After witnessing 4 different Israeli companies ring the Wall Street bell in June, Israeli high-tech is once again upping our excitement level -- this time four Israeli startups are acquired in less than 24 hours.

IntSights acquired for nearly $400M by Rapid7

The first company out of the bag is IntSights, which reported its acquisition by American cyber giant Rapid7 for close to $400 million in cash and stock. The deal also entitles Rapid7 to reserve spots to keep IntSights full headcount, and there are 200 of them which will become Rapid7’s official R&D center in Israel.

The company was founded in 2015 by CEO Guy Nizan, CTO Gal Ben David, and CPO Alon Arvatz. IntSights has raised $70 million to date, meaning that some of the investors will see a nice return on their investment. Among the investors in the Israeli startup we find Glilot Capital, Vintage, Tola, Blumberg, BlackStone, ClearSky, Qumra Capital, and Wipro.

The Israeli company developed a cybersecurity system that not only protects enterprises from the inside but also from outside of their network. Meaning that instead of waiting for cyberattacks behind a wall, the system provides customers with an overview of what is happening outside the network, in an attempt to pre-identify and prevent attacks before they make it to the organizational network. The platform uses numerous data points, and works alongside an analytics engine that prioritizes collected intelligence, and translates critical data for immediate response. While this may sound like data chaos behind the scenes, actually the whole platform can be operated on a single dashboard by a single analyst.

“Cyber security is a lopsided battle today and the odds consistently favor attackers,” said Corey Thomas, chairman and CEO, Rapid7. “Both IntSights and Rapid7 have a shared belief that organizations will succeed only when they have a unified view of internal and external threats, complete with contextualized intelligence and automated threat mitigation which will allow security teams to focus on the most critical threats. We look forward to working with IntSights to make this vision a reality for our customers.”

VC fund takes control over Connatix

When a startup exits, it’s not always acquired by another bigger tech company. Sometimes, as we previously saw with Armis, it’s the venture funds that want to get their hands on a startup -- usually to further improve the company and sell it for a higher margin. Israeli startup Connatix announced it had signed a deal for the majority of its shares to be acquired by American fund Court Square Capital Partners.

Connatix developed a video player and optimization engine for content creators and publishers. Additionally, the platform enables creation of videos based on existing content and links up to existing content libraries. Among the company’s base we see Reuters, Mashable, and others. According to the company, over 3,000 content creators and 1,000 advertisers use the video optimization platform.

“Since its inception, Connatix’s mission has been to help publishers grow their businesses through successful video experiences,” said David Kashak, CEO and Co-Founder of Connatix. “We are thrilled to partner with Court Square Capital to further this mission as we enter this next stage of growth. Their extensive experience, breadth of knowledge, and shared vision for the growth potential of Connatix made them the ideal investment partner.”

The Israeli startup notes that the investment (or acquisition) will facilitate global expansion, new product development, and acquisition of competing or complementary companies. Just like back in 2019, when Connatix acquired Israeli startup Kamidoo. Connatix was founded by CEO David Kashak and COO Oren Stern, with Kashak keeping his position in the company. According to Pitchbook, the company has only raised $15 million, and employs a team of 130 people.

After selling high on Whitebox, the founders run it back again with their new baby

They say that lightning never strikes twice, but that lightning has never met Maor Goldberg, Eran Leib, and Shlomi Wexler. In 2015, the trio sold their company Whitebox Security to SailPoint. Now they’re looking to do it again with Apolicy, just one year after first landing its Seed funding. Recently, Sysdig announced its intent to acquire Apolicy, and as a result will establish an R&D center in Israeli with the Apolicy team and executives.

Apolicy developed a security policy management platform for Cloud Native. The system performs individual accurate risk analysis for all active workloads while defining policy-as-code based on research, market insight, and personalized customer service insight. Additionally, the platform also offers customized “prescriptions” to manage remediation and prioritize critical tasks.

Although the acquisition’s total value has yet to be revealed, estimates put the deal in the tens of millions of dollars. This means that investors enjoyed nice ROI, in light of the company raising only $3.5 million from StageOne Ventures and Angels.

"We founded Apolicy with the purpose of securing Kubernetes from source to production through risk identification, remediation, and policy enforcement," said Maor Goldberg, Chief Executive Officer, Apolicy. “We are excited to join forces with Sysdig and combine the best security capabilities in the market for cloud and containers together with our infrastructure and posture security. Together we will bring customers one end-to-end cloud native security platform that is built on open source.”

Isaeli cyber giant taps local ecosystem

Recently Cybereason announced a mega $275 million funding round at a $3 billion valuation. Not wanting to waste any time, the company quickly decided to start spending that massive check; announcing the acquisition of Israeli startup empow.

The empow platform analyzes, detects, and automates cyber threat management, by pulling existing data from organizational networks, and generating a map of potential threats in addition to defense strategies. The company claims to be able to predict an attacker’s next step, and therefore cuts the chain of attack. It’s pretty obvious why Cybereason, a key player in the post hack landscape, wanted to get its hands on empow’s tech and talent.

Empow was founded in 2014 by CEO Avi Chesla and Iko Azoulay, both former Radware execs. According to Pitchbook, the company has raised $19 million over 7 years, and has a roster of 30 employees.

“Cybereason has been recognized as a leader in the EDR and EPP space for some time, and its operation-centric approach to delivering deep contextual correlations offered by the ability to identify MalOps is defining the gold standard for XDR solutions,” said empow Founder and CEO Avi Chesla. “There was a great deal of natural synergy in everything both companies were already doing, and we are very enthusiastic about the acquisition because this is truly a case where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”