Qwak Nominated by Globes as One of Top 10 Startups in 2024

We are extremely thankful to Globes for nominating us to be one of the top 10 startups in 2024.

At Qwak, we aren't just participating in the artificial intelligence revolution—we're leading it. With a firm belief that AI should simplify rather than complicate, our mission is clear: empower organizations to fully integrate AI into the business by simplifying AI workflows and enabling rapid innovation at scale.

The following text has been translated from the article published today by Globes (in Hebrew). 

Making AI Happen

The company that simplifies life for AI teams. Four entrepreneurs, all alumni of tech giants, identified the weaknesses of large organizations in implementing artificial intelligence and went on to establish a company that provides them with an end-to-end solution.

The technology offered by Qwak enables companies to create, implement, operate, and manage artificial intelligence applications. Qwak's AI platform is designed to reduce the infrastructure work required around developing machine learning models, allowing teams to concentrate on the core work of the development and data science teams.

The product philosophy at Qwak is quite expansive. "We help companies implement machine learning models. Essentially, we want to provide a comprehensive solution for development teams and data science teams, and our goal is to make these models accessible to them," they say. 

The development of surrounding infrastructures needed to implement these artificial intelligence models often poses challenges and difficulties that consume a lot of work and time. They explain that "although many companies invest considerable effort in establishing dedicated data teams, these investments often do not yield fruit."

Another issue Qwak tries to address is that the communication between development teams and data science teams tends to not always be optimal, which also translates into added work. The company's technology eliminates the dependency between these teams, thereby streamlining and accelerating the work of each team and enabling a well-organized work environment, even after the machine learning models have been implemented."

Created Out of a Personal Necessity

Behind the company stand four entrepreneurs, all with a professional background in major tech industry companies: CEO Alon Lev, a former employee at Payoneer; Chief Technology Officer Yuval Fernbach, who worked in Amazon's Cloud Division; Lior Penso, who has a resume that includes work at IronSource and Amazon; and Ran Romano, a former Wix employee.

Lev says, "I left my job at Payoneer during the first wave of COVID, and convinced Yuval, who was previously my commander in the army, to leave Amazon—where he led the artificial intelligence sector in Europe and Israel. He brought Lior, who was also an Amazon employee. During the 'ideation' process, where entrepreneurs try to get feedback from the market on the idea they present, as well as to strengthen the theory on which they build the company, we met Ran, who led the same field at Wix, and convinced him to join."

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Their professional experience influenced their desire to establish Qwak. Lev says, 'We founded the company out of our own personal need. We all have experience and come from a background of machine learning and artificial intelligence. We worked with the biggest companies in the industry, both in the country and internationally, and saw dozens and even hundreds of organizations talking a lot about machine learning, models, and decision-making, but the implementation is significantly lacking. It turns out that the smart models are not implemented and therefore never reach the customers, and that's because companies do not have the suitable human or product infrastructure to support this implementation. We aim to bridge that exact gap.'"

The four founded the company in 2021, and today it employs over 40 people. To date, Qwak has raised $27 million, with the latest funding round announced last March, where they raised $12 million led by Bessemer Venture Fund. Previous investors in the company, including StageOne Ventures and Amiti, also participated in this funding.

The company is riding the hottest wave of the of the last few months - artificial intelligence. According to them, although this wave strongly pushes Qwak's product forward, they are staying focused on their goal. "We must be attentive and understand what's happening in the market. Even if we're on a certain wave, it doesn't mean that we don't need to prepare intelligently for the future. When we founded the company, the market was in a different state, but we didn't rush to raise crazy fundraising rounds, and that worked to our advantage."

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In the arena where Qwak operates, there are also giant companies offering similar products, like Amazon Sagemaker, Vertex AI, and Databricks. At Qwak, we believe our uniqueness stems from the fact that we 'look at the customer's problem and not at the specific technological challenge. In the end, there's a collection of challenges, but what really interests us is helping companies generate business benefits through artificial intelligence.