Wanda Fish, Gutsy and Mana.bio Make Seed Raises

Mana.bio co-founders. (company pic)

Gutsy, an Israeli cybersecurity startup, came out of stealth with $51 million invested in a Seed round of funding led by YL Ventures and Mayfield. Meanwhile, Mana.bio, an Israeli biotechnology startup accelerating programmable drug delivery, raised $19.5 million in seed financing co-led by Andreessen Horowitz Bio + Health, Base4 Capital, NFX, LionBird and Technion.

And Wanda Fish, an Israeli FoodTech startup that offers a platform that produces a wide variety of fish fillets using sustainable cell-cultivation practices, raised $7 million in Seed funding led by Netherlands-based global aquaculture investment fund Aqua-Spark.

Founded in 2021 by the Kitchen Hub and Daphna Heffetz, Wanda Fish says that its goal is to balance the “joy of eating fish and all the goodness they provide” with the need to protect them and their natural marine habitat. The company boasts that its innovative platform offers a new way of eating fish, sustainably. Wanda Fish grows fish fillets using cell-cultivation practices outside the water.

Wand Fish’s products are produced in a hygienic environment, with animal-free growing media, devoid of microplastics, mercury, toxins, and chemicals found in wild catch and aquacultures.

In this way, the fish are “safe” to eat as they are not exposed to any of the pollutants found in the oceans and rivers of the world.

“We are excited and feel incredibly fortunate to collaborate with Aqua-Spark in propelling our venture forward,” said Daphna Heffetz, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of Wanda Fish. “We are on a shared mission to improve the global food value chain, creating a tasty, more sustainable future for all. This financial backing by leading global venture funds gives us significant leverage to make sustainably cultivated, cruelty-free, and ocean-friendly bluefin tuna a reality.”

Co-founded by CEO Yogev Debbi, CTO Roy Nevo, Avi Schroeder and Kira Radinsky, Mana.bio is an AI based drug delivery startup, creating a platform for Lipid Nanoparticle (LNP) development for oligonucleotide therapies including mRNA-based therapeutics, vaccines and gene therapy.

RNA-based therapies and genetic medicines offer immense potential to transform approaches to vaccines, gene editing, gene therapy and more, explains Mana.bio. However, cracking the code on safe and tissue-specific delivery methods has proven challenging. The limitations on delivery methods have severely restricted the full therapeutic promise of RNA, CRISPR and gene therapies. By integrating machine learning and high-throughput screening into its development process, Mana.bio has engineered next generation LNPs to more safely and effectively deliver RNA payloads to specific tissues.

“The field of LNP discovery has historically been driven by stochastic experimental discovery, and has lacked systematic, methodical optimization across the full space of potential chemistries and formulations,” said Yogev Debbi, co-founder and CEO of Mana.bio. “We believe that artificial intelligence methods provide a unique way to learn from the world’s previously generated LNP data, novel data that we generate every day in our own lab, and even the design principles of adjacent non-LNP delivery systems. Mana.bio’s integrated experimental and machine learning platform enables the discovery of smarter, faster, more precise delivery formulations to unlock the field of nucleic acid-based and genetic medicines. We are encouraged by our platform’s early in vivo success and for its potential to deliver breakthrough therapies for a broad range of diseases.”

Founded in 2022 by CEO Ben Bernstein, VP R&D Dima Stopel and CTO John Morello, Gutsy says it is redefining the security governance market. Many enterprises, explains the company, invest heavily in security tools, but they often struggle to get the most out of them because the tools are not integrated well together. This can lead to gaps in security coverage, as well as difficulties in detecting and responding to threats.

Gutsy is a process mining company that is using this technology to address this problem. Process mining is a technique that analyzes event logs from different systems to discover and visualize the actual processes that are taking place. This can be used to understand how security tools are actually being used, and to identify any gaps or inefficiencies in the security posture.

Gutsy’s platform applies process mining to security data to give enterprises a continuous, automatic, and data-driven understanding of how all their security tools work together as part of their processes. This can help enterprises to identify gaps in security coverage, optimize their security posture, detect and respond to threats more quickly and effectively and improve the efficiency of their security operations.

Gutsy’s 2023 State of Security Governance survey, with responses from over 50 enterprise CISOs, highlights the problems the company is solving. Enterprise CISOs reported that 55% of their security tools are not well operationalized, which has led to process failure being the root cause of 38% of security incidents. Similarly, 63% of audit findings are the result of breakdowns in security processes.

“Customers often tell us they have 80 or 100 different security tools, but they consider less than half of them to be well operationalized, so they struggle to get the outcomes they need,” said Ben Bernstein, CEO and co-founder of Gutsy. “That’s because security is more than just tools; it’s people, process, and technology. But today security processes are more complex and opaque than ever. Gutsy revolutionizes governance by taking a process and outcome focused perspective, helping you understand how all the pieces work together, what results you’re delivering, and why you’re getting them.”