Israeli digital services co OpenLegacy raises $30m

Ron Rabinowitz, Romi Stein and Roi Mor Photo: PR
Ron Rabinowitz, Romi Stein and Roi Mor Photo: PR

OpenLegacy already works with three of the world's top-ten banks.

Israeli software company OpenLegacy has announced that it has closed a $30 million financing round led by Silverhorn Investment Advisors and with the participation of CommerzVentures, the venture capital unit of Commerzbank, C. Entrepreneurs, a VC created by BNP Paribas Cardif with Cathay Innovation, Leumi Partners, O.G. Tech Ventures, Prytek-GFS Group and RDC.

OpenLegacy delivers fast, powerful and flexible digital services from virtually any legacy back-end or proprietary application that allows organizations like banks and insurance companies with legacy systems to connect up easily with digital apps.

Founded in 2014 by CEO Romi Stein and CTO Roi Mor, Open Legacy has 85 employees, 35 of them in its Tel Aviv and Petah Tikva offices. The company has raised $40.5 million to date in three financing rounds.

OpenLegacy CFO and COO Ron Rabinowitz told "Globes" that the company's product is unique in its approach. He explained that core systems are closed from connecting up to most external services, except for one central "pipeline" called ESB through which all information passes including data and business logics from the core systems to new apps. The information is translated from the core systems' languages to newer languages like Java, which serves the digital applications.

In the case of banks that want to connect up with mobile payment apps, for example, the information is about the bank's customers and the actions that they can take, and the data enters this pipeline. On the back of this information, it is necessary to build manually API gateways in order to connect up with the apps. Surplus information streams through the same pipeline and links back up with the external apps in a procedure that is slow and awkward.

In contrast, Rabinowitz said, "OpenLegacy's platform enables these core systems to be opened and automatically and quickly create API gateways allowing dialogue with all other apps. We provide this architecture as a micro-service."

He added, "Payment apps are comprised several parts, which check out the credit card number, the balance in the bank account, security checks, and are built in a monolithic way and each service is dependent on the other. In other words, the monolithic architecture of the bank must download all the payment apps. We break this up into micro-services than any Java programmer can decide which of them to provide access to and to where. Thus in the future, if the banks want to build new business logics, it can link up to one micro-service and not all of them."

OpenLegacy will use the new funds to accelerate growth, which according to Rabinowitz has seen the company double in size over the past year, while it tripled in size between 2016 and 2017. He said that, "The company has had a major cash flow of millions of dollars over the years and in 2018 this has become a positive flow." Nevertheless, the company decided to raise funds in order to fully realize its growth potential.

He said that the company already works with the world's top ten banks and other customers include Bezeq Israeli Telecommunication Co. Ltd. (TASE: BEZQ), Meuhedet Health Fund, AIG, and the Israel Airports Authority.

The new funds will be used to further develop the company's product and expand its global marketing efforts.

Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on November 28, 2018

© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2018

Ron Rabinowitz, Romi Stein and Roi Mor Photo: PR
Ron Rabinowitz, Romi Stein and Roi Mor Photo: PR
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