Unit exits stealth mode

Israeli Fintech startup Unit emerges from stealth mode announcing both Seed and Series A funding rounds, totaling $18.6 million. The startup, which develops a financial services platform for enterprises, had both investments led by TLV Partners ($3.6 million Seed round) and Aleph ($15 million Series A). The rounds also saw participation from Better Tomorrow Ventures, Flourish Ventures, OperatorVC, and 30 Angels from the Fintech sphere.

Implement financial tools at core

Unit develops a platform that helps organizations create financial features in their existing products. For example linking bank accounts, payments, loans, and more. Unit claims that by utilizing its service, clients can provide their users custom financial services integrated into their core technologies.

The system is implemented into the organizational infrastructure, and it takes care of the tedious and complicated negotiation process with banks, as well as helping meet bureaucratic regulations. The company was founded by CEO Itai Damti and CTO Doron Somech, who previously founded Leverate in 2008. Unit’s system is currently available in the U.S., with the new capital planned to be invested in advancing R&D efforts. The company’s Israeli R&D center is home to eight out of Unit’s ten employees, with the CEO and another based in the U.S.

At-Bay nails 2020, adding $34M Series C

At-Bay, which offers insurance policies for the digital age, announced a $34 million Series C funding round. The investment was led by Qumra Capital, with participation from M12, Lightspeed Venture Partners, insurance giant Munich RE Ventures, Acrew Capital, and Khosla Ventures. This round closes a total of $74 million raised for 2020 and $91 million since founded, with the Series B round coming back in March during the early days of COVID madness.

Also provides data-security insight

At-Bay offers a different kind of insurance policies that protects companies and organizations from cyber-attacks. The company doesn’t rely solely on past data to assess an enterprise’s cyber risk, but rather collects and enriches data for security experts to analyze and adjust the policy pricing model according to future risks. This way, clients can receive updated risk assessment reports within a few hours. “At-Bay has built a different kind of insurance company, designed from the ground up to address the risk of doing business in the modern technology-driven economy,” said Lior Litwak, Partner at M12.

Similar to traditional insurance companies, the Israeli startup also provides insurance agents with a platform that combines the insurance policy with actionable risk insight. This enables complete visibility between agent and client, and simplifies policy sales, according to the company. Customers are provided with up-to-date cyber risk reports, a calculator for potential cyber damage, test cases, and a whole war chest of information that assists enterprises with better understanding their potential cyber threats.

“Insurance is now an imperative for businesses to mitigate cyber risk, which is fast becoming the greatest threat they face. At-Bay helps businesses prevent cyber loss before it happens, with an in-house security team continuously monitoring the network of every company in our portfolio, offering actionable insights to strengthen security. This modern approach to risk management is not only driving strong demand for our insurance, but also enabling us to improve our products and minimize loss to our insureds,” said Rotem Iram, co-founder and CEO, At-Bay.

At-Bay was founded in 2016 by Rotem Iram, Roman Itskovich, Etai Hochman, and Tilly Kalisky-Bannett. The company is headquartered in Mountain View California, with R&D efforts based in Tel Aviv. At-Bay mentions that the newly acquired capital will be invested in talent recruiting, new product launch, new partnerships, and improving on the existing platform. At-Bay has tripled its team size, while establishing a regional presence in New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles and Dallas. With this financing, At-Bay's Series C valuation has increased nearly 10X over the course of 12 months.

Firebolt emerges from the data warehouse shadows

Israeli startup Firebolt, providing a performance upgrade to cloud data warehouses, officially launches into the high-tech sphere with $37 million in funding. The investment was raised from Bessemer Venture Partners, Zeev Ventures, TLV Partners, and Angular Ventures. The startup was founded by CEO Eldad Farkash, co-founder and former CTO of Sisense; COO Saar Bitner, former Sisense GM and CMO.

They realized that with terabytes of data, cloud data warehouses could not scale to deliver the performance and efficiency companies needed to power their BI tools and analytics.

Big Data, the bigger the better

Gunning for data dominance, Firebolt is looking to take on market giants like Snowflake, Google, and Amazon to name a few, in the data analytics arena. Firebolt has developed an advanced cloud data warehouse that allows for massive data analysis, leading the startup to claim that its product leads the market in performance and value - as one of the cheaper options out of competing cloud data warehouses. The platform enables analysts, employees and end customers to gain the insights they need without having to wait for the results or worry about costs.

"While companies can store massive amounts of data, most organizations are only able to analyze a fraction of that big data, and often find themselves looking at stale data that does not reflect the current state of their business," said Firebolt Co-Founder & CEO Eldad Farkash.

Firebolt’s architecture combines rapid analytics technologies with an almost infinite storage of data lakes, which uses very little cloud resources to run queries. Firebolt physically separates data storage from data analysis, promising flexibility and optimization in every action.

"For companies to flourish today, they need to move fast, and they should not be forced to make data compromises to achieve only a small part of the business value that their data holds. With Firebolt, organizations can finally gain the insights they need without breaking the bank," added Farkash.