Equalum, an Israeli startup that helps companies gather data from a variety of enterprise sources, announced an $18 million Series B investment today.
The round was led by Planven Investments . Other participants included United Ventures and prior investors Innovation Endeavors and GE Ventures, along with a group of unnamed individuals. Today’s haul brings the total raised to $25 million, according to data provided by the company.
Equalum CEO and founder Nir Livneh says his company essentially acts as the data pipes to feed artificial intelligence, machine and more traditional business intelligence requirements. “Equalum is a real-time data ingestion platform. The idea of the platform is to be able to [gather] data coming from a bunch of enterprise system sources and be able to centralize that data and send it in real-time into analytic environments and feed those analytic environments,” Livneh explained.
He sees the money from this round as a way to continue to expand the original vision he had for the company. His approach in many ways is a classic Series B play. “I think the original thesis was validated. We have proven that we can go into Fortune 100 companies and get our solution adopted quickly,” he said. The next step is to expand beyond the original set of several dozen large customers and accelerate growth.
The company was founded in 2015 in Tel Aviv, Israel. It still maintains its R&D arm there today, with sales, marketing and management in Silicon Valley. Interestingly, its first customer was GE, which was also an early investor via GE Ventures.
Livneh says that he sees lots of room to grow in this market, which he says is still dominated by legacy vendors. He believes he can swoop in and replace aging offerings by providing a more modern and streamlined approach to data collection. Time will tell if he is right.