Israeli startup Trustmi, which offers payments fraud prevention tools, raised a $17M Series A led by Cyberstarts, taking its total funding to $21M
Shai Gabay and Eli Ben-Nun, two entrepreneurs based in Israel, met in 2018 while working at Cynet, a cybersecurity startup developing extended detection and response tools.
Context & Ripple Effects
Trustmi's founders came up through Israel's cybersecurity bench — Shai Gabay and Eli Ben-Nun met at Cynet, the extended detection and response vendor — and are now pointing that background at B2B payments fraud rather than endpoint or cloud security. The raise extends a pattern in the corpus of Israeli teams carving fraud and trust tooling out of the broader security stack.
The category has already produced a benchmark exit: Riskified's $3.3B NYSE listing proved public markets will price e-commerce fraud protection, while ThetaRay's later $57M round showed deep-pocketed appetite for AI-driven transaction monitoring. Trustmi's Series A positions it on the business-payments side of that same trust-infrastructure wave.
First-order effects
- Cyberstarts' $17M gives Trustmi runway to scale its payments fraud prevention product against finance-team buyers who currently lack a dedicated B2B-focused alternative.
- The round validates the Cynet-to-founder pipeline as a repeatable source of security startups, strengthening Cyberstarts' position as the go-to first check for Israeli cyber entrepreneurs.
Second-order effects
- Riskified's e-commerce franchise now faces specialists attacking the corporate-payments segment it does not own, pressuring incumbents to extend coverage beyond consumer checkout fraud.
- Adjacent spend-management players like Mesh Payments face rising buyer expectations that expense and payment platforms embed fraud screening natively, rather than leaving it to standalone vendors.
Third-order effects
- If the Riskified-to-ThetaRay-to-Trustmi sequence holds, Israel consolidates into a distinct trust-and-fraud cluster inside cybersecurity, with funds like Cyberstarts systematically seeding founders out of established security firms.
- Fraud prevention is trending toward becoming embedded payment infrastructure — a compliance-grade layer every B2B transaction flows through — which would shift pricing power toward whoever owns that verification point.
The trend: Israeli cybersecurity alumni keep spinning out specialized fraud-prevention firms, turning trust infrastructure into a funded sub-sector of its own between security and fintech.