Intel Capital Leads $9M Investment In Israeli Cloud Software Startup

Israeli startup Model9, a cloud data management developer for mainframe customers, announced on Wednesday that it raised $9 million in a Series A funding round led by Intel Capital, the corporate VC arm of Intel. Additional investors include Stage One, North First Ventures, and Glenrock Israel.

Mainframes, or computers used by large organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing, resource planning, and transaction processing, are used as the core computing platform. Ninety-two of the world’s top 100 banks, along with leading insurance carriers and many retail, healthcare and government organizations rely on mainframes, according to IBM. They process 29 billion ATM transactions annually and are counted for $7.7 trillion in credit card payments every year.

Founded in 2015, Model9 provides backup, recovery, archiving, space management, replication, data security, and regulatory compliance both on-premises and in the cloud.

Model9 says the infusion of capital will help “accelerate market adoption” of its data management and business intelligence solutions. The funds will also be used to fuel global expansion and further enhance Model9’s offerings, which the startup says have already been successfully implemented in some of the world’s leading financial services institutes, government agencies, and transportation companies.

“We help large enterprises accelerate their implementation of hybrid cloud and reduce the cost and complexity of their mainframe infrastructure, leveraging modern skills,” said Gil Peleg, founder and CEO of Model9.

“The company has been enjoying a positive momentum with sales
increasing 300 percent in the last quarter and a long list of prospects,” he went on.

“Mainframes store 70 percent of the world’s business data” said Anthony Lin, vice president and senior managing director at Intel Capital. “We identified Model9 as having a first-mover edge with a software-only solution to extract and load mainframe data from the mainframe to any cloud or to any on-prem storage through a standard TCP/IP protocol. This ability opens up a variety of DR, Archive and Storage use cases, scaling to thousands of companies from the financial and public sectors, among others.

“Furthermore, Model9’s solution enables conversion of mainframe-compatible file formats to object storage, thus allowing the company’s customers to utilize the latest business analytics, big data and AI solutions to gain insights from previously untapped data sets,” he added.