Personetics

The founders: from Actimize to personal banking

Personetics was founded in 2011 by David Sosna and David Govrin, who a few years earlier had sold their previous company, Actimize, to NICE for about $280 million in 2007. (Finovate gave 2010 as the founding year.) Their experience at Actimize, which developed fraud and money-laundering detection systems for banks, gave the founders familiarity with the less glamorous side of the product: selling to large, conservative and slow banks. "Banks are conservative, but once I start working with a bank I immediately onboard millions of users," Sosna told Calcalist in 2022.

What the system does

According to Calcalist, the platform analyzes the financial data of the bank's customers in real time, learns their behavior patterns, tries to anticipate their needs and acts on their behalf. From these it produces enriched data, insights and financial advice that the bank shows the customer, along with automated programs to improve financial wellness. The company has called this "self-driving finance," and the system works for retail customers, small businesses, wealth management and credit card holders.

The customers: large banks

According to Calcalist, in 2022 the company worked with more than 80 financial institutions in 30 markets, including U.S. Bank, RBC, BMO, Santander, Intesa Sanpaolo and MUFG, and in Israel Bank Hapoalim, Leumi, Discount, the First International Bank and Isracard. In 2019 the company reported more than 60 million bank customers, and in 2026 150 million customers a month in 24 markets. These are figures the company provides itself.

Funding

In early 2021 the company raised $75 million from Warburg Pincus, and in January 2022 another $85 million from the software investment firm Thoma Bravo, with participation from existing investors such as Viola Ventures, Lightspeed, Sequoia and Warburg Pincus. According to Calcalist, the company raised $160 million in those ten months, and a small part of the amount was used to buy shares from employees. Sosna refused to reveal the company's valuation: "I'm old-fashioned and don't understand why entrepreneurs announce their valuation."

The development center in Nazareth

In 2019 the company opened a research and development center in Nazareth, with the help of the nonprofit Tsofen, which works to integrate Arab engineers into Israeli high-tech. The company explained that the center lets it recruit from a high concentration of talent, less than two hours' drive from Tel Aviv.

2026: inside the banking infrastructure

In June 2026 Fiserv, one of the largest providers of software infrastructure to banks in the United States, announced that it was embedding the Personetics platform in its digital banking suite, to lower the barriers to adoption for banks and credit unions. At the time Personetics was headed by CEO Udi Ziv. According to Finovate, the move illustrates a shift of AI in banking from a standalone fintech tool to a component of the basic infrastructure of digital banking.