Israeli startup funding hits $11B as marketers take its tech global

Israeli tech companies raised $3.6 billion between July and September across just 91 disclosed financing rounds, up 53% from the same quarter last year, according to preliminary figures IVC and LeumiTech published in October.

That brings the year’s total past $11 billion, a 50% increase on the same period in 2025. 

The headline number, however, partly hides where the money went. LeumiTech CEO Maya Eisen Zafrir put the caution plainly when the numbers came out: deal counts stay low, and capital is pooling in a small number of companies, stages and sectors.

First-half data from Poalim Tech and Dealigence points the same way. Funding rose 45% to roughly $8.6 billion, while the number of rounds fell by about a third.

Serial founders raised 39% of rounds, up from 43% in 2025, as investors favored founders with a track record. 

For the people whose job is to market what these companies build, that combination changes the work. When investors write fewer, larger checks and foreign funds take part in more than 70% of the investments, a company’s story has to hold up in front of a skeptical buyer in Chicago or Frankfurt, usually with a lean team behind it. 

Global budgets offer little relief. Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey found marketing spend stuck at 7.8% of company revenue. CMOs now put 15.3% of that budget into AI, yet only 30% say their organizations are ready to scale it. 

That pressure shows up across marketers and founders alike. Some sell enterprise technology out of Tel Aviv. Others, in Boston, Florida and the Bay Area, are building companies designed to reach buyers without a big sales or marketing department. 

Five of them are worth watching in 2027. 

Few marketing leaders understand the hardest sell in technology better than Maya Mason. Over more than two decades in the B2B tech sector, the Herzliya-based executive has built a career marketing products that are meant to work invisibly in the background: fintech infrastructure, payments, enterprise SaaS and legal technology. Her audience is rarely a consumer; more often it is a bank’s risk and compliance committee—the group that has to be convinced a new technology is the best fit. Mason’s career runs from Israel’s early tech era at M-Systems, to a director-level marketing role at Equivio before its acquisition by Microsoft, to vice president of marketing at CreditStacks. Along the way she became one of the most trusted voices in a category where credibility is key.

At Jifiti, which she joined in 2021, Mason built the marketing team and strategy from the ground up, helping position the embedded-lending platform with banks and retailers worldwide. Colleagues describe a leader who is both strategic and hands-on, and who credits her team publicly and often. As marketing departments face a flood of new channels, shifting budgets and AI tools arriving faster than anyone can adopt them, Mason has pushed back against frantic acceleration. Her widely read writing argues for clarity, careful curation and calm.

The industry has noticed. In 2026 alone, The Sociable named her one of 26 marketing leaders to watch, and the Fintech Marketing Hub ranked her among its Top 30 Most Influential Fintech Marketers. Her stated goal, helping B2B technology companies turn marketing into a real growth engine, could sound generic. Her record shows what it means in practice: earning the trust that complex technology needs before it can grow. That makes her an exemplary choice for this year’s list of top marketing leaders.

Today she is the fractional CMO at Altorney, which was founded in late 2021 by brothers Shimmy and Rachi Messing, two e-discovery veterans who started together at Merrill Corporation in the early 2000s. One of its two main products, MARC, runs AI document review inside a client’s own firewall. The name carries a family story: it honors their late father, Marc Messing, an attorney, rabbi and educator who passed away in 2021.

Joshua Schwartz, who is based in NYC and is an alumni of Yale University, faces a different kind of skeptic. After stints at Citigroup and Apollo Management, and leading an Article 28 diagnostic and treatment center, he co-founded Viking Pure Solutions in 2017, which installs machines in hospitals, schools and food plants that make electrolyzed-water cleaners on site, using a patented process that keeps salt out of the solution so it does not corrode equipment. 

Buyers in that category can at times distrust green claims, so Schwartz markets in part by teaching, through bylined pieces in the trade titles facilities managers read, from food production to senior care. Expertise does the marketing. 

With enterprise software drawing close to 30% of Israeli funding this year, its highest share since 2020, the premium is on marketing leaders who can make complicated products make sense to a buyer abroad. Yotam Kramer has forged a strong reputation in the industry here. He came up through NICE Systems and Ex Libris, where he ran corporate and product marketing from 2016, before joining SQream, a Tel Aviv data-processing and analytics company, as VP Marketing in August of 2023. 

Today he is the Vice President of Marketing at SCAILIUM and is also a Mentor at Techstars, in addition to being a Contributor at Entrepreneur Magazine.

Lean AI companies already have working examples. Gene Sigalov, based in Miami and an alumni of the Cardozo School of Law, is an attorney who founded and bootstrapped SimpleTexting to 17,000 customers before its sale to Sinch in 2021 without outside investment. His company today, Upfirst, is an AI receptionist for small businesses. Answering services were charging him $10 a call, and as the company tells it, “the math didn’t add up for a small business.” 

According to his speaker profile, Upfirst passed 1,000 clients in its first year with no ad spend.

Ibrahim Hasanov,  based in San Francisco, got there earlier, launching his first startup at 13 and later founding MyUser, long before AI agents were a budget line. The platform automates B2B prospecting, personalization and follow-up.

“The idea for MyUser was born out of necessity,” he told Pulse 2.0. His first customers came through MyUser’s own outreach, making the product its own case study. With CMOs routing 15.3% of budgets to AI, that bet now looks early.

When it comes to today’s tech market, the squeeze is sharpest at the start. Pre-seed through Series A rounds drew just $741 million in the second quarter, while mid and late-stage companies took 83% of capital, according to IVC-LeumiTech. 

Importantly, foreign money is still arriving, with about 110 foreign funds making their first investment of the year in the third quarter alone, albeit most of it goes to companies further along.

LeumiTech CEO Eisen Zafrir has called for more room and support for emerging founders, but until the funds move earlier, much of that support has to come from their first customers.

Winning those customers early, however, is precisely what these companies have demonstrated to be good at.