Global software companies are moving quickly to secure emerging artificial intelligence capabilities, with Israel becoming a central focus in this new wave of early-stage acquisitions. Over the past several weeks, Salesforce, Figma, and HubSpot have all completed deals involving young Israeli AI startups, many of them only months into their operations. The pattern reflects a growing urgency among large U.S. software firms to deepen their AI portfolios and capture technical talent before these companies reach scale.
The acquisitions point to the expanding influence of Israel’s AI ecosystem, which has long been recognised for cybersecurity and developer-tooling expertise but is now gaining momentum in enterprise AI workflows, knowledge retrieval, creative automation, and marketing technology. What stands out across the three deals is not only the strategic intent but also the early maturity of the companies involved. Some were less than a year old, had small teams, or had raised modest funding rounds before entering negotiations with global buyers.
Among the three startups, Doti AI is the most established, though it remains younger than many typical acquisition targets. Founded less than two years ago, the company has raised around seven million dollars and built a product focused on helping enterprise users access internal knowledge with the speed and intuitiveness expected from modern AI systems. The founders, Matan Cohen and Opher Hofshi, previously worked in infrastructure security and development tooling at Wix. Their experience shaped the design of Doti’s real-time Work AI platform, which enables employees to search and retrieve organisational information instantly across various internal systems.
Salesforce is acquiring Doti AI in a deal estimated in industry reports to be around one hundred million dollars. The company has signalled that the acquisition will be used to support the expansion of its existing AI research and development centre in Israel. The technology is expected to strengthen Salesforce’s work on agent-driven enterprise search, an area the company is positioning as essential to its broader AI roadmap. For Salesforce, Doti’s technology aligns with its goal of turning conversational interfaces into reliable gateways for enterprise knowledge.
A similar motivation appears to have shaped HubSpot’s acquisition of XFunnel, although the startup was even earlier in its lifecycle. XFunnel was founded ten months ago by Beeri Amiel and Neri Bluman, with a focus on the rapid shift toward AI-driven marketing workflows. As search behaviour evolves through the adoption of large language models, marketers are exploring systems where consumers receive direct answers instead of traditional search result lists. XFunnel builds tools suited to this environment, positioning itself in what its founders describe as the emerging answer-engine ecosystem.
The path to acquisition began when HubSpot engaged with XFunnel as a potential customer. This early interest progressed to an investment and eventually to the company’s first acquisition in Israel. With a market capitalisation of roughly twenty billion dollars, HubSpot’s move reflects a strategic push to integrate AI-native marketing capabilities into its product suite and address shifts in how users search for information and make decisions.
While Salesforce and HubSpot have focused on enterprise search and marketing, Figma has directed its attention toward creative technology. The design-software company, valued at around nineteen billion dollars, has announced the purchase of Weavy, a one-year-old Israeli startup with approximately twenty employees and four million dollars in funding. Industry estimates place the acquisition at more than two hundred million dollars, making it Figma’s largest acquisition to date.
Weavy develops a platform that integrates video models with advanced editing tools, a combination that fits with Figma’s ambition to expand its AI-based creative capabilities. The startup has attracted backing from well-known investors including Entrée Capital, Designer Fund, Founder Collective, and Fiverr chief executive officer Micha Kaufman. For Figma, the technology is expected to support new product experiences where design, video, and AI-assisted creation converge, particularly as demand for dynamic multimedia content increases across industries.
While each acquisition serves different segments of the enterprise market, the broader trend highlights a shared priority. Large U.S. software companies are opting to acquire early rather than wait for startups to mature. The activity suggests a competitive landscape in which firms are racing to secure technical talent, proprietary models, and differentiated workflows before their rivals do so. Israel’s strong engineering base, combined with the surge of small AI-focused teams building tools for enterprise use cases, makes it an appealing ground for companies seeking innovation.
The rapid succession of these three acquisitions indicates that this momentum is unlikely to slow in the near term. As enterprise customers continue to adopt AI-driven workflows in search, marketing, and creative production, global software platforms are accelerating efforts to integrate capabilities that allow them to maintain differentiation. If current patterns continue, Israel’s role as a hub for early-stage AI innovation is expected to strengthen further, with more companies entering the market and global buyers increasing their presence.