Israeli startup Spike, developer of an email-based message platform for the work environment, announced today that it had raised $8 million in a Series A funding round led by Insight Partners. Spike was founded by its CEO Dvir Ben-Aroya and its CTO Erez Pilosof, founder of the Walla! website.
Among investors who participated in previous rounds and in the current one are Wix.com Ltd. (Nasdaq: WIX), Gigi Levy's NFX, Koa Labs, angels Guy Gamzu and Aryeh Mergi, and several strategic partners. Insight Partners vice president Daniel Aronovitz will join Spike's board of directors. Altogether, Spike has raised $16 million to date.
"Many companies are trying to define the future of workspace technology, but unlike many other work management products, Spike understands that email will always be at the center of how we work. By combining a smart inbox with other essential collaboration capabilities, the team has developed an incredible and intuitive solution to help people work smarter," said Aronovitz.
Insight is a group of venture capital funds and private investment funds that has invested in more than 300 companies, and it has been one of the most prominent investors in Israeli technology companies in the past few years. It has invested more than $700 million in fifteen Israeli companies. In October last year, it opened a representative office in Tel Aviv, its first outside the US.
Spike, which operates from Herzliya and employs fourteen people, intends to accelerate its growth in the coming year, to add tools and services to its platform, and to double its workforce.
Alongside the announcement of the fund-raising round, the company launched a suite of new, real-time communication and workflow capabilities, including tasks, to- dos, notes and documents. Spike claims to be the world's first application that combines productivity tools and email into a powerful inbox.
According to Ben-Aroya, Spike has nearly 100,000 active users, most of them small businesses and private users. It has a freemium pricing model - a basic suite of features for free, and beyond that a monthly payment pf $6-8.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on June 11, 2020
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