This year has seen several large funding announcements from Israeli companies, despite the tough economic situation following the war with Hamas. A key new area that is attracting a lot of attention is GenAI, with some impressive funding rounds already happening in 2024.
Bria
sector: Visual GenAI Platform | Established: 2020 | Founder: Dr. Yair Haddat, Gal Jacobi, Asa Elder (since 2022) | FundingThe company has raised $26.6 million from GFT Ventures, Intel Capital, and Entre Capital, with participation from Publicis Groupe, Getty Images, and Samsung Next.
BRIA, which developed an open visual generative AI platform, announced $24 million in Series A funding in February. The round was co-led by GFT Ventures, Intel Capital, and Entrée Capital, with additional investors including Publicis Groupe, Getty Images, Samsung Next, IN venture (Sumitomo Corporation, Japan), Atinum Investment (Korea), Z Venture Capital (LY Corporation, Japan), Mirae Asset Venture Investment, and J-Ventures.
BRIA allows companies to easily customize their visual requirements and allows developers to seamlessly integrate generative AI capabilities into existing products, solutions and systems as source code, pre-trained models, APIs and SDKs. BRIA works with many of the world’s leading stock image providers and manages over one billion licensed images. These images are used to train BRIA’s underlying text-to-image models, ensuring that original creators, artists and media companies receive royalties that fairly compensate them for their imagery contributions to the final output produced.
Aiming for security
sector: GenAI Security | Established: 2022 | Founder: Matan Götz and Adir Gruss | Funding: Raised $28M from Canaan Partners, YL Ventures, Wiz founders, and industry leaders Palo Alto Networks, Proofpoint, and Google.
Aim Security, developing a security platform to manage and secure the use of AI across modern business environments, on Monday announced an $18 million Series A funding round led by Canaan Partners with participation from the company’s seed investor, YL Ventures.
Founded by Matan Getz (CEO) and Adir Gruss (CTO), who worked on AI platforms with the Israel Defense Forces’ elite intelligence unit 8200, Aim is developing a platform focused on AI-specific threats, including sensitive data leaks, supply chain vulnerabilities, harmful or manipulated output, and the emergence of attack methods such as jailbreaking and prompt injection.
Ilmex
sector: GenAI | Established: 2021 | Founder: Inna Tokarev-Sera | FundingThe company has raised $13 million from Cardumen Capital, Amdocs Ventures, and Samsung Ventures, with participation from ICI Fund, Jibe Ventures, Iron Nation Fund, Ginnosar Ventures, ICON Fund, Today Ventures, and angel investors.
Illumex helps organizations overcome data challenges that impede Generative AI (GenAI) initiatives by automating the creation of a semantic layer that unifies data silos and adds business context, generating a consistent vocabulary of domain-specific terms. An alumnus of Intel Ignite and ICON programs, Illumex already has clients such as Teva and Carson using its platform. The company employs 15 people, the majority of whom are women.
Illumex’s platform analyzes metadata without accessing the underlying confidential information to create a unified semantic knowledge graph. This graph acts as a single source of truth that aligns all data with consistent business terminology and context. This serves as the foundation that enables LLM to reliably map user questions to the relevant data points that need to be captured to provide accurate results while ensuring proper governance.
Question AI
sector: GenAI Insights for Enterprise | Established: 2021 | Founder: Aron Talmor | Funding: Raised $20 million from Leaders Fund, including seed investors Vertex Ventures, State of Mind Ventures, and GTMFund
Ask-AI, a generative AI answers and insights solution for enterprises, announced it has raised $11 million in Series A in tandem with the launch of a new sidekick called ASK. The round was led by Leaders Fund, with participation from seed investors Vertex Ventures, State of Mind Ventures, GTMFund and others. This brings the company’s total funding to $20 million.
Ask-AI’s solutions are designed to improve efficiency in repetitive tasks, knowledge management, and understanding customer needs. It can connect to over 50 enterprise work systems, including Salesforce, Zendesk, Confluence, Jira, Slack, Google Drive, Teams, and many other customer communication and knowledge sources. Ask-AI ingests, analyzes, and understands all possible enterprise knowledge and integrates it into employee workflows. The goal is to improve employee productivity by serving multiple use cases in customer support, success, product, R&D, and sales.
That companion is called ASK, a sidebar that provides contextual information about everything in a team member’s workflow. Users can inquire about a customer’s long-term concerns or past interactions, or request insights on sentiment or churn risk, and ASK can suggest succinct answers and relevant knowledge from all company sources. ASK also provides confidence scores and linked citations for generated content, which counters AI hallucinations and has been difficult to achieve with other AI models.
Rapid Security
sector: Enterprise GenAI Security | Established: 2023 | Founder: Itamar Golan and Lior Drihem | FundingRaised $5 million from Hetz Ventures, with participation from Four Rivers and angel investors including the CISO from Airbnb, Elastic, and Dolby.
Prompt Security, an enterprise generative AI security platform, launched from stealth and announced it has raised $5 million in seed funding. The round was led by Hetz Ventures with participation from angel investors including Four Rivers, Airbnb, Elastic, and the CISO from Dolby.
According to a Google study, LLMs like ChatGPT can be manipulated to leak large amounts of data used in training. A recent lawsuit filed by The New York Times against OpenAI alleges that ChatGPT can output near-verbatim article excerpts in responses, highlighting the potential for generative AI tools to leak training data. Prompt Security helps businesses benefit from generative AI deployments while protecting their applications, employees, and customers from a range of risks. It inspects each prompt and model response to prevent sensitive data leaks, block harmful content, and protect against a range of generative AI-specific attacks. The solution also provides enterprise leadership with visibility and governance of the AI ​​tools used within their organizations. The company was founded in August 2023 by CEO Golan and CTO Lior Drihem. Its platform already supports millions of prompts and thousands of users every month.
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