After more than a year in stealth, ZyG, the new startup of ironSource founders Tomer Ben-Zeev and Omer Kaplan, ands other entrepreneurs from the IDF Intelligence unit, has been unveiled. The company has announced the completion of a $58 million seed financing round from venture capital funds including Bessemer Venture Partners, Viola Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Disruptive AI, Emerge, Len Blavatnik’s Access Industries (Claltech), Stardom Ventures, and Jibe Ventures.
The other founders include Assaf Ben Ami, Nadav Ashkenazy and Claltech’s Daniel Shinar, Eyal Amit, Omri Steinmetz and Guy Tsur. They have all been working over the past year launching an online platform for selling brands, with an emphasis on consumer products such as cosmetics and grooming, pet food, and health products. ZyG’s platform identifies companies that market consumer products online that have commercial potential and provides them “With AI agent capabilities that allow them to stand out, grow, and succeed in a competitive environment.”
This is not an individual platform or website on which all of the products identified by ZyG are sold. The company itself establishes contact with the brands and serves as their trading platform on a dedicated website branded for that company, managed using ZyG’s technology. Globes previously revealed that the company operates a trading system for the Mills pet food brand and OKOA cosmetics brand.
“A platform that predicts growth potential”
To select the right brands to work with ZyG, the Israeli company built a growth prediction model, which allows it to forecast the company’s growth potential and programming to succeed, and attaches a score to it called ZyG Score. Entrepreneurs who receive a high score will be able to join Zyg. “So instead of entrepreneurs investing their time and money in additional manpower, marketing agencies and other data tools, ZyG will do it for them and they will be able to focus on the physical product they have built,” the company said.
“The platform predicts the growth potential of a product even before launch based on advanced data models,” the company added. “And then serves as an end-to-end operating system for the entrepreneur and performs all the actions required for their success: establishing an online store, building a brand, creating advertising, digital marketing, managing organic growth in search engines and AI engines, working with influencers, acquiring customers, retaining customers and optimizing logistics – all on one platform.
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ZyG will also provide entrepreneurs and companies that work with the platform with financing that will significantly reduce the risk of launching products and the money required to invest in advertising, which is the largest expense of an online retailer. 99% of new products in the online sales market fail – a good product is only the tip of the iceberg of what is required of entrepreneurs – advanced marketing capabilities, robust data capabilities and the ability to raise financing over time are required, resources that most entrepreneurs in the market do not have access to.”
The company’s business model is based on a fixed percentage of revenue – a more effective model in a world where software-as-a-service (SaaS) products are losing their influence. ZyG also offers products that have shown significant growth potential (Cohort financing) based on the models developed by the company, especially for products with customer acquisition costs that are recovered over time.
ZyG and brands that seek to grow from within it will face competition from two companies with an Israeli background, with expertise in marketing beauty products: Oddity, owned by entrepreneur Oran Holtzman, which promotes brands such as IL Makiage, Spoiled Child and Maelys, owned by Zvika Birnbaum, and Leumi Partners, which operates from Cyprus and New York.
All three companies claim that they can help distribute cosmetics and consumer brands based on the power of the network, while using increased data science and improving focus on the end consumer. Oddity itself has also suffered a sharp decline in its share price – 67% since the beginning of the year due to an algorithm error, but also due to negative sentiment towards software companies. ZyG will have to prove that it provides entrepreneurs with value that rivals the AI agents of the AI giants and their website building capabilities. It is possible that its previous experience in promoting brands gained over the past 18 months and its financing program may help in this.
Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on March 5, 2026.
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