Participated · Series B · Sep 2021

Quantum Machines builds quantum control solutions (hardware and software) that reduce errors and coordinate experiments for quantum-computing research. Its technology is used by more than half of all companies working on quantum computers and quantum computing, and the company counts hundreds of clients including startups, large corporates, national labs, universities and banks running research on third‑party machines. Customers and partners cited in the article include Nvidia; the company declined to name other specific customers. Quantum Machines positions itself as agnostic to differing quantum-computing approaches, acting as a mediator that reduces noise across architectures. That customer traction and broad addressable market are central to its commercial momentum. Financially, the company recently completed a large funding round to support its continued operations and growth in the quantum ecosystem. Quantum Machines offers a full‑stack Quantum Orchestration Platform (QOP) and hardware, including OPX and the Pulse Processing Unit (PPU) Hadamard, to orchestrate quantum processors and real‑time algorithms. Its control solutions support a wide range of qubit types and customers typically report more than a 100x speedup of quantum workloads when integrated with existing hardware. The company's technology is used by over 280 quantum computing facilities across 23 countries, and it grew its team to over 140 in 2022. Quantum Machines expanded via the acquisition of Danish firm QDevil and partnerships such as Toyota Tsusho for Japanese customers, and it is participating in the €5m EuRyQa Neutral Atom project. It was chosen to lead the establishment of the Israel Quantum Computing Center, intended to house multiple types of quantum processing units under one roof. Financially, the company announced an additional $20M in funding in January 2023, bringing total funding to $100M. Quantum Machines builds a classical hardware and software stack called the Quantum Orchestration Platform to power and control quantum computers. The company designs its own silicon and focuses on the classical hardware layer and the software that drives it, rather than building quantum chips. Its customers include governments, researchers, universities and hyperscaler operators, and it currently has customers in 15 countries. Quantum Machines has about 60 employees and has expanded hiring globally, leveraging remote work to build a distributed team. The $50M Series B will be used to expand the orchestration platform, accelerate R&D and grow the team. CEO and co‑founder Itamar Sivan frames the company’s vision as making quantum computers ubiquitous across industries as the technology matures. Quantum Machines builds hardware and software to control and program quantum computers, and earlier this year launched its Quantum Orchestration Platform to run quantum algorithms and experiments. The company says the platform has already been adopted by multinational corporations and startups. Founded in 2018 by Drs. Itamar Sivan, Yonatan Cohen and Nissim Ofek, the company employs about 30 people, more than half of whom are physicists. The new funding will be used to accelerate customer adoption and advance the company's technology. Quantum Machines positions itself at the intersection of instrumentation and developer tooling for quantum research and development. Quantum Machines was launched by three Ph.D. physicists and focuses on building the operational and control layer for quantum computing. Co-founder and CEO Itamar Sivan frames a three-layer quantum stack—processor, classical control hardware, and software—and says the company is concentrating on the classical control and software layer. The startup is developing prototype hardware and is working with several beta customers. Today it announced a $5.5 million seed investment to accelerate that work. The funding should help the company move from prototype toward a marketable, vertically integrated control solution that includes both classical hardware and software. Founders argue that commercializing quantum computing requires tightly integrated classical and quantum systems to pass data and interpret commands.

Led · Equity · Jul 2021

Shopic sells a clip-on touchscreen smart-cart system that uses two basket-facing cameras and computer-vision algorithms to recognize products, show in-store maps and promotions, and enable checkout via the device. The company maintains and updates a product database of more than 50,000 SKUs, adding up to 10,000 new entries weekly, and requires an initial in-store onboarding pass to train items. Shopic charges retailers a subscription fee for its hardware and software and says its carts have processed transactions worth hundreds of millions of dollars by tens of thousands of shoppers, with increases in monthly shopper spending of up to 8% at some stores. To protect privacy, Shopic anonymizes purchase data and blurs shopper faces captured by cameras, and it says customer retailers own the data. In the near term Shopic plans to add side-facing, shelf-capturing cameras to detect out-of-stocks, price-tag errors and planogram alignment, and to streamline installations. The company intends to focus on customer acquisition, ramp deployments with existing customers, and expand headcount by roughly 30 employees to exceed 100 total by year-end. Shopic develops an AI-powered clip-on device that instantly recognizes items placed in or removed from a shopping cart, automatically registering them by price and displaying the shopper’s active receipt on the device’s screen. The product personalizes the in-store experience by delivering digital promotions in real time based on prior buying habits, store location, and current item selection. For retailers, Shopic’s analytics engine provides live data on shopping journeys, cart movements, and shelf status to optimize store management, enable footpath personalization, and improve contextual promotions. The company is led by CEO and co-founder Raz Golan and co-founder and CTO Eran Kravitz. Shopic intends to use new funds to accelerate commercial activities and expand its team. Financially, the company raised an additional $10m in equity, bringing total capital raised to $21m.

Led · Series D · Jun 2021

Duda provides a platform and tooling for larger businesses and the agencies they employ to build, host and manage professional websites, with templates, widgets and support geared toward multi-person workflows. The product targets customers running tens, hundreds or thousands of sites and is optimized for large amounts of content, audiences and processes such as mass e-commerce. Duda has crossed 1 million published websites and has a community of 17,000 developers (up from 560,000 sites and 6,000 professionals in 2019). The company has shifted into SaaS, which now accounts for about half of its business, while e-commerce has grown 65% and represents roughly 20% of company activity. Duda has raised $100 million to date and CEO Itai Sadan said the company’s valuation has tripled since its last round. Management plans to use the new funding to expand the business and double down on e-commerce, and Sadan expects an IPO in two to three years. Duda provides a cloud-based website building platform aimed at non-technical builders at digital agencies and SaaS platforms, offering tools to build and update sites at scale. Its feature set includes a Widget Builder, APIs for integrating data sources, client-facing comment/feedback tools and asset sharing. The company emphasizes faster site builds and claims customers switching to Duda achieve a 50% reduction in site build times. Duda has a team of engineers in Israel and positions itself as more advanced and customizable than consumer site builders while avoiding some of the complexity associated with WordPress. To date there have been more than 560,000 websites built on the platform by roughly 6,000 web professionals (about 93 sites per developer on average). The company plans to keep investing in product development, sales and marketing to convince customers to switch from larger competitors. DudaMobile is a do-it-yourself mobile website platform that enables small- and medium-sized businesses to build mobile-friendly sites. The company leverages a patented technology to convert desktop websites into mobile-optimized sites. Its platform is used by agencies, designers, marketers, SMBs and enterprise partners including GoDaddy, AT&T, Yahoo, Google, Homestead and OpenTable. DudaMobile currently hosts 4 million mobile websites and has expanded into international markets including Australia, Brazil, Japan, Mexico and Spain. Led by CEO Itai Sadan, the company plans to use new capital for product development and to expand its service offerings, including mobile advertising. DudaMobile provides a platform that converts existing websites into mobile‑optimized versions that stay in sync with desktop sites as changes are applied. The product was originally offered as a white‑label service and in August launched a self‑serve platform that creates sites compatible with iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone. The company offers a freemium pricing model (a free tier, a $9/month premium plan, and a pro option priced $499 first year then $9/month) and partners with companies such as Webs.com, Logoworks by HP, AT&T, Yahoo and eniro. DudaMobile reports strong user growth — it recently surpassed 1.4 million websites built and hosted on its platform, and since the start of 2012 its user base has grown by more than 100,000 new users each month (earlier it reported over 175,000 hosted sites, 35% of which were small business sites). The company plans to use new funding to expand engineering and marketing teams with a particular focus on targeting the SMB market, and says it will announce a large partnership in early April.

Participated · Equity · May 2020

Cyberbit builds a hyper‑realistic simulation platform and advanced cyber range that trains cyber operators and executives by replicating attacks, networks, and commercial security tools. The platform is used across industry, government, and higher education and delivers over 1 million hours of exercises annually. Recent strategic moves include relocating the company’s global headquarters to Newburyport, Massachusetts, appointing Caleb Barlow as CEO, and launching a government‑focused subsidiary. The company has added leadership from the IBM team that established the first commercial cyber range. Cyberbit says its platform reduces cyber risk, boosts resilience, and improves team retention. Ongoing product development and planned expansion target North America as well as Europe, the Middle East, and Indo‑Pacific markets. Cyberbit delivers a cloud-based cyber range that replicates real-world cyberattacks and immerses trainees in a virtual security operations center where they use commercial security tools to respond to live simulated attacks. The platform offers comprehensive performance assessment, feedback and ranking to help organizations identify and fix gaps in their security teams’ performance. Customers include multiple Fortune 500 enterprises, two of the Big-Four accounting firms, training service providers, governments and academic institutions. Founded in 2015 and based in Ra’anana, Israel, Cyberbit plans to accelerate development of its cyber range product and expand global sales and marketing. The company recently received a major capital infusion that affects its current financial position and runway. Leadership is led by CEO Adi Dar. Cyberbit offers a consolidated detection-and-response platform that protects IT, OT and IoT attack surfaces, including endpoint detection and response powered by behavioral analysis, SOAR, ICS/SCADA security, and a cyber range for simulated training. The company’s products have been adopted by enterprises, governments, academic institutions and MSSPs worldwide. Cyberbit is a subsidiary of Elbit Systems Ltd., was founded in mid-2015, and is led by CEO Adi Dar. It has offices in Israel, the US, Europe and Asia and is headquartered in Ra’anana, Israel. The company raised $30M to expand sales and marketing—primarily in North America—accelerate product development, and enhance customer and partner support. Oded Tal of Claridge Israel will join Cyberbit’s board of directors following the investment.

Participated · Equity · May 2020

GigaSpaces provides an in-memory computing platform for real-time insight-to-action and extreme transactional processing, enabling enterprises to operationalize machine learning and transactional workloads. Its always-on platforms support mission-critical applications across cloud, on-premise, and hybrid environments. Customers include Tier-1 and Fortune-listed organizations across financial services, retail, transportation, telecom, and healthcare. The company is led by CEO Adi Paz and maintains offices in the US, Europe and Asia. GigaSpaces closed a $12M financing and said it will use the proceeds to accelerate rapid growth, scale global expansion, deepen partner collaboration, and accelerate product innovation. GigaSpaces Technologies provides pure-play cloud orchestration and data scalability platforms through two main product lines, Cloudify and XAP. Funding will accelerate global awareness and adoption of GigaSpaces’ cloud application orchestration and data scalability solutions, drive continued product innovation, and expand its sales organization worldwide in hybrid cloud, NFV and real-time analytics. The company reported its best year to date in revenue, tripled product adoption in 2015, and closed several record multi-million dollar deals for both Cloudify and XAP. Hundreds of tier-1 enterprises and carriers currently run GigaSpaces’ flagship products in production deployments across multiple industries. In 2015 the company implemented Cloudify orchestration at more than 20 Telco providers for NFV initiatives. GigaSpaces maintains offices in the US, Europe and Asia Pacific.