After CTO was murdered by Hamas on October 7, cloud startup Firefly nets $23 million Series A
After CTO was murdered by Hamas on October 7, cloud startup Firefly nets $23 million Series A
Firefly co-founder Sefi Genis was murdered in the brutal attack by Hamas at the Nova party. “In the early days, we did not know if we would survive. It hurts every day, but we are not in mourning. We are building Sefi's legacy,” said CEO Ido Neeman
On October 7, Israeli startup Firefly lost one of its founding pillars, Sefi Genis, in the brutal attack by Hamas at the Nova party. Seven months later, the company announced on Wednesday the completion of a $23 million Series A.
Founded by CEO Ido Neeman, CPO Eran Bibi, and the late CTO Genis in 2021, Firefly has developed an IaC-powered Multi-Cloud Control Plane. Its code generation engine targets all parts of the Platform Engineering lifecycle: discovery, self-service provisioning, governance, drift management, and backup. The startup has rapidly grown, now employing 50 people, with two-thirds based in Israel and the rest in the U.S. Their clientele boasts names like Cisco, AppsFlyer, ZoomInfo, HPE, Check Point, SimilarWeb, and numerous Fortune 500 companies.
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Firefly co-founders Ido Neeman and Eran Bibi. CTO and co-founder Sefi Genis was murdered on October 7.
(Photo: Firefly)
In a conversation with Calcalist, CEO and co-founder Ido Neeman reflected on the loss and the journey since. “Sefi was one of the closest people to me, a friend and partner on a personal level,” Naaman shared. “It hurts every day, but we are not in mourning. We are building Sefi's legacy.”
Despite the devastating loss, Firefly has made significant strides. Neeman recounted the uncertain early days post-tragedy, crediting CPO Bibi for steering the company through turbulent waters. “In the early days, we did not know if we would survive. I was called up for reserve service for 60 days and Eran managed the company and ensured we kept moving forward,” Neeman said.
The Series A round, led by Vertex and including participation from Hanaco, SoftBank, InMotion Ventures (the investment arm of JLR) and Redseed, brings the total investment in Firefly to approximately $30 million. This influx of capital follows a fourfold increase in the company’s revenues in 2023 and accelerated growth into 2024.
Firefly’s mission is clear: to tackle the complexities of cloud management. “We are solving a very big problem created by the proliferation of clouds,” Neeman explained. “People who operate the cloud often don’t know what is right for them or how to handle the complexity. Our system identifies inefficiencies and creates automatic solutions.”
A 2024 State of Infrastructure-as-Code report by Firefly revealed that 23% of DevOps and Platform Engineering practitioners have 100+ Cloud accounts - a 2x increase since 2023 alone. The surge in modern cloud-native applications has led to inefficiency, fragmentation, and chaos in the infrastructures that manage them.
Neeman noted that he wants to honor Sefi’s memory by building a great company. “We will honor Sefi’s name by building a large and successful company. We are not a commemorative enterprise but a hungry and very successful startup. I want us to be like Akamai, whose founder was killed in a terrorist act, and from there it became a huge company.”
