Israeli startup Onfire, founded by veterans of the elite IDF intelligence unit 8200, has emerged from stealth with $20 million in funding to help B2B companies decode developer intent and time their sales outreach with precision.
The round includes a new $14 million Series A co-led by Grove Ventures and TLV Partners, with participation from IN Venture (Sumitomo Corporation’s VC arm) and LeumiTech 77, a fund commemorating Israel’s 77th anniversary.
The company’s mission: turn the online chatter of developers — on Hacker News, Reddit, Stack Overflow, and beyond — into actionable buying signals.
“Developers are constantly signaling what they need, but vendors miss it because it’s buried in public data,” said Tal Peretz, Onfire’s co-founder and CEO. “We built Onfire to capture those signals and surface them as real, contextual sales intelligence.”
Turning Developer Conversations Into Data Gold
Onfire’s platform monitors public developer forums to identify what tools, SDKs, and technologies people are discussing. It then uses AI and entity resolution to determine which companies those users work for and who the likely decision-makers are — layering in data like budget cycles, hiring trends, and product launches to give sales teams a complete picture of when and how to engage.
The result: more relevant, better-timed outreach to technical buyers who are notoriously resistant to traditional marketing.
“Our customers are happy, and even their prospects are happy — because people get pitched the right product at the right moment,” said Lotan Levkowitz, Managing Partner at Grove Ventures.
Since launching its private beta 12 months ago, Onfire says it has already driven over $50 million in closed deals for clients including ActiveFence, Aiven, Cyera, Port, and Spectro Cloud — startups selling to engineers, CISOs, and DevOps teams.
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From Intelligence to Insight
Onfire’s founding trio — Peretz (CEO), Shahar Shavit (CTO), and Nitzan Hada (CPO) — all served in Israel’s Unit 8200, known for its technical prowess and data analysis expertise.
After leaving the defense world, they spotted an opportunity to apply intelligence-style signal analysis to the SaaS industry. Before building anything, the founders interviewed over 275 revenue leaders in enterprise IT to understand their pain points.
“We realized most go-to-market teams were still flying blind,” Peretz said. “They had AI tools for automation but no meaningful data layer underneath. That’s what we built first — the data — and then layered AI on top.”
This data-first strategy is what Onfire believes differentiates it from generic sales AI tools like Apollo.io or ZoomInfo. By focusing on developer ecosystems and software infrastructure vendors, the startup aims to create a compounding dataset that gets smarter with every client onboarded.
“With every new customer, the dataset improves — that’s the beauty of Onfire’s network effect,” said Levkowitz. “Their verticalized model gives them a defensible position against CRM incumbents like Salesforce and HubSpot.”
Expanding to the U.S. Market
With its new funding, Onfire plans to scale aggressively. The startup will expand its AI, R&D, and go-to-market teams, with 60% of its staff remaining in Israel while its commercial hub grows in New York City — a key market for enterprise sales tech.
The company’s next step is to build automated playbooks that not only identify buying intent but also help sales teams craft personalized outreach, powered by real-time context from the developer ecosystem.
“Software companies can’t rely solely on product-led growth anymore,” said Levkowitz. “They need intelligent, data-driven GTM tools — and that’s exactly where Onfire comes in.”
About Onfire
Onfire is an Israeli startup using AI and signal intelligence to turn developer conversations into actionable sales insights. Its platform monitors public forums, analyzes intent data, and identifies organizational buying signals to help B2B vendors engage technical buyers with precision and timing. Founded in 2023 by Unit 8200 alumni Tal Peretz, Shahar Shavit, and Nitzan Hada, Onfire is backed by Grove Ventures, TLV Partners, IN Venture, and LeumiTech 77.
