Assaf Feldman and Eido Gal, Riskified founders (website pic)
Israeli startup Riskified, which offers e-commerce fraud prevention services, announced that the company would withdraw $500 million -all of its cash reserves – from banks in Israel. It is doing so out of concerns over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government’s planned judicial reforms currently before the Knesset.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government’s proposed judicial reform plan would dramatically curtail the powers of Israel’s Supreme Court and attorney general. So, opponents say that this would leave the government free to do whatever it wants in the absence of any oversight.
Calcalist reported that in an email to employees, Riskified founder and CEO Eido Gal wrote, “Our concern is that as the financial situation continues to deteriorate, and in order to maintain financial stability, the government will limit transfers and withdrawals of large amounts.”
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“Given the quick pace in which Israel is changing I wanted to articulate my position in writing and share the actions our company has taken,” he added.
This is just the latest in such moves.
In January, Israeli startup Papaya Global, a fintech unicorn that offers a cloud based platform for companies to handle their payrolls, decided to divest itself of Israeli banks due to the judicial reform plan proposed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. The move came after the Governor of the Bank of Israel himself warned Netanyahu that the plan could harm foreign investment in Israel since it would weaken Israel’s democratic system.
In February, Tom Livne, the CEO of Verbit, an Israeli startup and a unicorn that has built an AI-powered real-time transcription and captioning service, said that he would leave Israel in protest over the judicial reforms proposed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government.
Also in February, after hitting a $10 billion valuation with a $300 million raise, Wiz, an Israeli cloud security startup and a unicorn, stated that it would not put the funds into Israeli banks saying, “To our regret, due to the judicial revolution, the money we have raised will not enter Israel.”
And to date, more than $1 billion in funds have been pulled from Israeli banks by local firms.
Founded in 2012 by Assaf Feldman and Eido Gal, Riskified states that they empower businesses to realize the full potential of eCommerce by making it “safe, accessible, and frictionless.” Riskified has built a next-generation platform that the company states allows online merchants to create trusted relationships with their consumers. Leveraging machine learning that benefits from a global merchant network, the company declares that its platform identifies the individual behind each online interaction, helping merchants to eliminate risk and uncertainty from their business.
