An Israeli tech founder’s journey from a near fatal injury in Gaza to a $100m exit
Rivery co-founder Itamar Ben Hemo, who was nearly killed a year ago while serving with the IDF reserves, hopes buyout will help restore investor confidence in Startup Nation
Sharon Wrobel is a tech reporter for The Times of Israel.
Almost a year after Itamar Ben Hemo was hit by a bullet in the chest during an ambush by Hamas terrorists in Gaza, the Israeli tech entrepreneur has sold his startup for $100 million.
Ben Hemo, the co-founder of Israeli data integration platform Rivery, inked the multimillion-dollar deal this week with private US data management company Boomi after being missing in action as CEO of the startup for six months.
On October 7, 2023, Israeli expat Ben Hemo was in Israel on a visit from the US, as his family had moved back to Israel after his daughter decided to join the IDF. Following the brutal onslaught on southern communities by Hamas terrorists that day — some 1,200 people were killed in southern Israel and 251 taken hostage in the Gaza Strip — there was no other thought for Ben Hemo other than to immediately check his military gear and volunteer for reserve duty in his paratrooper unit to join the fighting, he told The Times of Israel on Thursday.
For the next three months, the 49-year-old major, who previously served many years in a paratrooper division around Gaza, participated in military missions — including the evacuation of survivors of the Hamas massacre in the kibbutzim and rescue actions in Gaza — while using breaks in combat to conduct management meetings every couple of days, either from his car or nearby border communities, he said.
“I told my management that everyone needed to step up and not wait for me to make decisions, as I don’t know what my availability will be,” Ben Hemo recounted. “Clearly it was tough, but I tried to come to the Gaza border every couple of days and take phone calls with the management or jump on Zoom calls.”
“I’d sit next to [Kibbutz] Be’eri for two or three hours with my laptop then go back to the field… That was the way that we operated the company for three months until January 8, when I got shot at by terrorists,” he said.
That day, Ben Hemo’s division received an alert to rescue a wounded soldier in Gaza, which he recalled was a near-daily occurrence. This time, though, Ben Hemo and his commander were ambushed by Hamas terrorists in a rocket-propelled grenade attack.
Ben Hemo was hit in the chest close to his heart by a bullet fired from a Kalashnikov assault rifle and suffered internal organ damage, and his commander was severely injured as well, he said.
“What saved our lives is that our unit succeeded in defending us and in parallel got us to a hospital within 45 minutes, as we were losing a lot of blood,” he said. “The emergency surgery was a miracle.”
After two major surgeries, Ben Hemo started a three-month recovery path in the hospital while the startup’s offices in Tel Aviv, New York and London continued their operations without his leadership. However, Ben Hemo was trying to make every effort to be present even from his hospital bed, where he held an online company board meeting less than a month after sustaining the life-threatening injury.
Resilience amid multiple challenges
Ben Hemo exemplifies the high-tech sector’s resilience amid Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, which has been raging for over 14 months.
Over the past year, local startups and tech companies have continued to run their businesses despite fundraising challenges as they sheltered from rockets, and many of their executives and employees were called up to reserve duty.
While still in rehabilitation at the hospital, Ben Hemo started to go to the startup’s Tel Aviv office for a day or two each week in the second half of March before fully returning to work in April.
“The fact that the company survived is a miracle in itself, thanks to the hard work of the employees and co-founders,” Ben Hemo said.
However, he said, “I found that a company six months without a CEO had a lot of gaps, which we managed to fill in a couple of months, and around July we felt the company was in a much better place, stable, and [it] came back to life.”
That same month, Rivery mourned the tragic loss of one of its employees: Reservist officer Maj. (res.) Itay Galea, 38, was killed in northern Israel by a rocket launched from Lebanon by the Iran-backed Hezbollah terror group.
“A month later, when Itay’s wife delivered their third child, we decided together with the board to give equity to his family,” Ben Hemo said. “I’m so happy that now, with the Boomi acquisition deal, his family will also be a beneficiary.”
Understanding data
Founded in 2019 by Ben Hemo, CTO Aviv Noy, and chief architect Alon Reznik, Rivery has built a data management platform to help businesses understand and ingest data from multiple sources, such as apps. To date, the startup has raised a total of $46 million, backed by Israeli venture capital firms State of Mind Ventures and Entrée Capital, and US firm Tiger Global. Rivery employs 80 people, of whom 50 are based in Israel.
Ben Hemo shared that Rivery had previously received acquisition offers but only accepted when Boomi came along, which Ben Hemo described as a complementary fit for the technology that the startup has built. The US business software maker is a private company controlled by private equity giants TPG and Francisco Partners, which acquired the company from computing giant Dell in 2021 for $4 billion.
“They [Boomi] weren’t afraid with what is going on in Israel during the war, and they trust the Israeli tech industry, technology and engineering,” he said.
As part of the acquisition deal, Boomi will operate a strategic data management R&D center in Israel together with Rivery’s employees. Ben Hemo will take up the role of general manager of data management and integration.
Ben Hemo disclosed that after he shared Galea’s story with Boomi CEO Steve Lucas, Lucas said Boomi would add a donation to the Galea family on top of the purchase deal.
“This is why we will succeed [with] this deal and have a bright future together — because this is the type of culture that we would like to be part of,” Ben Hemo said.
Highlighting the local tech industry’s current fundraising woes, Ben Hemo also spoke about the difficulties faced by startups in raising money from foreign investors amid the ongoing war.
“In the last year, it’s truly been a big risk and challenge for investors and global companies to invest in a country under war,” he said. “We need to work very hard as founders and executives to keep up our resilience by continuing our business operations and keeping our customers happy despite all the challenges we are facing.”
“I hope that our story will be kind of a start of a new beginning, or the light at the end of the tunnel, to help restore the confidence of US investors and companies to invest in Israeli companies,” he said.
