The Venture Codex

Participated · Series B · May 2017

Fornova is a Yokneam Illit, Israel-based provider of market intelligence and market visibility solutions for hotels. Led by CEO Dori Stein, the company’s technology scans, extracts and analyzes large amounts of online marketplace information to help hotels understand pricing, ranking and presentation across channels. Its two-tiered offering includes a market intelligence product for collecting and analyzing market data and a channeling and market visibility product that translates analysis into actions to boost occupancy and direct website sales. Fornova serves more than 13,000 hotels, including brands such as Marriott, Hilton, NH Hotels and Premier Inn. The company has offices in London, Amsterdam, New York and Ukraine and plans to use new funding to grow sales, marketing and productization worldwide. It recently closed a $17M Series B to support that expansion.

Participated · Equity · Apr 2016

Nexthink offers a platform that continuously analyzes billions of real-time signals across devices, applications, and networks to give IT teams a comprehensive, moment-to-moment view of technology performance across the enterprise. Leveraging generative and agentic AI, the software anticipates user needs, detects and resolves issues proactively, and automates large-scale improvements. By focusing on Digital Employee Experience, the company enables organizations to boost productivity and reduce IT support costs. Nexthink currently serves more than 1,500 enterprise customers and supports 25 million employees worldwide. Headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland, with a U.S. base in Boston, the company is led by founder and CEO Pedro Bados. The leadership team is positioned to drive the next phase of growth following the latest investment. While revenue figures were not disclosed, the customer base indicates significant market penetration and recurring usage of the platform.

Led · Series D · Mar 2015

SimpliVity is a pioneer in hyperconverged infrastructure whose flagship OmniCube platform assimilates 8–12 IT functions below the hypervisor into a single 2U building block. The company’s data virtualization architecture aims to improve performance, protection, and data efficiency while enabling global unified management from one console. SimpliVity launched its platform in April 2013 and reported record growth in 2014, with revenues up more than 500% year‑over‑year, expansion with resellers into 50 countries, and headcount exceeding 400. The company says 65% of its customers standardize all virtualized applications on its platform. The new financing is intended to fund rapid expansion and capitalize on a large market opportunity; Gartner forecasts integrated system spending growing at a 24% CAGR through 2018. SimpliVity sells through an indirect reseller/distributor model and partners with vendors such as Cisco to expand reach. SimpliVity builds OmniCube, an all‑in‑one, globally scalable infrastructure platform powered by its OmniStack data architecture that delivers inline deduplication, compression and optimization across a federated framework. OmniCube converges compute, storage, networking, cache‑accelerated performance, native VM‑centric backup/replication and public cloud integration into simplified building blocks. The company emerged from stealth in August 2012 and has seen rapid market adoption across small environments to large global cloud providers, with customers such as Swisscom and Dairylea. SimpliVity claims its technology can deliver roughly 3X TCO savings while simplifying management and improving data protection and mobility. The product earned industry recognition, including Gold for Best of VMworld 2013. The company recently secured new capital and plans to use it to accelerate product development, grow engineering headcount, and expand service, support and field teams worldwide. SimpliVity develops a "data center in a box" infrastructure platform, with OmniCube as its flagship product. The company says OmniCube consolidates compute, storage, and networking into a scalable pool of shared resources that can reduce complex data centers to one or two boxes. CEO Dorom Kempel positions SimpliVity as an on‑premise corollary to AWS, describing the topology as integrated and open for end‑users to deploy. SimpliVity highlights integrated features such as de‑duplication and compression that it says differentiate it from competitors. Competitors named in the article include Nutanix, IBM PureSystems, EMC, and NetApp FlexPod, while the market is also being reshaped by providers like AWS. The company came out of stealth just before VMworld and has raised a total of $43 million to date.