Salesforce, Figma and HubSpot turn to Israel in the hunt for next-gen AI talent
The acquisitions of Doti, Weavy and XFunnel underscore the country’s growing influence in enterprise AI innovation.
Over a matter of weeks, three of the most prominent names in global software, Salesforce, HubSpot, and Figma, have quietly converged on the same target: Israel’s youngest generation of AI startups. All three companies have announced acquisitions of early-stage ventures, some barely a year old and each with only a couple dozen of employees at most or a modest Seed round behind them. The deals, while varied in size and purpose, point to the urgency with which U.S. tech giants are trying to secure AI innovation.
The most mature of the three targets, Doti AI, is less than two years old and has raised just $7 million. Salesforce, which has a market cap of around $232 billion, is acquiring the startup in a deal that underscores how quickly new AI workflows have become indispensable to enterprise software. Doti develops a real-time “Work AI” platform that gives employees secure, immediate access to company knowledge across all internal systems. The two founders, Matan Cohen and Opher Hofshi, built the company’s core ideas from their background in infrastructure security and developer tooling at Wix. For Salesforce, the acquisition is aimed at expanding its AI R&D center in Israel and accelerating the development of agent-based enterprise search, a strategic layer the company now sees as foundational to its platform.
A similar logic is visible at HubSpot, which has a market cap of about $20 billion, though the startup it bought could hardly be earlier in its lifecycle. XFunnel, founded just ten months ago by Beeri Amiel and Neri Bluman, is built around a premise reshaping the marketing industry: traditional search is giving way to large language models that deliver direct answers rather than lists of links. XFunnel builds tools for marketers operating in this “answer engine” environment. HubSpot’s relationship with the company began not as an investor or acquirer but as a potential customer. That early contact soon evolved into an investment and then a full acquisition, the company’s first in Israel.
Design-software giant Figma, with a market cap of $19 billion, has taken the most dramatic leap, announcing the purchase of Weavy, a one-year-old startup with about 20 employees and only $4 million in funding. While financial terms were not released, industry estimates put the figure at around $200 million, making it Figma’s largest acquisition to date. Weavy develops a platform that integrates access to video models with advanced video-editing tools, technology expected to strengthen Figma’s AI capabilities. Its backers include prominent investors such as Entrée Capital, Designer Fund, and Founder Collective, as well as Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman.
Although each deal reflects different strategic goals, enterprise knowledge retrieval, AI-native marketing, and video-focused creative tooling, the pattern is unmistakable. Large U.S. software companies aren’t risking waiting for Israeli startups to scale before acquiring them; they are moving earlier, faster, and with larger checks.
