Israeli startup Panax raises $10 million Series A for its AI-powered cash flow management platform

High interest rates and financial pressures make it more important than ever for finance teams to better manage their cash flow, and several startups are hoping to help.

Two-year-old Israeli startup Panax is one of them, and it just raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Team8, with participation from TLV Partners.

Startups have had some luck tackling the CFO stack by streamlining processes and freeing up time to work on strategic tasks. The collapse of SVB has created a tailwind for the cash management category, which includes players such as Embat, Kyriba, Statement and Vesto.

Unlike some of them, Panax focuses on medium and large companies in traditional sectors such as manufacturing, logistics and real estate. Although they need more than startups, they don’t always have the type of large treasury services that traditional solutions cater to.

Target aside, Panax also hopes to differentiate itself in its offering, and not just by including investment accounts and lines of credit within its scope.

While visualizing cash flow is useful, Panax wants to go further than providing a dashboard, Panax CEO Noam Mills told TechCrunch. She believes helping clients requires “using data to understand what’s really important, influencing those decisions and helping them manage (their cash flow).”

This value proposition appears to resonate with Panax’s early adopters, including companies such as public beauty company Oddity, for whom automating cash management saves time and effort. money.

Bringing its total funding to $15.5 million following a $5.5 million seed round led by TLV Partners, this new round will help Panax expand its go-to-market approach and build a team of More robust AI and data now that it has enough data for it,” Mills says.

AI already plays an important role at Panax: it helps the startup make sense of all the financial data it gathers, as well as identify insights and forecast cash flow. For Mills, it’s in the emergence of action items that AI can really help. “Often there is no formal treasury department (…), so we see AI as a great way to be proactive and raise the right signals for the client. »

The clients Panax seeks are businesses with complex cash management needs; typically they operate in multiple locations in currencies. Foreign exchange is one aspect that Panax can help optimize, and this could provide additional benefit to the company on top of its SaaS model, which is priced based on the complexity of each client’s operations.

Many stakeholders hope to get a share by helping companies optimize their cash flow. For example, they could apply for loans and request working capital or lines of credit from their banking application or from their accounting software interface. But Panax has a card to play as a unique cash management dashboard integrating recommendations and projections.

The goal of Panax, Mills said, is that finance teams don’t need to go elsewhere to execute the decisions they need to make. “(That) if we give them information, they can move more cash into interest-bearing accounts. Integrating this functionality into our platform is something that we see as very closely tied to our value proposition, and these are also things that we’re expanding into many different use cases with money movement.

Mills’ understanding of these needs comes from her experience in private equity, which she shares with chief commercial officer and co-founder Niv Yaar. But her personal journey is entirely unique: before her roles in private equity and corporate finance, she was an Olympic fencer for Israel and won several titles in her home country.

When asked what her background as an athlete and her role as a CEO had in common, she pointed to similar psychological demands, such as perseverance and the ability to deal with uncertainty. But fencing is an individual sport, while running a business “is more of a team sport.”

After its Series A round, Panax will expand its New York office and Yaar will relocate there, but its R&D will remain in Israel. So will Panax CTO and third co-founder, Sefi Itzkovich, who worked on machine learning at Facebook after the company where he was previously CTO, Otonomo, went public via a SPAC.

“There is competition for talent everywhere (but) the deep roots we have in the R&D community in Israel through our CTO and founding team give us a certain advantage in the competition for talent,” Mills said .

Mills expects network effects to also play a role in New York, where Team8 has an office. But she and her co-founders also chose the city because of the additional overlap with Israel’s time zone compared to the Bay Area’s, and because of its importance to fintech. “The center for this is more in New York and the East Coast,” Mills said.