
Onfire AI is an innovative Israeli startup transforming the way B2B sales teams connect with technical buyers through a sophisticated AI-powered revenue intelligence platform. Founded by alumni of Israel Defense Forces’ Unit 8200, Onfire leverages proprietary artificial intelligence to analyze vast public data sets, particularly targeting developer communities and forums, to uncover precise buying signals and prospect behaviors. This approach helps software companies, especially those with complex technical products, identify high-intent prospects and tailor their outreach with unprecedented precision. Since its beta launch, Onfire has rapidly gained traction in the IT infrastructure ecosystem, driving over $50 million in closed deals and attracting major investors. In this article, discover ten essential insights about Onfire AI—from its origin story and technology to its unique market position and future prospects.
Onfire AI was founded by Tal Peretz (CEO), Shahar Shavit (CTO), and Nitzan Hadar (CPO), all veterans of the Israeli Defense Forces’ Unit 8200, an elite intelligence unit known for its advanced expertise in signals intelligence and data analytics. This background strongly influences Onfire’s technological and strategic approach, blending military-grade data processing capabilities with commercial sales intelligence needs. The founders’ experience enables Onfire to develop highly sophisticated AI models that mine public technical forums and online communities to generate actionable sales insights. Their transition from defense intelligence to SaaS sales intelligence reflects a broader trend of leveraging government-developed AI in commercial applications.
Onfire addresses a common challenge faced by SaaS and cloud infrastructure companies: identifying and engaging with highly specific technical buyers such as DevOps managers, CIOs, and CISOs who are notoriously difficult to reach. The platform specializes in sifting through millions of interactions on developer-centric platforms like Reddit, Hacker News, and Stack Overflow to detect nuanced purchase intent signals. This vertical, data-first focus sets Onfire apart by providing precise, contextual information that helps sales teams avoid wasting resources on inappropriate targets, increasing efficiency and success rates in complex sales cycles.
A key technological innovation of Onfire is its proprietary Account Intelligence Graph™. This graph connects first-party customer data — such as CRM notes and trial signups — with Onfire’s extensive public data footprint, covering over 50 million engineers globally. By refining this data with AI, the platform reveals high-intent buyers at the individual prospect level within ideal customer profiles (ICPs). This integration enables sales and marketing teams to have a continuously updated, accurate view of prospects and buying committees, thereby enabling more timely and relevant outreach efforts.
Onfire excels in capturing real-time buying intent signals from open web sources, including direct posts and anonymous mentions in technical forums. Unlike many generic intent data providers, Onfire’s technology is finely tuned to the nuances of software infrastructure purchases, offering actionable insights on prospective buyers’ technology stacks and pain points. This approach empowers revenue teams to act quickly and precisely, improving conversion rates by aligning outreach efforts with real-world buyer behavior and current budget cycles.
The Onfire platform is designed to integrate natively with popular customer relationship management (CRM) systems and sales engagement tools. This means sales teams can enrich their current CRM data and execute high-impact outreach directly within their existing workflows, without disruptive exports or context switching. This seamless connection ensures that Onfire’s sophisticated AI insights are easily accessible and actionable, allowing revenue teams to maximize efficiency and accelerate deal cycles.
Since its beta debut just over a year ago, Onfire has helped clients close more than $50 million in deals. Its client roster includes prominent companies like ActiveFence, Aiven, Cyera, Port, and Spectro Cloud, among others in cybersecurity, FinOps, data, and observability sectors. These results validate Onfire’s data-driven approach to reaching technical buyers and demonstrate the platform’s effectiveness in moving deals faster and uncovering previously hidden revenue opportunities in complex enterprise sales environments.
Onfire's growth has been strongly backed by notable investors, having raised $20 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Grove Ventures and TLV Partners, with participation from IN Venture (the venture arm of Japan's Sumitomo Corporation) and LeumiTech 77, a fund celebrating Israel’s 77th anniversary. This injection of capital is earmarked for accelerating product development in AI, research and development, and scaling global go-to-market operations, particularly focusing on the U.S. market where Onfire has established key sales infrastructure.
Given its methodology of mining public online conversations and matching them to individual companies and prospects, Onfire operates within a landscape of heightened scrutiny around data privacy. The company adheres to rigorous compliance standards including SOC2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR, CCPA, and CSA Star certifications. While the veteran intelligence background of its founders invites questions on data ethics, Onfire emphasizes that its solutions benefit both sellers and prospects by ensuring buyers receive relevant, timely pitches, enhancing the overall sales engagement experience.
Onfire’s data-first vertical strategy differentiates it from broader AI sales tools. Many General AI platforms offer automation but lack the granular data needed to personalize outreach effectively to technical buyers. Onfire combines massive technical community signals and vendor evaluation data with its client’s internal context, creating an AI-enabled feedback loop that continuously refines prospect scoring and insight accuracy. This specialization gives Onfire a defensible moat against CRM incumbents such as Salesforce and HubSpot by offering a deeply contextual GTM solution tailored for the $5 trillion IT market.
Looking ahead, Onfire aims to expand its AI capabilities, deepen its data sources, and broaden adoption across more IT sectors globally. The company plans to continue hiring top AI talent and scaling its sales force to meet increasing demand from software infrastructure vendors seeking better ways to navigate complex technical sales. If successful, Onfire could redefine AI-powered revenue intelligence standards, enabling enterprises to unlock growth by connecting more relevantly and efficiently with an elusive, technically sophisticated buyer segment.
Onfire AI exemplifies the next generation of sales technology by combining elite intelligence expertise with cutting-edge AI and data science tailored for the nuanced needs of technical buyers. Its platform not only enhances the precision of prospecting by analyzing massive real-time signals from developer communities but also seamlessly integrates into existing sales workflows to drive measurable revenue impact. As B2B SaaS markets grow more competitive and technical purchasing decisions become more complex, Onfire’s unique approach offers a compelling blueprint for how AI can facilitate smarter, faster, and more contextually aware sales engagements. The ongoing evolution of Onfire will likely influence industry standards for buyer intent data and AI-driven go-to-market strategies, raising the question: How will other sales tech innovators keep pace with this new intelligence-powered frontier?