Israeli startup Onfire AI has raised $20 million in seed funding. The round was led by TLV Partners and Grove Ventures, with additional investment from IN Venture and Leumi Tech 77, the new investment branch of Bank Leumi.
The funding happened in two parts — it started in 2023 and continued into this year.
The company has built a contextual intelligence platform that studies online activity on forums, blogs, social networks, and developer communities. It helps software and cloud companies find potential customers and understand what they need in real time.
By turning large amounts of public data into useful insights, Onfire AI helps sales teams find better leads and reach out to them in a more targeted and effective way.
“We took the informing capability that armies use and gave similar capabilities to sales teams in our content world,” said Tal Peretz, Onfire’s co-founder and CEO, in an interview with Calcalist. “We worked together for many years and learned to solve problems with the help of data and AI. We helped the IDF solve the problem of targets before and during the war, and we wanted to build something that gives value to the world.”
Peretz added that before writing a single line of code, the founders met with hundreds of companies to identify pain points in go-to-market operations. “Our next significant goal is $10 million in sales, which I expect we will reach in the coming year,” he said.
Onfire AI already works with companies like Aiven, Spectro Cloud, and Cyera. It was founded in 2023 by Peretz (CEO), Shahar Shavit (CTO), and Nitzan Hadar (CPO) — all former members of the IDF’s elite Unit 8200.
During their military service, they won two Israel Defense Awards for major projects — one for a system that tracked individual terrorists for the IDF and Shin Bet, and another for an automated target recommendation platform that used advanced algorithms.
In the company’s first six months, about 90% of the employees, including two of the founders, were called to reserve duty during Israel’s ongoing war. Despite this, the startup managed to sign its first commercial deal while the founders were still serving.
Today, Onfire AI has 33 employees — 28 based in Israel and 5 in New York.
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