vFunction completes $12.2 million funding round led by Israeli investor Oren Zeev

The company’s technology allows apps to be rewritten in Javascript, automatically and efficiently to the cloud

Israeli startup vFunction raised $12.2 million in a seed round led by Israeli investor Oren Zeev’s fund, Zeev Ventures along with Shasta Ventures and with the participation of Khosla Ventures and Engineering Capital, who took part in the company’s pre-seed round. The company was founded in 2017 by serial entrepreneurs: Amir Rapson, Moti Rafalin, and Ori Saporta after selling their previous company WatchDox to BlackBerry in 2015. The company has parallel activities in Israel and the U.S.

 

The company also launched its new product which makes it possible to rewrite business applications in Javascript, automatically and efficiently to the cloud.

 

Israeli investor Oren Zeev. Photo: Josh Todd

 

Many organizations rely on veteran Javascript applications for running their business operations, but are forced to confront the existing need to transition to the cloud in order to maintain their competitive edge, promote news, and respond rapidly to unplanned events like the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. Over the years, these organizations have accumulated hundreds and often thousands of previous-generation Javascript software, which hinders digital transformation initiatives and IT organizations. These applications require significant manual maintenance, expensive licensing, frequent critical changes and continual improvements to maintain business value, and as a result these organizations’ speed of development all but disappears. Modernization projects and current existing tools are manual, slow, expensive and inefficient, and strategic modernization like “Lift-and-Shift” yield limited benefits without splitting the software into microservices. In addition to the complexity, oftentimes organizations lack the minimal resources and skills necessary to conduct modernization on their organizations’ software.

 

“We spent over three years perfecting the vFunction technology to ensure we were helping our customers unlock the true value of the cloud for the 80% of the workloads that aren’t yet cloud-native,” said Rafalin, who serves as the company’s CEO. “vFunction provides developers, CTOs and system architects the opportunity to increase business and engineering velocity, by enabling and accelerating enterprises’ journey to cloud-native architecture, without the steep time commitment, high cost, and significant risk associated with the modernization approaches that exist today.”

 

vFunction is a partner of several companies and a home for leading information technology companies around the world, including Tata Consultancy Services, HCL Technologies, and Wipro. The company is also a partner on leading cloud-native platforms like Red Hat OpenShift.