Latest / Israel Tech Daily / Sentra raises $150 million, Explorium shuts down, and Nice says AI is part of its job cuts

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Sentra raises $150 million, Explorium shuts down, and Nice says AI is part of its job cuts · Israel Tech Daily

• 0:00
  Noa: Sentra, a data security company founded by former Unit 8200 commanders, has raised $150 million, as companies try to keep AI agents away from data they shouldn't touch.
• 0:17
  Noa: Good morning, it's Thursday, the fifth of November. I'm Noa.
• 0:21
  Eli: And I'm Eli.
• 0:23
  Noa: Today, Sentra's new round, the data startup Explorium closes its doors, and Nice explains its job cuts as its results come in.
• 0:31
  Noa: Sentra announced on Wednesday that it has raised $150 million in a round led by Capital One Ventures. Globes and Ynetnews call it a Series C. Existing investors Bessemer, Zeev Ventures, Standard Investments, Munich Re Ventures and Key1 Capital also took part, and a Capital One representative joins the board.
• 0:51
  Eli: That takes Sentra past $250 million raised in total. The company won't give a valuation. Globes cites PitchBook data valuing it at about $205 million in its previous round, and chief executive Yoav Regev told CTech the valuation has tripled since then.
• 1:09
  Noa: The founders are a familiar group. Globes says Regev spent twenty-five years in Unit 8200, last as head of its cyber center, and president Asaf Kochan is a former commander of the unit. The company was founded in 2021 and has 130 employees, 65 of them in Tel Aviv.
• 1:28
  Eli: What it sells is a map of a company's data, who can reach it, and when to take that access away. Regev's point to Globes is that AI agents often run with far broader permissions than they need. In his words, AI is, at its core, a data problem.
• 1:43
  Noa: The company reports growth of three hundred percent a year. CTech adds that it has about a hundred large customers in the United States and Europe, revenue in the tens of millions of dollars, and plans to double its workforce in Israel and the US and open an office in London.
• 2:00
  Eli: Doubling a team means a lot of interviews. Our sponsor, SkillSim, gives candidates a short, timed AI scenario with pasting switched off, so you see their own thinking before you hire, not months after. And they get half an hour of real challenge, not a week of homework. Try it free at skillsim.co.
• 2:19
  Noa: Now, a company that ran out of road. Explorium is shutting down after almost nine years. Co-founders Omer Har and Or Tamir announced it in a farewell post, CTech reports. They wrote that the team kept growing the business this past year, but in the end, it all just wasn't enough.
• 2:37
  Eli: CTech says Explorium raised more than $127 million, from Insight Partners, Zeev Ventures, Emerge, F2 Capital and others, including a $75 million Series C led by Insight in 2021. Geektime says that during the pandemic it reached a valuation of more than half a billion dollars.
• 2:58
  Noa: It started by connecting companies to thousands of outside data sources, to improve their machine learning. As those tools became common, it pivoted to data for AI agents, and its chat-based prospecting app drew more than 350,000 registered users, according to the founders.
• 3:15
  Eli: Geektime says more than seventy employees are expected to lose their jobs. One more detail. Its third co-founder, Maor Shlomo, ran Explorium until 2023, then founded Base44, which Wix went on to buy.
• 3:30
  Noa: Yesterday we told you Nice is cutting about 500 jobs. On Wednesday's earnings call, chief executive Scott Russell explained more. CTech quotes him saying the cuts reach research and development, where teams are using AI tools to increase productivity materially, and that Nice is removing layers of management.
• 3:49
  Eli: That's a change of tone. In July, CTech says, Russell told it Nice had no plans to cut its workforce in Israel. The company still hasn't said how many of the cuts land here. It expects restructuring charges of fifteen to twenty million dollars, mostly this quarter.
• 4:05
  Noa: The numbers themselves, according to CTech. Revenue rose eight percent to $791 million, and annual recurring revenue from AI products rose forty-six percent to $392 million. Russell admitted cloud growth is not where it needs to be.
• 4:22
  Eli: On Actimize, the financial crime division up for sale, Russell said only that Nice continues to work with advisers and has no further update. In September, Sky News reported that Brookfield was in exclusive talks to buy it for about $2 billion. Actimize's revenue grew thirteen percent last quarter, to $135 million. Nice bought it in 2007 for $280 million.
• 4:48
  Noa: Finally in our top stories, an exit. The ice news site, citing TheMarker, reports that Fortissimo Capital is buying all of Contguard from Ewave Mobile, part of the Ewave group, in a deal valued at about $50 million.
• 5:02
  Eli: Contguard, based in Hod Hasharon with about seventy employees, puts sensors on trucks and containers that track location, route, temperature, humidity and tampering. ice says Amazon is among its customers. It once filed a draft prospectus for a Tel Aviv listing in 2021, then pulled back, and the founders are expected to stay on.
• 5:24
  Noa: Now the quick round-up.
• 5:25
  Eli: Brava Security has raised a $15 million seed round led by Pitango and F2, CTech reports, with senior executives from Anthropic, Microsoft and Check Point also investing. It checks whether a company's defenses would actually spot an attack, without running one.
• 5:43
  Noa: Schneider Children's Medical Center and Clalit have launched a venture fund for children's health, aiming for $50 million. CTech says it has made three investments. The figures for its first close differ, and the Times of Israel puts it at twenty million shekels, about $6.3 million.
• 6:01
  Eli: eToro has agreed to buy LB Finanzas, an investment app from Argentina, FX News Group reports. It's eToro's fourth acquisition deal this year, after Zengo, the Israeli crypto exchange Bit2C and the US broker TradeZero.
• 6:16
  Noa: And CTech reports that Google's headcount hit a record 204,757 at the end of September, up about ten thousand in six months, with hiring and the Wiz acquisition behind the rise, even as Google expands voluntary buyouts in several countries.
• 6:34
  Eli: What to watch: Actimize. Nice says it has nothing new to report on the sale, but CTech says the division made nearly twenty-nine percent of Nice's operating profit in 2024, so a signed deal would reshape the company.
• 6:49
  Noa: This episode was brought to you by SkillSim. If you manage a support team and need new agents who stay calm with an angry customer, let them prove it in a live scenario first. Check them out at skillsim.co.
• 7:01
  Eli: Follow Israel Tech Daily in your podcast app, and read more at startuptofollow.com.
• 7:06
  Noa: See you tomorrow morning.