The Edge of TechFive leading Israeli GenAI startups that raised funding in H1 2024
The Edge of Tech
Five leading Israeli GenAI startups that raised funding in H1 2024
BRIA, Aim Security, Illumex, Ask-AI, and Prompt Security all raised significant money in the first half of 2024
This year has seen some large fundraising announcements from Israeli companies, despite challenging economic times following the war with Hamas. A significant new space that is garnering a lot of attention is GenAI, and 2024 has already seen some impressive funding rounds.
BRIA
Sector: Visual GenAI Platform| Established: 2020 | Founders: Dr. Yair Adato, Gal Jacobi, and Assa Eldar (from 2022) | Funding: $26.6 million from GFT Ventures, Intel Capital, and Entrée Capital, with participation from Publicis Groupe, Getty Images, Samsung Next, and others
BRIA, which has developed a visual generative AI open platform, announced in February that it has raised $24 million in Series A funding. The round was jointly led by GFT Ventures, Intel Capital, and Entrée Capital with additional investors including, Publicis Groupe, Getty Images, Samsung Next, IN venture (Sumitomo Corporation, Japan), Atinum Investment (South Korea), Z Venture Capital (LY Corporation, Japan), Mirae Asset Venture Investment, J-Ventures, and others.
BRIA enables companies to easily tailor their visual requirements and allows developers to seamlessly integrate generative AI capabilities into any existing product, solution, or system as a source code and pre-trained model, API, and SDK. BRIA collaborates with many of the world’s leading stock image providers and manages over one billion licensed images. These images are used to train BRIA’s text-to-image foundation models while ensuring the original creators, artists, and media companies receive royalties to fairly compensate for their images’ contribution to the final generated output.
Aim Security
Sector: Security for GenAI | Established: 2022 | Founders: Matan Getz and Adir Gruss | Funding: $28 million from Canaan Partners, YL Ventures, and the founders of Wiz and industry leaders from Palo Alto Networks, Proofpoint, and Google.
Aim Security, which is developing a security platform that governs and secures AI use across the modern business environment, announced on Monday an $18 million Series A funding round led by Canaan Partners, with participation from the company’s seed investor, YL Ventures.
Founded by Matan Getz (CEO) and Adir Gruss (CTO), who worked on AI platforms in the IDF’s elite intelligence Unit 8200, Aim is developing a platform specifically tailored for AI’s unique threats, including sensitive data exposure, supply chain vulnerabilities, harmful or manipulated outputs and the emergence of attack methods such as jailbreaks and prompt injection.
Illumex
Sector: GenAI | Established: 2021 | Founders: Inna Tokarev Sela | Funding: $13 million from Cardumen Capital, Amdocs Ventures, and Samsung Ventures, with participation from ICI Fund, Jibe Ventures, Iron Nation Fund, Ginnosar Ventures, ICON Fund, Today Ventures, and angel investors.
Illumex helps organizations to overcome data challenges that hinder generative AI (GenAI) initiatives by automating the creation of a semantic layer that unifies data silos and adds business context, as well as generating a consistent vocabulary of domain-specific terminology. Illumex, an alumni of the Intel Ignite and ICON programs, already has clients of the likes of Teva and Carson using its platform. The company employs 15 people, with a majority of female employees.
Illumex's platform analyzes metadata — without accessing the underlying sensitive information — to create a unified semantic knowledge graph. This graph acts as a single source of truth that aligns all data with consistent business terminology and context. This serves as a foundation that enables LLMs to reliably map user questions to the relevant data points that should be retrieved in order to deliver accurate results while ensuring proper governance.
Ask-AI
Sector: GenAI insights for enterprises | Established: 2021 | Founders: Alon Talmor | Funding: $20 million from Leaders Fund with participation from Seed investors Vertex Ventures, State of Mind Ventures, GTMFund, and others
Ask-AI, a generative AI answers and insights solution for enterprises, has announced that it has raised $11 million in Series A, alongside the launch of its new sidekick called ASK. Leaders Fund led the round with participation from Seed investors Vertex Ventures, State of Mind Ventures, GTMFund, and others. It brings the company to a total of $20 million in funding.
Ask-AI’s solution is designed to improve efficiency in repetitive tasks, knowledge management, and understanding the needs of customers. It can connect to more than 50 enterprise work systems such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Confluence, Jira, Slack, Google Drive, Teams, and many other customer communication and knowledge sources. Ask-AI then ingests, analyzes, and understands all the enterprise knowledge it can and integrates that into an employee’s workflow. The idea is that it will help them be more productive, providing multiple use cases for customer support, success, product, R&D, and sales.
Its sidekick goes by the name of ASK which is a sidebar that provides contextual information about anything in a team member’s workflow. Users can then enquire about the customer’s long-term concerns and past interactions, request insights about sentiment and churn risk, and it can suggest concise answers and relevant knowledge across all company sources. ASK also offers a confidence score and linked citation for its generated content, something that can combat AI hallucination and that other AI models have struggled to do.
Prompt Security
Sector: Enterprise GenAI Security | Established: 2023 | Founders: Itamar Golan and Lior Drihem | Funding: $5 million from Hetz Ventures with participation from Four Rivers and angels including CISOs at Airbnb, Elastic, and Dolby.
Prompt Security, a platform for enterprise generative AI security, has launched from stealth and announced $5 million in Seed funding. The round was led by Hetz Ventures with participation from Four Rivers and angels including CISOs at Airbnb, Elastic, and Dolby.
Research from Google has shown that LLMs like ChatGPT can be manipulated into revealing large amounts of data on which they were trained. The recent lawsuit against OpenAI filed by The New York Times alleging that ChatGPT can output almost-verbatim article excerpts in its responses highlights the potential for generative AI tools to leak training data. Prompt Security helps enterprises benefit from the adoption of generative AI while also protecting from a range of risks to the applications, employees, and customers. It inspects each prompt and model response to prevent the exposure of sensitive data, block harmful content, and secure against a range of gen AI-specific attacks. The solution also provides the leadership of enterprises with visibility and governance over the AI tools used within their organizations. The company was founded in August 2023 by CEO Golan and Lior Drihem, who serves as CTO. Its platform already supports millions of prompts and thousands of users per month.
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