The 48 hours that rewrote Israel's startup rankings
Wonderful, Upwind and HiBob all revealed sharply higher price tags this week, and one rising star may already be on its way out the door.
In the span of about 48 hours this week, three Israeli technology companies added a combined $5.7 billion to their paper valuations. Wonderful, an AI customer-service startup, was valued at $5 billion after a $550 million raise, its third fundraising round in under a year and a jump from $2 billion just six months earlier. Upwind, a cloud-security firm, more than doubled its own valuation to $3.8 billion in five months. And HiBob, a human-resources software maker, was valued at $3.5 billion after Salesforce led a $166 million investment.
None of the three companies had done anything as dramatic as ship a breakthrough product or land a marquee customer in the days before their new price tags were set. What changed, mostly, was investors' willingness to keep paying up, a pattern that has become the defining feature of Israeli tech funding since 2024, when the sector began climbing out of a slump brought on by a judicial overhaul fight and the war that followed October 7.
The result, drawn from a full accounting of every disclosed Israeli funding round since the start of 2024, is a ranking of the country's 15 most valuable startups that would have been unrecognizable three years ago. It is also a ranking that may already be out of date: Decart, the AI infrastructure company sitting at number nine with a $4 billion valuation from a funding round in May, is in advanced talks to be acquired by Anthropic, the AI lab behind the Claude chatbot, in a deal that people close to the negotiations say could value the company at around $7 billion. If it closes, it would be Anthropic's largest acquisition to date, and would remove one of Israel's fastest-rising startups from the ranks of independent companies just months after it arrived there.
A list built on the last two years, not the last decade
Unlike most "most valuable startup" rankings, which tend to accumulate valuations set years or even a decade apart, this one is built entirely from rounds raised since January 2024. That makes it, in one sense, a narrower slice of the Israeli tech landscape, older companies that haven't needed to raise money recently, or that have simply stopped growing, don't appear. But it also makes the numbers unusually current: nearly every valuation on the list was set in the past two years, and several were set in the past two days. In an industry where a "unicorn" badge earned in 2021 can be a stale and even misleading signal today, that recency is arguably the more meaningful measure of where investor money is actually flowing right now.
At the top of the list sits Vast Data, the data-infrastructure company that reached a $30 billion valuation in April after raising $1 billion amid the broader AI computing buildout. Vast Data's ascent to the top spot was itself a byproduct of another deal. The company became Israel's most valuable private tech firm only after Wiz, the cybersecurity startup that had held that title, was sold to Google. Deel, the global payroll company co-founded by an Israeli entrepreneur, ranks second at $17.3 billion after a $300 million round last October. Cyera, a data-security startup, is third at $12 billion, having quadrupled its valuation in eighteen months. Its CEO, Yotam Segev, has said the company's ambition is to become "the CrowdStrike of data security."
Look past the top three and the list is dominated by cybersecurity companies, a reflection of Israel's long-standing strength in the field and of enterprise customers' bottomless appetite for tools to secure an increasingly AI-driven workplace. DriveNets, a networking company, ranks fourth at $8.5 billion after telling investors it is now cash-flow positive with more than $1 billion in order backlog. Cato Networks and Island, both cybersecurity firms, are tied at $4.8 billion; Island's valuation has more than quadrupled since October 2023 as demand grows for "enterprise browsers" that give companies more control over how employees interact with corporate data. Claroty, which protects industrial and infrastructure systems from cyberattacks, sits at $3 billion.
Rapyd, a fintech company, registered a $4.5 billion valuation in a raise this year used partly to fund its $610 million acquisition of the payments firm PayU. Notably though, this is well down from the $10 billion valuation the company achieved in 2021.
What connects Wonderful, Upwind, Decart and much of the rest of the upper list is a broader dynamic playing out across global venture capital: valuations for companies seen as central to the AI buildout, whether they sell AI products directly or the infrastructure underneath them, are rising faster and more frequently than in almost any other category of startup. Wonderful's valuation rose from $34 million to $5 billion in roughly a year. Upwind doubled in five months. Decart, an AI infrastructure company, went from an initial funding round to a reported $4 billion valuation before the acquisition talks with Anthropic began.
That velocity cuts both ways. Rapid re-pricing rewards founders and early investors, but it also means today's valuation is a bet on a still-unproven trajectory, not a settled judgment, and it raises the stakes for what happens if growth slows or a larger buyer simply writes a check instead of continuing to fund the run. Decart's likely exit is a reminder that in the current market, the fastest way to leave this list is not to fail, but to succeed enough to get bought.
The list (top 15, by latest disclosed valuation since January 2024):
Vast Data — $30 billion
Deel — $17.3 billion
Cyera — $12 billion
DriveNets — $8.5 billion
Wonderful — $5 billion
Cato Networks — $4.8 billion
Island — $4.8 billion
Rapyd — $4.5 billion
Decart — $4 billion (in advanced talks to be acquired by Anthropic for a reported ~$7 billion)
Eon — $4 billion
Upwind — $3.8 billion
HiBob — $3.5 billion
Claroty — $3 billion
Xsight Labs — $2.8 billion
AppsFlyer — $2.7 billion
