Legato

Two development managers who met at Verint

Dana Rochman and Shlomit Tennenbaum did not meet through an entrepreneurship program or a conference. They met while working together as development managers at Verint, the Israeli intelligence and analytics technology giant. Each has more than two decades of experience in product management and AI, gained also at other technology companies such as Taboola and AnyVision. This shared background, years of working inside a large organization that sells software to other organizations, is what led them, according to the interviews they gave to the press, to pinpoint the exact friction point every SaaS vendor runs into: customers who want customization, and an in-house development team that can't keep up with all the requests. Legato was founded in 2025 out of this insight. Its stated goal is not to build yet another general AI tool, but a component that SaaS vendors can build into their own product.

Building an app inside another app

Legato's central idea is a distinction between two kinds of AI products: standalone tools that a user opens separately (like a general chatbot), versus a capability built into an existing SaaS product that appears to the customer as a natural part of it. The system runs several AI agents that work together. One interprets the user's request, another plans the technical structure, and a third writes the actual code, so the end result resembles the work of a small product team more than a single model's text completion. From the SaaS vendor's point of view, this means it can offer its customers deep customization without hiring a large professional services team of its own, and without giving up control over what is built inside its own system.

The economic problem the company is trying to solve

In its funding announcement, Legato described the market for customization services for SaaS software as one that keeps growing, and that sometimes eats up more than half of a customer's budget for deploying a system. That money goes to outside consulting and integration firms rather than to the software vendor itself. For SaaS vendors, many customization requests from different customers put a load on in-house development teams and slow down how fast new customers get up and running. The company's bet is that "the next battleground" in the competition between enterprise software vendors will not be about who offers the best general AI capability, but about who lets the business customers themselves (not the IT department and not outside vendors) build what they need on their own, quickly and without depending on a waiting list.

The funding: S Capital VC and Cerca Partners

In January 2026 Legato announced it had completed a $7 million seed round, led by the venture capital fund S Capital VC, with participation from Cerca Partners and other private investors, including well-known Israeli entrepreneurs. The company said the money would be used to speed up research and development and to expand its AI team. According to the same announcement, the company currently works with a range of SaaS platforms, from CRMs to HR tech platforms, and intends to widen its reach beyond SaaS, into fields such as financial services, healthcare, telecoms and energy. A seed round, usually the earliest funding stage, before there is meaningful revenue data, shows that this is still a company at the start of its journey: as of this writing there is no public disclosure of the number of paying customers, revenue, or an agreed company valuation. This is a major difference from older companies in this category with more established revenue, and it is worth keeping in mind when judging any claim about the product's impact on the market at this stage.

Same name, two completely different companies

Anyone searching for information about "Legato" may run into confusion. Alongside the Israeli company described here, there is also a completely separate American company with the same name, which came out of stealth in August 2026 with an entirely different product: AI glasses to help people who are hard of hearing, founded by entrepreneurs with a background in hearing aids. The two companies are not connected in any way, not in ownership, not in founders and not in field of activity. The overlap probably comes from two separate founding teams each choosing a fairly common name from the world of music (legato is a musical term for smooth, connected playing). A reader who comes across an article about "Legato's AI glasses" should not conclude anything from it about the Israeli company described here, and vice versa.