The founders of ironSource have raised $58 million in a Seed funding round for ZyG, a new AI platform designed to help entrepreneurs build and scale e-commerce brands.
The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, Viola Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with additional participation from Stardom Ventures, Access Industries (ClalTech), Emerge, Disruptive AI, and Jibe Ventures.
ZyG was founded by ironSource founders and executives Tomer Bar-Zeev (Chairman), Omer Kaplan (CEO), Assaf Ben Ami (CFO & COO), Nadav Ashkenazy, and Daniel Shinar, alongside cybersecurity and artificial intelligence experts from Unit 81: Dr. Eyal Amitt, Omri Steinmetz, and Guy Tsur.
The company’s platform is designed to predict the growth potential of consumer products even before they are launched, using proprietary data models. Once a product is selected, ZyG acts as an end-to-end operating system for building an e-commerce brand, handling tasks such as launching an online store, brand creation, advertising, digital marketing, search and AI-engine optimization, influencer partnerships, customer acquisition and retention, and logistics optimization, all through a single platform.
In addition to operational support, the company plans to provide financing to entrepreneurs and companies using the platform, helping reduce the financial risks associated with launching new products and lowering the heavy upfront advertising costs that typically dominate e-commerce budgets.
ZyG’s business model is based on taking a fixed percentage of revenue, aligning the company’s incentives with those of the entrepreneurs using the platform. Under this “pay-as-you-grow” model, founders retain full ownership of their brand’s intellectual property. ZyG will also offer “cohort financing” to products that demonstrate strong growth potential based on the company’s predictive models, helping founders fund expansion as demand increases.
To identify promising partners, ZyG has developed a growth prediction system that assigns each potential product a rating known as the “ZyG Score.” Entrepreneurs whose products achieve a high score can partner with the platform.
Rather than building internal teams, hiring marketing agencies, and purchasing multiple data tools, founders can rely on ZyG to manage these functions while they focus on developing their products.
“Today, product innovators are set up to fail. You can build an incredible product and website, but still have no viable path to becoming a brand that reaches $100M+ in annual sales. Most DTC products stall because founders are forced to master growth marketing, data science, and capital strategy, all at once. That’s unrealistic,” said Omer Kaplan, Co-Founder and CEO of ZyG. “ZyG exists to change that equation. We’re building a new partnership model that lets founders focus on what they do best – creating amazing products – while our data, technology, AI agents, and financing, power the product to scale.”
Omer Kaplan, CEO of ZyG: “We are one of the most talked-about companies in the market, but as time went on we realized there was a need to explain what we are doing to a much broader audience. Something about the potential of Amazon, and about building a market around it, made us realize that we needed to come out in an organized way and explain what we offer. There have been many misleading publications, and it was important for us to present things correctly.”
Kaplan explained: “Let’s think about someone who has spent many years developing a product that helps prevent hair loss. He has a small company with a product that has real value. It is very difficult for him to raise funding for the project, and even when he does, the sums are usually small. Yet he might have the potential to reach millions of people, and it is still very hard for him to test the market.
“Either he goes to Amazon and gets swallowed up among countless competing products, or he goes to Shopify and builds a store that very few people visit, because it is extremely difficult to build a business that way. It’s very similar to what happens to game developers who upload endless games to app stores and get swallowed up by the competition.
“The difference is that building a product is one thing, but building a large-scale online brand around it is almost impossible. How do you approach the marketing model? How do you manage inventory? Most entrepreneurs simply cannot bridge that gap, so more than 90% fail.
“Today, thanks to AI, it’s already easy to develop software that solves a specific problem. But entrepreneurs need a platform that allows them to focus on the product itself while everything else is handled for them. We built a prediction engine that analyzes a product’s potential for distribution and sales worldwide. If the product shows strong potential, we then build everything it needs: advertising, brand creation, inventory forecasting, and many other operational elements.”
Kaplan detailed the different stages of the company’s funding. “There was an initial $40 million round and another $18 million SAFE round from investors who wanted to join later. There was strong demand to participate, which is why we opened the SAFE round.
“There were eight founders at ironSource, and there are also eight founders here. Initially we started with five founders: Tomer Bar-Zeev (Chairman), Assaf Ben Ami (CFO & COO), Nadav Ashkenazy, Daniel Shinar, and myself. A few months later we were joined by another company led by three very senior people who decided to merge with us. They told us they had decided not to go into cybersecurity like many of their peers. So, similar to ironSource, this is also a combination of teams coming together, and we now have eight founders.”
