Veego to seek up to USD 17m in Series A later this year
Veego to seek up to USD 17m in Series A later this year
TIM LEEMASTER
Veego, the Tel Aviv, Israel-based enterprise-level IoT troubleshooting firm using AI, plans to raise up to USD 17m in a Series A later this year, a person familiar with the matter said.
The round is currently scheduled to kick off towards the end of summer and close by November.
Proceeds would go to building out the team to provide support for more clients. Currently the firm can service about 50 clients but by the end of they year they want that number to quadruple to at least 200.
Currently the company has about 30 staff in Israel and one in New York. By May they expect to have four more R&D staff in Israel and two sales staff, one in New York and one in Europe to establish operations there.
The Series A would fund another set of hiring with 80% of any new employees in customer support and sales and 20% in technical staff.
The two-year old company raised USD 5m in a seed round in May last year from investors that included the venture capital arm of Germany’s Bosch Group and early stage Israeli venture capital firms State of Mind Investors and North First Ventures.
The fresh funds would be raised from new and existing investors, the person said.
The company declined to comment.
Veego uses AI on routers and other devices to automatically detect and repair connectivity and other problems with smart devices in the home. The company says internet service providers, its target clients, can save on average over USD 25 per customer a year in fewer calls and technician visits.
CEO and co-founder Amir Kotler is a veteran of the Israeli military technology unit Talpiot and a serial entrepreneur, particularly in cybersecurity. Previous startups he has been involved with include Promisec, Schoss and Secdo, which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks for a reported USD 100m in 2018.
Kotler says he wanted to apply the detection aspect of cybersecurity to the Internet of Things. “I thought about whether I could put an end to malfunction in the connected home in real time,” Kotler says.
He founded the company with AI expert Denis Sirov and Reffael Cospi, who specialized in smart devices.
“It was a lot of madness and a little technology,” Kotler says when they firm kicked off. “We didn’t know if we could crack it.”
Potential clients were skeptical as well. One Japanese internet service provider said if they could delver on 10% of what they were trying to do that would be enough, Kotler says.
He declined to identify the company or current clients apart from saying they were top ten internet service providers in North and South America, Europe and Asia.
Part of the problem stemmed from the complexity of smart home technology with issues possible in a number of places including the cloud, LAN, the router and the device itself.
Sales are based on a software as a service licensing model. The company began generating revenue shortly after it kicked off and should rise fourfold this year compared to last year, Kotler says but did not provide specific figures.
[Read our past coverage of another startup with founders from Israel’s Talpiot program: asset management firm Pagaya]
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