Cyber-fintech company Trustmi announced on Wednesday that it has raised $17 million, led by Oren Zeev and Cyberstarts, along with other investors such as Chen Amit, co-founder and CEO of Tipalti, Assaf Rappaport, co-founder and CEO of Wiz, and Eynat Guez, co-founder and CEO of Papaya Global. The round was concluded in January of this year.
Among the company’s clients are Fortune 500 companies, including Takeda Pharmaceutical, Colgate-Palmolive, and CNA. Trustmi, which raised $4 million from Cyberstarts in 2021, currently employs 40 people in Tel Aviv and the United States.
Trustmi has developed a product that assesses the safety of financial transactions, warns against suspected fraud in real-time, and identifies potential flaws in the process that may result from human error.
The company was founded in 2021 by Shai Gabay, co-founder, and CEO, along with Eli Ben-Nun, co-founder, and CTO. Gabay started as an amateur hacker at the age of 13 and served about eight years in unit 8200 during his military service, followed by time as part of the General Staff Reconnaissance Unit (Sayeret Matkal). After his release, Gabay worked for about eight years at Bank Discount, starting as the head of the information security team and later being promoted to Chief Information Security and SOC Manager. He also served as the chief innovation officer of Cyberbit, vice president of products and services at Cynet, and GM of the Opora development center in Israel. Ben-Nun worked for six years at Rafael, during which he took part in the “Iron Dome” project and founded two startups in the fintech and cybersecurity fields, Epok and Shield128. After that, Ben-Nun worked for two years as a product manager at Bynat.
“Over the years, I have been exposed to many fraud events involving millions of dollars, where I had to deal with real-time hacks,” said Gabay. “There I deeply understood the problem of securing payments and discovered that, in many cases, the blame falls on the junior employee who carries out the process of transferring the funds, even though they do not have the tools to deal with it. Our ambition as a company is to protect the bottom line of organizations – their money, alongside our goal to lead and build the global payment security market, and raise public awareness of the issue. Today we are saving our customers millions of dollars by preventing fraud and streamlining the money transfer processes.”
Gili Raanan of Cyberstarts said: “The problem of protecting payments is one of the most painful and complex issues for any modern organization.”
