Iranian-born Israeli entrepreneur raises $6 million for AI finance startup Arito
Daniel Zahavi, who sold his first company to Comcast, launches a new startup with Levl co-founder Michael Estrin, focused on AI tools for finance teams.
Arito AI, a startup developing AI tools for finance and revenue teams, has raised $6 million in a Seed round led by Amplify Partners, with participation from several senior finance executives, including Thomas Seifert, CFO of Cloudflare.
The company was founded in 2025 by CEO Daniel Zahavi and CTO Michael Estrin. Zahavi, who holds a PhD in information theory, immigrated to Israel from Iran and served in the IDF’s electronic warfare units, while Estrin is a veteran of Unit 8200 with a master’s degree in computer science.
This marks the duo’s second startup together. Nearly a decade ago, they co-founded Levl, which developed technology for identifying WiFi users without compromising privacy. The company was acquired in 2022 by US telecom giant Comcast, owner of NBC, Sky, and Universal, for $60 million.
Arito operates offices in Tel Aviv and Palo Alto, and its customers already include Percepto and Zesty.
The company’s platform is designed specifically for finance and revenue teams, enabling them to work with AI systems without requiring complex integrations. The platform autonomously ingests data while understanding the structures of common financial systems, communicates with users in natural language, analyzes scenarios, generates personalized alerts, and provides real-time AI-driven insights.
Zahavi was born in Kermanshah, Iran, in 1985 during the Iran-Iraq war and immigrated to Israel with his family at age 15. After joining a gifted-students program in high school, he studied electrical engineering at the Technion. During his military service, he held one of the highest security clearances and worked on projects involving the Prime Minister’s Office and the Intelligence Corps.
He later earned a doctorate in information theory, a field that underpins modern large language models. Drawing on his defense and technology background, Zahavi went on to develop defense-related technologies, including drone interception systems and offensive cyber capabilities for defense industries. That activity was eventually halted after Israel’s Defense Ministry declined to approve exports of the sensitive technologies.
Arito’s platform enables collaboration between human users and AI agents inside a shared workspace, without requiring technical expertise. Users can create dashboards that update automatically through natural-language prompts and configure AI-powered alerts for significant financial events.
The company has also developed technology focused on integrating AI into Excel files and spreadsheets, outperforming larger competitors in benchmark tests. Another technology currently in the patent-registration process allows users to train AI agents using real-world examples to guide how analyses should be performed.
“At Arito, we believe every business team should be able to operate with real-time intelligence, securely, and without waiting on analysts or outdated dashboards,” said Zahavi. “This funding allows us to double down on our vision of making insights truly self-serve, proactive, and actionable through intelligent agents that understand the business context and adhere to rules and permissions defined by the organization while maintaining full data lineage.”
