Israel’s Akeyless, Clarifruit, Loops.ai, theGist raise nearly $100 mn in funding

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

The round, which brings the total money 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 that Mike Christenson, the former COO and President of New Relic and CA Technologies, has come on board as an investor and board member.

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

Onn, the chairman and president, had earlier founded Fireglass, which was sold to Symantec in 2018.

While half the 80-strong workforce of Akeyless is based out of the US, the other half is in Tel Aviv where it has its research and development centre. The company is looking to double its employee strength, with significant hiring in Israel.

Clarifruit

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

With this fundraise the startup has raised $15 million, including a $2.5 million grant two years back.

Clarifruit is developing a software platform for automated quality control for fruit and vegetable supply chains. It said it will look to reduce waste in the fresh produce supply chain and secure a sufficient 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 employs 25 people around the world.

Loops.ai

Israeli artificial intelligence-based startup Loops.ai has raised a $14 million seed funding round 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 product lead at Airbnb), Casey Winters (Former CPO of Eventbrite and Growth Lead at Pinterest), Darius Contractor (Former Chief Product and Engineering Officer of Vnder and VP of Growth at Airtable) and Ben Shanken (VP of Product at Discord).

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

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

theGist

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 founded this year itself by Itay Dressler, Itzik Ben-Bassat, and Nir Zohar and is developing smart AI and machine learning tools to enhance the employee experience by focusing on simplifying the content of internal data and communications.

Ben-Bassat (CEO) was previously involved in founding and growing companies of the likes of Blizzard, OpenWeb and Wix, Dressler (CTO) is the former VP of Engineering at OpenWeb, Co-founder and CTO at Salaryo, and VP R&D at Gong, while Zohar is the COO and President of Wix.