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Thanks to artificial intelligence, the chip industry in Israel is getting warmer

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Avanan, an enterprise security provider for SaaS-based email and collaboration platforms, announced today that it has raised $25 million in Series B funding from existing investors StageOne Ventures, Magma Venture Partners and Greenfield Partners (a TPG Growth investment platform). Avanan’s customer base has increased 10-fold in the last 12 months, protecting over 1M end-user accounts in organizations across all industries, from startups to Fortune 100. Avanan plans to use the new funding to further accelerate its growth. Read More

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While there’s always focus on the billion-dollar-plus unicorns, there is now increasingly more investment activity taking place among younger start-ups. Venture capitalists poured a record $11.5 billion into early stage companies in the second quarter of 2018, according to PitchBook, while the average deal size reached a 10-year high of $18 million. Many companies that received some of that funding have made it onto this list.

The companies that made this year’s Upstart 100 list represent nearly every sector of the economy, from enterprise software and finance to insurance, health care and retail. They come from nine different countries and 13 U.S. states, and 19 of the 100 are led by women. All of them are less than five years old, but 28 are less than three years old and six were founded just last year.

And all of the 100 companies on the list have quickly become entrepreneurial success stories worth keeping an eye on.

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Apprente helps businesses and their employees minimize customer wait times, boost service productivity and improve consumer experiences. The company is currently focused on the QSR space, developing systems that completely automate customer food ordering processes at drive-thru stations, kiosks and on mobile devices.

“Research shows that more than half of all fast food revenue is generated by drive-thrus,” said Itamar Arel, Ph.D., CEO and founder of Apprente. “But fast food is not always fast and bottlenecks at ordering stations result in lost sales. Our conversational agents deliver human-like interactions with technology-driven efficiencies, allowing restaurants to improve customer engagement. With virtual agents, QSRs can easily improve order throughput and menu order fulfillments, and shorten queue lines by leveraging multiple drive-thru stations.”

Unlike conventional speech-to-text solutions that transcribe audio signals, Apprente’s patented sound-to-meaning technology leverages proprietary artificial intelligence mechanisms for learning and processing of speech signals to directly infer meaning from audio.

The company’s virtual agents provide an engaging, informative, natural language understanding of complex conversations, including handling corrections and revisions to ordered items, such as, “Can you make that first drink extra-large?” Additionally, Apprente’s solution offers a more consistent and pleasurable customer service experience with its virtual agents never sounding tired, annoyed, unhappy or angry.

“Our technology is closer to how the human brain processes and understands speech,” Arel said. “Audio signals are administered and directly invoke representations in Apprente’s models that are mapped onto decisions, enabling faster, more robust human-machine interaction.”

Apprente’s domain-customized conversation simulator augments collected data with realistic synthesized samples, which enables a high degree of accuracy, as well as easy introduction of custom words into the order-dictionary.

Additional features of the technology include:

• Robustness – Operational in challenging real-world conditions, including noisy environments and poor language and grammar used by customers.
• Real-time engagement – Deployable in diverse settings, without relying on uninterrupted cloud connectivity or heavy computing hardware.
• Customization – Compatible with legacy infrastructures ranging from point-of-sale platforms to call center systems.
• Natural interaction – Eliminates the need for wake words or the requirement to speak carefully and clearly.

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Enterprises face growing security threats that are becoming stronger and more ubiquitous over time. The spectrum of security challenges continuously widens due to heightened connectivity, and IT professionals are faced with more sophisticated viruses, trojans and other malware, which can inflict irreparable damage to an organization. The current generation of malware is evolved, evasive and can bypass most endpoint and network security products on the market.

According to a recent report, it takes an average of 243 days to detect a security breach. The havoc that can be wreaked on an organization in that time span is tremendous, and cost estimates to an organization are averaged at $3.5M, not to mention lost productivity and growth, and will continue to grow at a 15% rate per year.

Three veterans of Israel’s cyber security arena founded Minerva Labs in 2014, Eddy Bobritsky, Erez Breiman and Omri Moyal. Eddy Bobritsky (CEO) has been a cyber and information security expert for over a decade and has developed a deep specialization in endpoint security in both the management and the hands-on deployment of important cyber security projects in large enterprises. Eddy has served as a freelance cyber consultant for the Israeli military, government and banking sector throughout his career and worked on a number of projects in a product management capacity. Erez Breiman (CTO) has been a Software Architect and Developer Expert for over a decade specializing in security and has extensive hands-on experience in implementing and integrating endpoint security projects in large and complex working environments. Omri serves as the company’s VP of Research and brings extensive experience in the testing of advanced malware solutions in both laboratory and enterprise production environments. For the vast majority of his career, Omri has served as a malware analyst and threat intelligence expert for a wide spectrum of organizations whether military, industrial, intelligence, communications and financial services.

“StageOne management’s belief is that Minerva Labs’ solution might have a major impact on the entire industry by improving current solutions and, in the long term, could replace some of the incumbent anti-virus vendors,” stated Yuval Cohen, Managing Partner at StageOne Ventures. “We do believe the founders have the right background to tackle the challenge and the market void, and bring valuable know-how and technology to the table.”

About Minerva Labs Minerva Labs is an early stage security company that offers a low footprint endpoint protection platform. Minerva Labs brings a completely new paradigm to the malware detection problem by focusing on preventing malware execution by using the malware’s strengths against it. The security platform simultaneously empowers existing security products and improves detection rates, thus improving the customer organization’s overall return on security investment. Time is of the essence, so when it comes to data breaches there is often significant damage by the time a threat is detected. Minerva Labs’ patent pending solution utilizes the malware’s nature to neutralize the threat.

About StageOne Ventures
StageOne is an early stage technology fund, focusing on enterprise and communications software ventures. The fund was founded by a professional management team, and enjoys the support of leading Israeli and international institutional and private investors. StageOne is now investing out of its second fund, StageOne II, after a successful run with its first fund that had six successful exits and provided returns that ranked top-quartile globally. StageOne’s team of professional executives represents numerous years of experience in the high-tech industry, which translates into a deep understanding of start-up executive management, IT proficiency, VC management, investment banking, mergers and acquisitions, as well as IPO’s. StageOne is distinguished by its proven ability to create value, making the fund a magnet for the most highly qualified entrepreneurs.

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