a technology company specializing in the autonomous flight and landing of commercial drones, announced the closing of a $4 million fundraising round led by Elron Ventures, in conjunction with Besadno Investment Group. The funds will be used to scale up operation and marketing efforts, while developing technology for additional applications.

Safe autonomous operation is this market’s enabler and at the heart of the rapidly developing drone regulation, and is being strongly promoted by the biggest industry players. Currently, the technology for operating drones beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) is lacking, which hinders the ability to provide safe, autonomous drone flights, making the commercialization of drones expensive and unscalable. As a response, Wonder Robotics developed their unique “WonderLand” for precise autonomous landings, that can be installed on any drone. Clearing landing zones in real-time, enables emergency autonomous contingency landings, in unprepared, uncharted, and unattended sites.

Wonder Robotics’ smart safety layer includes vertical awareness and robust precision landing, permitting drone safety beyond the operator/mission manager’s visual line of sight. In urban environments, this can prevent collisions with people and natural and infrastructural impediments such as trees, cables, buildings, and other dynamic environmental factors.

“We are thrilled to take part in the drone revolution, by partnering with major industry players leveraging on our technology to launch their commercial multi-drone operations,” said Idan Shimon, co-founder, and CEO of Wonder Robotics. “Since raising the seed round, we have partnered with Spright, Air Methods’ new drone division, helping it realize its mission to improve access to urgently needed medical supplies for healthcare providers.”

Wonder Robotics believe that their technology is ideal for commercial package delivery, infrastructure inspection, mapping, and advanced urban mobility for people (UAM). Their vision is to expand their offering to include horizontal situational awareness for navigation, obstacle detection, avoidance, and safe precision landing in the case of denied GPS.

"Wonder Robotics' founding team are true industry experts and have the knowledge and technical expertise needed to enable a market waiting to take off, and establish WonderLand as an industry standard," said Lauren Duke, Vice President of Business Development at Elron Ventures.

"Our investment in Wonder Robotics is perfectly aligned to our strategy of investing in domains where we can provide added value, by leveraging on our strategic partnership with Rafael and its validation platform for deep-tech ventures," added Kobi Katz, Partner, and CTO at Elron Ventures and former VP and CIO at Rafael.

Indoor Drone Tech Startup Indoor Robotics Raises $15 Mn in Series A to Revolutionize Building Monitoring and Security Practices

Image © - www.indoor-robotics.com

Tando™ is the world’s first commercially available indoor drone

"Indoor Robotics’ Tando™, the world’s first commercially available indoor drone, enables enhanced building security and monitoring. “We combined human-like capabilities with AI tools to enable next-generation security and monitoring,” says Doron Ben David, co-founder, and CEO.

Indoor Robotics, an indoor drone technology company that recently launched Tando™ drone, announced the closing of a $15 million in series A funding. The round of funding was led by Pitango and included Target Global, European Innovation Council Fund, and Spider Capital. This round enables Indoor Robotics to boost product development and enable intelligent indoor security worldwide.

Developing an autonomous indoor security robot has challenged robotics designers for years. While some ground-based robots are commercially available, ordinary items like a chair or a step can prevent them from fully securing an area. Indoor Robotics’ Tando™ uses multiple sensors and proprietary algorithms to accurately map and navigate in any indoor space, allowing it to autonomously navigate above or around any items in its path, enabling it to secure and monitor large areas.

"We reimagined what a drone was capable of and combined human-like capabilities with AI tools to enable next-generation security and monitoring,” said Doron Ben David, co-founder, and CEO of Indoor Robotics. “Tando has already been deployed by the world’s leading enterprises and security monitoring companies and is making a tangible impact on safety and security.”

Tando™ docks on the ceiling and functions as a security camera when not in flight. In addition to office buildings, it is currently being used to secure and monitor warehouses, data centers, malls, and retail establishments by well-known enterprises.

These funds will enable Indoor Robotics to move into full production and develop its go-to-market strategy. “We seized the opportunity to increase our investment in Indoor Robotics following the successful launch of Tando™ and the team’s demonstrated ability to surpass critical milestones,” said Rami Kalish, managing partner at Pitango. “Indoor Robotics’ proven capabilities have generated exciting demand from the market, which the investors are excited to facilitate.”

In addition to security functions, Tando™ drives significant safety and operational improvements. It is capable of collecting thermal imaging data and environmental data, as well as recording temperatures of rooms and identifying leaks. It also enables preventive maintenance, identifying areas in buildings that require care.

Doron Ben-David, Co-Founder, CEO (Left) & Amit Moran Co-Founder, CTO (Right)

Doron Ben David and Amit Moran founded Indoor Robotics in 2018. Ben David had left his role as CTO of Israel Aerospace Industries’ Space Division when he began to collaborate with Moran, former Head of Robotics Innovation at Intel. They set their attention to drones, looking for areas where they could outperform human beings. They recognized that drones were ideal for security, an industry that suffers from 300% employee turnover, is vulnerable to fatigue and human error, and pays minimum wage to guards tasked with protecting valuable assets.

The drone fits in line with the company’s mission to boost the quality of life by enabling a seamless, comfortable indoor experience through task-oriented robots.

About Indoor Robotics

Indoor Robotics was founded in 2018. The company combined innovative technology with human-like mobility to develop Tando™, the world’s first autonomous robotic drone fleet for indoor security and monitoring. Powered by AI, the drone features a 360-degree camera, heat sensors, motion sensors, and leak sensors. The company has several patents, including Tile™, its proprietary ceiling dock.

The company is based in Israel and has an office in the USA. Learn more at https://www.indoor-robotics.com/

About Pitango

Pitango has been home to visionary entrepreneurs and groundbreaking companies since 1993 and manages over $2B across its funds. From stealth mode to shining unicorns, Pitango invests via three parallel funds: Pitango Early Stage, Pitango Growth, and Pitango HealthTech. Since its inception, Pitango has invested in more than 200 startups, many of which have become category leaders, went public, and/or were acquired by strategic players. Learn more at www.pitango.com.

Israel-based Coralogix Raised $142 Mn Series D Funding to Expand Presence in India

Announces additional investment in India and Snowbit, its cybersecurity venture being built out of India and Israel

• Proceeds to assist Coralogix expand presence in India and Asia-Pacific regions
• Funds to be also used for the development of Snowbit, its recently launched cybersecurity firm in India
• Tripled customer base in India in over last 12 months with marquee customers across domains
• Total funds raised till date $238 million

Coralogix, a company using streaming analytics to rebuild the path to observability, today announced it has raised a $142 million Series D funding round, bringing the company’s total amount raised to $238 million. A significant portion of the proceeds from the round will be used for the company’s expansion plans, especially its India and APAC go-to-market teams.

A significant portion of the funds will be invested in expanding Coralogix's operations in India in addition to its recently launched Indian cybersecurity venture Snowbit (currently headed by Navdeep Manaktala ex-Amazon Web Services).

Coralogix has invested around $10 million as initial investment for the Indian market and it also plans to invest $30m in India over the next five years. the funds will also be used to accelerate the build-out and go-to-market of Snowbit, which is being constructed out of India and Israel.

New investors Advent International (“Advent”) and Brighton Park Capital co-led the round with participation from Revaia and existing investors Greenfield Partners, Red Dot Capital Partners, Eyal Ofer’s O.G. Tech, StageOne Ventures, Joule Capital Partners, and Maor Investments. In connection with the funding round, Alek Ferro of Advent and Mike Gregoire, Partner at Brighton Park Capital and former CEO at CA Technologies, have joined the Coralogix board of directors.

This announcement reflects the evolution of Coralogix from a log analytics platform to a full-stack observability platform—with robust capabilities for metrics, tracing, and security data, in addition to logs. The company’s flagship Streama© technology produces real-time insights and trend analysis for all observability data with no reliance on storage, solving the challenges of building, running, and securing modern infrastructures and applications. Powerful remote query capabilities enable clients to search Terabytes of their own data in seconds all without the costs and latency of indexing.

With data growing exponentially, cost-efficiently ingesting this data and having all related insights in a centralized platform is critical for DevOps, Engineering, and Security teams. Coralogix is a next-generation, full-stack observability platform that provides infinite insights for logs, metrics, tracing, and security data when and where users need them. The platform changes the unit economics of observability, with current spending as high as 10% of overall cloud infrastructure budgets, to give customers a 40-70 percent reduction in costs while simultaneously improving their performance and data insights. Furthermore, Coralogix offers a one-of-a-kind 24/7 in-app chat support committed to response times under 1 minute.

“Coralogix is an established leader in the modern observability market and is differentiated by its product, mission, and vision,” said Alek Ferro, Director at Advent. “We are confident that Coralogix’s unique data streaming architecture and analytics pipeline will continue to transform the category through its ability to provide superior monitoring coverage, insights, and results while yielding significant cost savings. We’re thrilled to partner with the Coralogix management team as they continue to build on this momentum.”

"Monitoring the applications that now orchestrate much of our economy is a critical piece of the modern software world, and Coralogix's technology enables its customers to do this at a massive scale without incurring excessive costs or compromising performance or functionality," said Mike Gregoire, Partner at Brighton Park Capital. "Coralogix’s offering is incredibly powerful, and we see several opportunities to grow their functionality while preserving the highly responsive support their customers are accustomed to. We look forward to partnering with the talented team at Coralogix as they scale into the leading platform in the observability market.”

Today’s announcement comes on the heels of unprecedented growth for Coralogix. In the past year, the company has signed some of the most successful hypergrowth and enterprise customers in the US, Israel, India, and EMEA. In India specifically, Coralogix has tripled its customer base over the last 12 months with marquee customers across a broad range of domains including eCommerce, financial services, messaging, media & entertainment, logistics, and educational services. 

The company also expanded into the security market with the launch of Snowbit, a cybersecurity venture focused on helping cloud-native companies comprehensively manage the security of their environments. Snowbit has operations across Tel Aviv and New Delhi/Gurgaon and is unique in being the first cybersecurity initiative to leverage the best of Israeli cybersecurity talent and India's unique growing position as a global cybersecurity hub.

“Our approach at Coralogix is to solve the fundamental challenges of ever-growing data volumes and system complexity. Our technology breaks the unit economics of observability to provide our customers with a cost-effective way to centralize and scale across the R&D organization. With this round of funding, we will be expanding our offering into further markets as we continue our journey to provide harmonious observability,” said Ariel Assaraf, CEO of Coralogix.

“Our rapid growth in the Indian market is a testament to the proposition and evolution of Coralogix as a full-stack observability platform. We are working to expand our go-to-market team in India and enter the ANZ and ASEAN geographies in the next few months. We will also significantly increase our investment in the buildout of Snowbit, our cybersecurity venture, given the strong interest we have seen in its ability to proactively monitor the entire cloud environment's security and compliance,” said Navdeep Manaktala, Co-Founder, Snowbit and President, APAC at Coralogix.

Coralogix is the leading in-stream observability platform, using proprietary Streama© technology to provide modern engineering teams with real-time insights and trend analysis for their data with no reliance on storage or indexing. For more information, please visit https://coralogix.com/

Snowbit is a cybersecurity technology innovator with a vision to empower organizations across the globe to quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively secure themselves against omnipresent and growing cyber risks. To enable this, Snowbit is looking to offer the broadest cloud-native managed detection and response offering available.

Founded in 1984, Advent International is one of the largest and most experienced global private equity investors. The firm has invested in over 390 private equity investments across 41 countries, and as of December 31, 2021, had $88 billion in assets under management. With 15 offices in 12 countries, Advent has established a globally integrated team of over 265 private equity investment professionals across North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia. The firm focuses on investments in five core sectors, including business and financial services; health care; industrial; retail, consumer and leisure; and technology. For over 35 years, Advent has been dedicated to international investing and remains committed to partnering with management teams to deliver sustained revenue and earnings growth for its portfolio companies. For more information, visit: www.adventinternational.com

Brighton Park is a Greenwich, CT-based investment firm that specializes in software, healthcare, and technology-enabled services. The firm invests in companies that provide highly innovative solutions in partnership with great management teams. Brighton Park brings purpose-built value-add capabilities that match the unique requirements of each of its companies. For more information about Brighton Park, please visit www.bpc.com

Cogniteam Raises $5.6 Mn to Enhance Low-Code AI Robotics Platform

Dr. Yehuda Elmaliah, Co-Founder and CEO at Cogniteam

Cogniteam boosts collaborative robotic development capabilities, helping companies bring new robotic programs to market in a fraction of the time. “Our low-code approach to robotics development is changing the programming landscape,” said Dr. Yehuda Elmaliach, Co-Founder & CEO of Cogniteam.

Cogniteam, a robotics development company that recently launched the Nimbus robotics AI operating platform, announced the closing of a $5.6 million in series A. The round of funding comprised the previous investors of Seabarn Management, (Andrew Owens) and UK-based Panthera family office members. This round enables Cogniteam to boost product development and Nimbus sales further as the robotics revolution continues to show both consumer and commercial demand.

Developing a modern robotics system is traditionally a time-consuming process where software engineers yield their development to hardware engineers until they complete the build-out of physical systems needed to meet project specifications. This requires the full robotics concept to deployment process to take up to 6 years. During this time, technological development moves forward, making hardware, software, and control systems obsolete by the time new robots are deployed commercially.

"We reimagined what is possible to accelerate and future-proof robotic development with the Nimbus platform," said Dr. Yehuda Elmaliach, Co-Founder & CEO of Cogniteam. “Nimbus’ low-code approach is changing the programming landscape by offering a simulated environment where software developers can thoroughly test their capabilities before the prototype physical robot build-out has been completed."

Cogniteam Team

Alongside this virtual testing environment, developers can select pre-built software packages from the popular ROS operating system, NVIDIA’s ISAAC SDK GEMs toolset, and field-tested algorithms that were developed in-house by Cogniteam. Once mobilized, Nimbus-operated robots are kept up to date throughout their life with the latest software developments and AI learnings through regular Cloud updates and lesson sharing.

These funds will enable Cogniteam to expand sales and support teams to onboard more companies who want to enable their robots with field-tested features. “We seized the opportunity to increase our investment in Cogniteam following the successful launch of Nimbus and the team’s demonstrated ability to surpass critical milestones,” said lead investor Andrew Owens. Cogniteam’s proven capabilities have generated exciting demand from the market, which the investors are excited to facilitate.”

In addition to the new round, Cogniteam has been handpicked to co-lead a $20 million Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) consortium, funded by the Israeli Innovation Authority. Together with other leading Israeli private and academic institutions, they are working on verbal and non-verbal communication gestures that robots can use to engage with society as they execute tasks.

In line with their mission of easy adoption of advanced capabilities, Cogniteam will open the consortium’s capabilities to their Nimbus platform for companies to utilize.

Tech Veterans and Former AWS Executives Join Coralogix to Launch New Cybersecurity Venture Snowbit

Investments slated for R&D, Product Buildout, and establishing Global Security Resource Centre

Snowbit’s SaaS platform and expert services teams enable organizations to proactively monitor their entire cloud environment’s security and compliance.

• India and Israel will be initial focus markets given its large existing customer base and the growing base of cloud-native businesses
• To institute 24x7 Global Security Resource Centre comprising of Security Analysts, Security Researchers, and Threat Hunting Professionals in New Delhi
• Snowbit aims to enable cloud-native companies across domains to comprehensively monitor and address cybersecurity risks

Leading provider of observability, Coralogix, headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, announced the launch of Snowbit, a full-service cybersecurity venture focussed on empowering cloud-native companies to secure themselves against growing cyber risks in a quick, efficient, and cost-effective manner.

Founded and being led by tech veterans and former Amazon Web Services (AWS) executives - Navdeep Manaktala and Zack Barak, Snowbit will have operations across Tel Aviv and New Delhi/Gurgaon. An Indo-Israeli venture, Snowbit will have its operations (R&D, product development, and expert teams) across India and Israel to leverage the best of Israeli cybersecurity talent and India’s unique position to become the global cybersecurity hub of the world.

Snowbit’s Managed Extended Detection and Response (MxDR) incorporates a SaaS platform and expert services. The platform gives organizations a comprehensive view of their cloud environment’s security and compliance (CIS, NIST, SOC, PCI, ISO, HIPAA). The expert teams are offered 24x7 to provide support for more efficient remediation.

Snowbit’s MxDR platform builds on the strengths of the Coralogix data streaming platform. It seamlessly ingests and enriches a broad range of data sources. The platform then scans your entire cloud environment for abnormal activity, configuration, network, and vulnerability issues. It automates threat detection and incident response leveraging machine learning, an extensive set of pre-configured rules, alerts & dashboards, and support for integration with any orchestration platform. Snowbit takes a holistic and proactive approach to cybersecurity vis-a-vis point solutions largely focused on detection and response.

The MxDR platform is complemented by a team of security experts deployed at Snowbit’s 24x7 Global Security Resource Centre in New Delhi. The expert service centre comprising of analysts, researchers, and threat hunting & incident response professionals will offer real-time guided responses to enable organizations to respond decisively to threats detected in their environment.

Snowbit will support multi-cloud infrastructure and SaaS environments. In addition, owing to the large investments outlined for the Indian market, allow customers the unique advantage of being able to process and retain data within the country at all times thereby remaining compliant with applicable data localisation norms including those proposed under the upcoming Data protection regulation.

Navdeep Manaktala is a technology industry veteran with 20+ years of experience in building and scaling cloud, mobile, and Internet businesses at companies such as Nokia, Microsoft, and AWS. Most recently, he was at AWS, where he established and led the cloud giant’s startup business comprising tens of thousands of customers across Asia-Pacific & Japan. Zack Barak is a cybersecurity industry veteran with 25+ years of cross-functional experience with Sygnia, Israel Aerospace, Israel Defence Force, and most recently was the CISO of Annapurna Labs (an Amazon company).

Navdeep Manaktala – Co-Founder, Snowbit & President – APJ, Coralogix, said “Rapidly accelerating cyberthreats are leaving many organizations exposed and unable to effectively deal with security challenges as they arise. Snowbit aims to address fundamental security-related challenges faced today including growing cloud complexity, increasing sophistication of attacks, lack of in-house cybersecurity expertise, and the overhead of managing multiple point security solutions.”

“Observability forms the bedrock of cybersecurity, and as a result, Snowbit is strategic for Coralogix as it enables us to offer a powerful integrated observability and security proposition to unlock the value of data correlation,” said Ariel Assaraf, CEO of Coralogix. “Snowbit’s platform and services enable organizations to overcome challenges of cybersecurity talent and disparate tools to more effectively secure their environments.”

"The Snowbit MxDR, with its proactive approach and pre-built detection capabilities complemented by the expertise at our Security Resource Centre, is one of the most powerful offerings for holistic cloud security," said Zack Barak.

About Snowbit

Snowbit is a cybersecurity technology innovator with a vision to empower organizations across the globe to quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively secure themselves against omnipresent and growing cyber risks. To enable this, Snowbit is looking to offer the broadest cloud-native managed detection and response offering available. The team is currently looking to expand globally - if interested, find the current open positions here. Users can sign up here to get alerts about the Snowbit launch.

About Coralogix

Coralogix is the leading in-stream observability platform, using proprietary Streama© technology to provide modern engineering teams with real-time insights and trend analysis for their data with no reliance on storage or indexing.

Cognifiber, which is Replacing Computer Chips with Fiber-Optic Cables Raises $6 Mn To Enable Computing at The Speed of Light

Surpassing Moore’s Law: Cognifiber Raises $6 Million Series A to Bring In-Fiber Photonic Processing to Market

In-fiber photonic processing enables computing at the speed of light, breaking the barriers of current technologies. “Our fiber optics-based system delivers a 100-fold boost in speed while reducing power consumption by 80%.

- said Dr. Eyal Cohen, Co-founder & CEO of CogniFiber

CogniFiber, a deep technology company developing advanced in-fiber photonic processing systems, raised a $6 million Series A round of funding. 

The funding round was led by Chartered Group, a private equity firm specializing in disruptive technologies with a far-reaching presence in Europe and Asia. This investment opens the path to break through current processing speed barriers, unlocking many AI-driven business opportunities.

Today’s hyper-scale data centers and edge devices alike run on silicon-based processors. Moore’s law, the standard trend in processor evolution, predicts that the capability of chips will double every two years without increasing in size. This capability is fast approaching a wall as the industry struggles with today’s barriers while maintaining efficiency and reliability. Complex computations can now be done on the fly with light carried through optical fibers.

Dr. Eyal Cohen

 
“This new ability to compute complex algorithms in a fraction of the time will leave Moore’s law in the rearview mirror,” said Dr. Eyal Cohen, Co-founder & CEO of CogniFiber. “In-fiber processing allows for the realization of a 100-fold boost in processing speed and efficiency.” Beyond leaping over the physical limitations of semiconductors, fiber-based processing radically cuts the cost of computing, which demands 1% of the world's electricity to operate and cool servers. This is even more important for Edge micro centers where high performance needs to co-exist with limited power resources.

Prof. Zeev Zalevsky

 
Before officially founding the company in 2018, CogniFiber’s co-founders spent years bringing the technology to life, including working within Intel’s Ingenuity Partner Program. “Senior engineers at Intel were excited to drill down into every aspect of our technology, reviewing its viability to revolutionize how computers operate today,” said Professor Ze’ev Zalevsky, Co-founder & CTO of CogniFiber. “This technology will help deliver on the promise of photonic computing to safety, cybersecurity, autonomous driving, AI-developed medicines, and countless other applications.”

Working with industry leaders and Japanese investors to promote this revolutionary technology, the Series A funding will go towards creating and delivering a robust and scalable product to market. “The balance between Israel’s agile approach to innovation and the tradition of high-quality, value-focused technologies amongst Japanese investors creates excellent synergy where entrepreneurs feel they have true partners,” said Eyal Agmoni, Founder and Chairman of Chartered Group. “Together, these parties will usher in a new era of photonic computing”.

Scribe Security Raises $7 Mn to Secure Software Supply Chains in a Seed Round Led by Elron Ventures

(L-R) Daniel_Nebenzahl CTO, Guy Chernobrov VP R&D and Rubi_Arbel, CEO - Scribe Security

Attackers today are experts at identifying hidden opportunities in the software's delivery life cycle. We protect against software supply chain attacks carried out by dependency manipulation, third-party software components, or during the code-delivery process

-- said Scribe Co-founder & CEO, Rubi Arbel

Tel Aviv, Israel-based Scribe Security, a provider of a SaaS platform for securing software across various supply chains, raised more than $7 million in a seed round led by Elron Ventures and joined by Tal Ventures, YYM Ventures, and others. The new funding will help Scribe bring its end-to-end solution to a market that is thirsty for innovation in this domain.

Scribe is developing an innovative platform tailored for the modern software development process. It allows organizations to develop, distribute, and maintain, code produced within the organization, while also verifying code components’ integrity, provenance, authenticity, and reputation. Their solution provides organizations with visibility and assurance of the entire software development life cycle from early design stages to final deployment.

“Cyberattacks on the software supply chain may be carried out by dependency manipulation, a third-party software component, or during the code-delivery process,” said Scribe Co-founder & CEO, Rubi Arbel. “Software supply chains have become an attractive attack vector for a wide range of threat actors. Experts predict that almost half of all organizations globally are likely to suffer from such attack consequences by 2025.”

Scribe’s platform allows for rapid deployment and easy use throughout the organization’s development process. This “shift left” approach will enable developers and DevOps teams to ensure that the software they are using and building is trustworthy. [At the same time, software vendors will be able to vouch for the integrity of the software and create trust on the part of their clients.]

Scribe was founded in 2021 by cyber and cryptography experts CEO Rubi Arbel, CTO Daniel Nebenzahl, and VP R&D Guy Chernobrov. Arbel is a cyber expert, served as a senior commander in 8200, and was the former VP Aviation at Argus Cyber Security. Chernobrov previously served as Chief Security Architect for Matzov - IDF’s defensive cyber center, led innovative cyber development projects, and was the IDF's Liaison Officer to CERDEC, US Army. Nebenzahl Led the Matzov research division for 11 years, where he was responsible for the development of innovative cyber and cryptography technologies and played a major role in strategic national cyber initiatives.

“We believe that the threat to the organization’s software supply chain is steadily increasing,” said Zohar Rozenberg, Venture Partner at Elron Ventures. “While a growing percentage of the code is being developed outside the organization, the attack surface is highly complex. With no single entity that had visibility and the ability to secure the code end to end, this is a super complicated issue. We believe that Scribe is serving a market with huge potential and has the right team to take on this complex task.”

Truecaller to Acquire Israeli App CallHero

Truecaller, the leading global platform for verifying contacts and blocking unwanted communications, has entered into an agreement to acquire the Israeli company CallHero (www.getcallhero.com). CallHero has developed a unique technical solution for both Android and iPhone, with an AI-enabled assistant. CallHero's assistant can answer calls for you in a natural language, take messages for you and even block your calendar. The feature will be integrated into Truecaller in a phased manner.

Truecaller to acquire Israeli app CallHero

You can also read more about CallHero and the technology behind it on our blog

"CallHero gives the user intelligent support in handling incoming calls with the help of an AI-based assistant who answers the call. The conversation between the caller and the assistant is visible in text-based format, live in the app. This service will help our users prioritize what is relevant and important without having to talk. The technology that CallHero is going to strengthen our offering. The service will start in the US first since that's where CallHero operated but our ambition is of course to roll out the service in all our markets, including India. CallHero today has a well-developed advanced functionality for iPhone users, which is important in the western world, but also a valuable complement to our work to make Truecaller more efficient and user-friendly for both iPhone and Android users worldwide," said Alan Mamedi, CEO and Co-founder of Truecaller.

CallHero Joins Truecaller

Watch a short video about CallHero here

The agreed purchase price amounts to USD 4.5 million, of which USD 2.6 million will be paid in cash upon completion of the acquisition and USD 1.9 million through newly issued shares in Truecaller. The purpose of the issue of new shares is to strengthen the long-term commitment to Truecaller for certain key persons at CallHero. In addition, a potential additional purchase price of a maximum of USD 2 million will be paid, provided that certain goals are achieved for a period of up to four years after the transaction is completed. Completion of the acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to be completed during the first quarter of 2022. The acquisition will be financed through existing cash and newly issued shares in Truecaller AB. The acquisition is primarily a technology and competence acquisition and is not considered to have a material impact on the results in 2022.

For more information, please contact: press@truecaller.com.

About Truecaller

We enable safe and relevant conversations between people and make it efficient for businesses to connect with consumers. Fraud and unwanted communication are endemic to digital economies, especially in emerging markets. We are on a mission to build trust in communication. Truecaller is an essential part of everyday communication for over 300 million active users, with half a billion downloads since launch and close to 38 billion unwanted calls identified and blocked in 2021. Headquartered in Stockholm, since 2009, we are a Co-founder-led, entrepreneurial company, with a highly experienced management team. Truecaller has been listed on Nasdaq Stockholm since 8 October 2021.

For more information, please visit corporate.truecaller.com.

Reposify Raises $8.5 Mn Seed Round Tackling the Security Threats from Unknown Internet-Facing Assets

Yaron Tal (Left), CTO & Founder, Uzi Krieger (Right), CEO 

Organizations’ constant digital footprint expansion creates major security blind spots. Reposify delivers the only Google-like search platform that enables enterprises to safely evolve in the cloud by seamlessly detecting and managing all exposed internet-facing assets.

Israel-based Reposify, a leading External Attack Surface Management (EASM) provider, announced today that it had raised seed round funding of $8.5M from two US-based VCs, Joule Ventures and First Rays Venture Partners, alongside several industry expert angels. Recognized by Gartner on its 2021 Emerging Vendors list for EASM, Reposify provides a platform enabling security teams to detect, prioritize, and manage all exposed internet-facing assets that are centralized or remote across on-premise, subsidiary, cloud, or third-party assets.

The need for visibility into external-facing assets and its related exposures has dramatically increased due to a growing number of digital transformation initiatives, such as shadow IT, weakening of the enterprise perimeter, and increased work from home options. Reposify created an algorithm that automatically identifies and associates every internet-facing asset with the organization that utilizes it.

SoFi CISO Hilik Kotler, an advisor to the company, said, “Reposify’s robust solution allows DevOps teams to work freely without compromising security. At the same time, it enables cybersecurity teams to identify and prioritize the risk of any web-facing asset. “Kotler added, “Now, teams can avoid ‘asset drift’ when deployments mature, providing an additional layer of monitoring and detection to better control infrastructure and security posture."

Reposify Team

Reposify’s Google-like search platform is seamless, requiring no installation or onboarding. “Reposify’s technology revolutionizes cloud security management. It is the fastest solution to prioritize and understand where security teams should be spending time and ensure nothing is left behind”, said Amit Sridharan, co-founder, and managing partner at First Rays Venture Partners. Reposify addresses this specific CISO pain point with a 24/7 engine that scans the entire internet, including internal assets, allowing security leaders to minimize alerts and data overload while remaining agile in protecting the entire IT network.

Platform Screenshot

During the last year, Reposify has tripled in size and continues to expand its market reach. Recently, the company onboarded Uzi Krieger, an experienced business executive, as CEO to spearhead its growth. “These are exciting times, as Reposify is taking a key role in shaping the way companies move faster and easier while securing their internet-facing assets,” said Krieger. “This is the essence of security as a business enabler."

Platform Screenshot

The funding will enable the company to expand its R&D team to meet its customer’s growing needs and expand its activity in the U.S. market. Speaking of Resposify’s unique positioning, Dafna Winocur Biran, partner at Joule Ventures, said, “Reposify has a unique combination of top-notch technology, inspiring and seasoned leadership, and a real solution for an acute need that is only going to grow over time"

Reposify was founded to help organizations take control of their external attack surfaces by providing complete and continuous visibility and actionable insight at scale. The company reinvented internet mapping, changing the cybersecurity landscape. In 2021, Reposify was recognized by Gartner on its 2021 Emerging Vendors list for External Attack Surface Management (EASM).

Joule Ventures is a U.S.-based seed fund enabling Israeli founders to tackle complex technical challenges within industry-leading enterprises. The firm has $100M+ in AUM and invests in cyber security, data, Cloud, and AI/ML solutions destined for growth and scalability in the United States. More information is available at www.joulevc.com

First Rays Venture Partners specialize in seed-stage investments in Enterprise Infrastructure Stack and B2B SaaS. They bring a specialized focus on meeting the specific needs of founders in the scale-up to Series A. The fund brings significant value beyond capital.

First Rays invests around mega-trends that are changing the landscape for enterprise IT.  These trends are disrupting the way software is being delivered and consumed in the enterprise landscape.