Israeli intelligence veteran raises $20 million to track developer buying signals

Developers hate (bad) marketing, but they still need a way to find useful tools and services. As a result, forums and sites like Hacker News, Reddit, and Stack Overflow are filled with developers discussing development kits and why some tools are better than others.

This buying intent is a signal that Israeli startup Onfire wants to help acquire software vendors. The company monitors public forums to understand what tools developers are discussing, and uses AI to identify which companies commenters work with and who the decision-makers are there. The platform also overlays data on budget cycles and brings it all together to help B2B sales teams time and understand the status of their outreach.

Onfire is now coming out of stealth with $20 million in funding, according to information obtained exclusively by TechCrunch. This includes a new $14 million Series A co-led by Israeli VC firms Grove Ventures and TLV Partners. IN Venture, the venture arm of Japan’s Sumitomo Corporation, also participated, as did LeumiTech 77, a special fund commemorating the 77th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel.

Like many other Israeli founders and venture capitalists, Onfire’s CEO Tal Peretz, CTO Shahar Shavit, and CPO Nizan Hada are alumni of Israel Defense Forces Unit 8200. The unit, an NSA-like intelligence unit, received awards and controversy for using advanced AI and data tools to conduct mass surveillance of civilians.

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

Still, we can’t ignore the elephant in the room. Given the founder’s intelligence background, Onfire’s trawling of public data to identify commenters’ employers will no doubt raise eyebrows. But Lotan Levkowitz, managing partner at Grove Ventures, says the startup’s results are a win-win. “Our customers are happy, and by the way, their prospects are happy, too, because people pitch them the right thing at the right time,” he said.

The company hopes its vertical, data-centric focus will give it an edge over its competitors. While other AI-enabled tools promise to boost sales for businesses, Peretz says personalized outreach is impossible without something to base it on. “What sets us apart is that we started as a data-first company and added an AI engine on top of that,” he said.

Levkowitz said Onfire is trying to fill a gap that the startup recognized before he met with its founders: software infrastructure companies weren’t leveraging AI in their go-to-market (GTM) strategies. “What was missing was data,” he said.

Onfire comes at a time when companies are facing the challenge of leveraging only product-driven growth in enterprise sales. Some in the industry believe a new data layer is needed to support GTM teams, and Lefkowitz said Grove had already reached that conclusion when it worked with Onfire. He helped Onfire connect with companies his team met while writing that paper.

“Before we wrote a single line of code, we interviewed approximately 275 revenue leaders in the IT space,” Peretz told TechCrunch. The co-founders discovered that while most companies still derive the majority of their revenue from direct sales activities, the introduction of AI tools is changing that.

They learned that buyers can benefit by using AI-based contextual tools to “do more with less.” But CISOs, CTOs, and engineering teams, traditionally seen as “tough buyers,” need to filter through more noise than ever before, thanks to AI tools that enable mass outreach, and this is where context can help salespeople.

Peretz emphasized that Onfire’s solution is also about mapping signals to the customer’s context. For example, selling data solutions to large organizations requires a different approach than cybersecurity solutions. Levkowitz says this is particularly interesting because it means that “every time Onfire acquires a customer, the dataset is actually getting better and better.”

At Onfire, we view this increasingly complex data layer as a moat to protect us from legacy CRM companies like Salesforce and HubSpot. “This verticalized approach gives us a very unique value proposition for go-to-market teams at software infrastructure companies,” said Lefkowitz.

Peretz said the startup plans to use the new funding to hire in AI, research and development, and sales. Although the company’s core AI systems are built in Israel, where 60% of the team is based, the startup expects the US to be one of its key markets, so its “go-to-market machine” is based in New York.