Israeli intelligence vets raise $20M to track developer buying signals

Developers hate (bad) marketing, but they still need a way to find useful tools and services. That’s why you’ll find a large number of developers on forums and sites like Hacker News, Reddit, and Stack Overflow discussing their development kits and why some tools are better than others.

This purchase intent is to signal that Israeli startup Onfire wants to help software vendors take over. The company monitors public forums to see which tools developers are discussing, then uses artificial intelligence to determine which companies those commenters are working with and who the decision-makers there are. The platform also collects data related to budget cycles, and pulls it together to help B2B sales teams time and contextualize their communication.

Onfire has now emerged from obscurity with $20 million in funding, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. This includes a new $14 million Series A co-led by Israeli venture capital firms, Grove Ventures and TLV Partners. IN Venture, the investment arm of Japanese company Sumitomo, also participated, as did LeumiTech77, a special fund marking the 77th anniversary of Israel’s founding.

Like many other Israeli founders and venture capitalists, Onfire CEO Tal Peretz, CTO Shahar Shavit and CPO Nitzan Hada are graduates of IDF Unit 8200, an NSA-like intelligence unit that has won awards and sparked controversy for its alleged mass surveillance of civilians using artificial intelligence and tools. Advanced data.

After joining the private technology sector, the trio (pictured above, left to right: Hada, Peretz and Shavit) saw the opportunity to use their intelligence expertise in SaaS. The startup estimates it has generated “more than $50 million in closed deals” for its clients since launching in beta 12 months ago, and says its early adopters include ActiveFence, Aiven, Cyera, Port, and Spectro Cloud, as well as other companies selling data and cybersecurity. FinOps and monitoring solutions for technical buyers.

However, one cannot ignore the big problem: Given the founders’ intelligence background, Onfire pulling public data to identify the employers of commentators would certainly raise eyebrows. But Lefkovich positions the startup’s results as a win-win. “Our customers are happy, and by the way, even their potential customers are happy, because people are offering them the right things at the right time,” he said.

The company hopes its data-centric vertical focus will give it an advantage over competitors. While other AI-powered tools promise to boost companies’ sales, Peretz says one can’t do personal outreach without something to back it up. “What sets us apart is that we started as a data-first company, and then we added an AI engine on top of that,” he said.

According to Grove Managing Partner Lotan Lefkowitz, Onfire fills a gap that the investment firm identified before it met the founders: software infrastructure companies are not leveraging AI in their go-to-market (GTM) strategy. “The missing piece there is data,” he said.

Onfire comes at a time when companies are facing challenges in capitalizing on product-led growth solely for enterprise sales. Some in the industry believe a new data layer is now necessary to support GTM teams, and Grove had already reached that conclusion when it linked up with Onfire, Lefkowitz said. He helped Onfire connect with companies his team met while developing that thesis.

“Before we wrote a single line of code, we interviewed about 275 IT revenue leaders,” Peretz told TechCrunch. The co-founders found that most companies still derived most of their revenue from direct selling efforts, but the adoption of AI tools was changing things.

They learned that buyers can benefit from using contextual AI-based tools to “do more with less.” But IT managers, technology managers, and engineering teams, traditionally considered “power buyers,” now have to filter out more noise than ever before thanks to AI tools that enable team communication, and context can help salespeople here.

Peretz stressed that the Onfire solution is also about mapping signals to the customer’s context – for example, you would need a different approach to selling a data solution to a large enterprise compared to a cybersecurity solution. This is particularly interesting, Lefkowitz says, because it means that “with every customer Onfire has, the data set actually gets better.”

This composite data layer is what Onfire sees as a moat to defend against CRM-based companies like Salesforce and HubSpot. “This vertical approach enables them to have a very unique value proposition for these go-to-market teams of software infrastructure companies,” Lefkowitz said.

Peretz said the startup plans to use its new funding to hire employees in the areas of artificial intelligence, research and development, and sales. Its core AI system is built in Israel, where 60% of the team is based, but its “go-to-market machine” is based in New York, where the startup expects the US to be one of its key markets.