There were a lot of big Unicorn stories to come out of Startup Nation Israel in 2023, which made it really hard to settle on just five. So we decided to just do the ones that came between the Jewish New Year – Rosh Hashana – that fell in September and the new New Year on January 1st.
(A unicorn is a startup with a valuation of $1 billion or more.)
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VAST Data Hits $9 Billion Valuation
Israeli startup VAST Data is becoming a super-unicorn, even an ultra-unicorn. According to a report in the publication the information, the company that offers the VAST Data Platform expects to hit a $9 billion valuation when it closes a new round of funding from investors like Fidelity Investments.
Founded in 2016 by Israeli entrepreneurs Renen Hallak and Shachar Fienblit, VAST Data boasts that its platform accelerates time-to-insight for workload-intensive applications, the VAST Data Platform delivers scalable performance, radically simple data management and enhanced productivity for the AI-powered world. Launched in 2019, VAST is the fastest-selling data infrastructure startup in history.
Cato Networks Hits $3 Billion Valuation
Cato Networks, an Israeli startup and unicorn that provides the world’s first Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform, hit a valuation of more than $3 billion in September. The new valuation came after the firm raised $238 million in equity investment, bringing total funding to $773 million to date.
Cato Networks first became a unicorn in November 2020.
Founded in 2015 by Shlomo Kramer, one of the founders of Check Point and Imperva, and Gur Shatz Cato Networks provides a single-vendor SASE platform, converging Cato SD-WAN and a cloud-native security service edge, Cato SSE 360, into a global cloud service. Cato SASE Cloud optimizes and secures application access for all users and locations everywhere. Using Cato, customers easily replace costly and rigid legacy MPLS with modern network architecture based on SD-WAN, secure and optimize a hybrid workforce working from anywhere, and enable seamless cloud migration.
AI21 Labs Hits $1.4 Billion Valuation
In November Israel’s AI21 Labs, a unicorn from Amnon Shashua that specializes in Natural Language Processing (NLP), became an even bigger unicorn. The firm raised an additional $53 million from investors like Intel Capital, the venture capital arm of Intel Corporation, and Comcast Ventures, the venture capital arm of Comcast Corporation for its Series C round of funding bringing the round’s total to $208 million . The company now has a valuation of about $1.4 billion and has raised $336 million to date.
AI21 Labs became a unicorn just this past August , when it raised $155 million in a Series C round of funding. Google, Nvidia, and Shashua all took part in the investment at that time.
Founded in 2017 by Yoav Shoham, Ori Goshen, and Amnon Shashua, AI21 Labs helps machines speak, or communicate, depending on how you look at it.
Lendbuzz Hits Unciron Status At $1.1 Billion Valuation
Israeli fintech startup Lendbuzz, which offers an AI based auto finance platform for people seeking a line of credit, is just the latest Israel Startup Nation firm to achieve the coveted unicorn status. The company hit a $1.1 billion valuation with a $345 million raise led by Group 1001 that included $45 million in equity funding.
Founded in 2015 by CEO Amitay Kalmar and CTO Dan Raviv, Lendbuzz uses Big Data analytics to “significantly” improve access to credit for international students and professionals living in the US. The Israeli founders explain that they decided to found the company when living in the U.S. themselves.
Cybersecurity Unicorn CHEQ To Help Twitter Crack Down On Bots
CHEQ, an Israeli cyber security startup, and a unicorn, entered into a deal secretly with Elon Musk to prove Twitter (now called X) to reduce the number of fake users on the platform. According to a report in the Israeli business publication Globes, the deal was struck when Musk visited Israel several weeks ago.
Founded in 2016 by CEO Guy Tytunovich, Chairman Ehud Levy and CTO Asaf Botovsky, graduates of the Israeli Military Defense Intelligence, CHEQ boasts that it is bringing cybersecurity solutions to CMOs and Marketing teams, protecting their customer acquisition efforts from bots, fake users and other forms of invalid traffic. Intel explains that Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) is a small amount of memory on a computer motherboard that stores the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) settings.
