NICE

From a rented apartment and Unit 8200: the founding

NICE was founded in 1986 by six engineers who knew each other from 8200, the technological intelligence unit of the Israel Defense Forces: David (Didi) Arazi, who served as the first CEO, Benny Levin, Yoav Avtalion, Mordechai (Miki) Golan, Rami Lazar and Nissim Avraham. The company's first office was a rented apartment on Moshe Sneh Street in Tel Aviv, and at first it worked as a subcontractor for the defense industries. This was a common pattern among Israeli high-tech companies founded at the time, when local venture capital was still limited and most advanced technological know-how came from military service. The company's name, Neptune Intelligence Computer Engineering, was quickly shortened to NICE, and in 1991 it officially became the trade name.

From two stock exchanges to CXone

NICE was among the first Israeli companies to list on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, back in 1991, and five years later also on Nasdaq. The dual listing remains to this day. Over the years its core business moved from a focus on call recording for contact centers to a much broader platform: workforce management in the contact center, sentiment analysis of calls, and, under the Actimize brand, tools for fraud detection and anti-money laundering for financial institutions. David Sosna and David Govrin, two of Actimize's three founders, sold it to NICE in 2007 for about $280 million. They later founded Personetics, which develops AI for banks that analyzes financial data in real time and gives customers personalized insights. The current flagship platform, CXone, brings most of these functions together in one cloud service, and today it produces most of the company's revenue growth.

The Cognigy deal: $955 million for conversational AI

On 28 July 2025, NICE announced an agreement to acquire Cognigy, a German company from Düsseldorf that specializes in conversational and agentic AI, in a deal with a total value of about $955 million. According to the official announcement, the payment structure included a main sum in cash and about $50 million more held for a fixed period as a "time-bound holdback": $25 million of it in cash and the rest in NICE shares. The acquisition received the required regulatory approvals relatively quickly and closed in September 2025, less than two months after it was announced. That is a fast pace for a deal of this size.

What "agentic AI" actually means in a contact center

Unlike a classic chatbot that answers questions from a fixed script, "agentic AI" in a contact center describes a system that can carry out a whole action on its own, such as checking an order's status, updating account details or closing a ticket, and not just reply with text. NICE uses Cognigy's technology to give its customers (large companies that run contact centers) the ability to run such agents alongside human representatives. The system decides in real time when a given request is suitable for fully automatic handling and when it needs to be passed to a representative. This is a central direction of development across the whole customer service industry, not only at NICE.

Growth after the acquisition

According to the results announcement for the third quarter of 2025, annual recurring revenue from NICE's AI business grew 49% from the year before, and still 43% without counting the contribution of the Cognigy deal. Management described this as a situation in which its AI capabilities "were included in every new seven-figure CX deal" that quarter. In other words, they had become an almost essential part of every large deal, not just a "nice extra." Still, these are figures the company itself publishes in its quarterly results announcements, so they should be treated as a documented trend, not a guaranteed forecast.