The Capital Quest | Israel’s Akeyless, Clarifruit, Loops.ai and theGist Raise Nearly $100M in Funding

Israeli-born tech startup Akeyless has raised $65 million in a Series B funding round led by NGP Capital.

The round, which brings the total funds raised by the software-as-a-service (SaaS) company to $65 million, was also joined by existing investors Team8 Capital and Jerusalem Venture Partners.

Akeyless also said Mike Christenson, the former COO and president of New Relic and CA Technologies, has joined the team as an investor and board member.

Akeyless develops a SaaS-based secrets management platform to secure DevOps and IT workloads. The company was founded in 2019 by Shai Onn, Refael Angel and Oded Hareven.

Onn, the chairman and chairman, previously founded Fireglass, which was sold to Symantec in 2018.

While half of Akeyless’ 80 employees are based in the United States, the other half are in Tel Aviv, where its research and development center is located. The company is looking to double its workforce, with significant hiring in Israel.

Clarifruit

Software company Clarifruit has raised $12 million in a Series A funding round led by Champel Capital and Firstime Ventures. Kubota, an agricultural machinery and technology provider, and venture capital fund NevaTeam Partners also joined the round.

Through this fundraiser, the startup raised $15 million, including a $2.5 million grant two years ago.

Clarifruit is developing an automated quality control software platform for the fruit and vegetable sectors. He said he would seek to reduce waste in the fresh produce supply chain and ensure an adequate food supply for future generations.

Clarifruit was founded in 2018 by Mardix alongside Avi Schwartzer (COO) and Ruby Boyarski (CTO). Its customers include Dole, Mucci Farms, Zespri, SanLucar and Pink Lady and currently employ 25 people worldwide.

Loops.ai

Israeli AI-based startup Loops.ai has raised $14 million in seed funding led by Scale Venture Partners.

Scale Venture was joined by Cardumen Capital and several prominent product and growth leaders, including Brian Balfour (Founder/CEO of Reforge, former VP of Growth at Hubspot), Lenny Rachitsky (Owner of Lennysnewsletter and former Head of product at Airbnb), Casey Winters (Former director of purchasing at Eventbrite and head of growth at Pinterest), Darius Contractor (former director of product and engineering at Vnder and vice president of growth at Airtable) and Ben Shanken (Vice President of Products at Discord).

Loops.ai has developed a product growth platform that enables product and growth teams to improve their key performance indicators (KPIs) by automatically identifying actionable opportunities from their data.

The company was co-founded in 2020 by chief executive Tom Laufer and chief technology officer Ido Adiv.

the essential

Israeli startup theGist has raised $7 million in a pre-seed funding round from StageOne Ventures and Aleph.

The Tel Aviv and New York-based startup was self-founded this year by Itay Dressler, Itzik Ben-Bassat and Nir Zohar and develops smart AI and machine learning tools to improve the employee experience by focusing on streamlining internal data content and communications.

Ben-Bassat (CEO) has previously been involved in building and growing companies like Blizzard, OpenWeb and Wix, Dressler (CTO) is the former VP of Engineering at OpenWeb, co-founder and CTO at Salaryo, and Vice President R&D at Gong, while Zohar is the COO and President of Wix.

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