Israeli startup Tailor Brands announced the closing of a $50 million Series C funding round. The round was led by a new VC player to the Israeli startup investment game -- GoDaddy, the American domain registrar and web hosting giant. Other than its first dab into Israeli tech, the investment also marks GoDaddy’s largest ever investment in a private company.

The round saw participation from OurCrowd, in addition to existing investors: Pitango Growth, Mangrove Capital Partners, Armat Group, Disruptive VC, and serial entrepreneur Richard Rosenblatt. Tailor Brands has raised $70 million since it was founded in 2015.

Starting a digital business from scratch

Journeying off on a small business venture is no simple task. Especially at a time when branding can often play a bigger role in business than product or service quality. This is where Tailor Brands steps in with an automated fix, leveraging AI technologies to help small businesses create logos, build websites, acquire domains (Understand now why GoDaddy is interested?), create content for social media, and even design branded products.

Tailor Brands

“Once we started to really track the explosive growth of small businesses as a result of Covid, we knew that Tailor Brands could provide real value for these business owners in a fun and engaging way by removing many of the hurdles that come with establishing and marketing a new business, including consolidating all of the needed services in one place, enabling business owners to free up valuable time to focus on other important aspects of growing their companies,” said Yali Saar, CEO and co-founder of Tailor Brands. “We are thrilled to have this vote of confidence from GoDaddy and our other investors as we continue on our growth trajectory with Tailor Brands unique position in the growing SMB economy.”

How did the GoDaddy connection happen?

Saar: “Tailor, over the past two years, has become a major player in the SMB market. More than 700,000 new SMBs choose to brand and build their business with Tailor every month. Today, more SMBs are using our platform over solutions provided by public companies operating in the same space… As a result, many of these public players want to collaborate. And GoDaddy is one of those companies.”

When I ask about the company’s future plans to stay private, to be acquired, or to go public? Saar elegantly deflects by saying that the company “is ideally positioned to become the next big player in the market.”

Tailor Brands was founded in 2014 by CEO Yaali Saar, COO Tom Lahat, and CTO Nadav Shatz. Often a rarity among tech companies, Tailor Brands employs an equal number of women and men on its roster, highlighting its deep commitment to diversity.