Israeli 42AI Founders Amit and Amir Gal-Or Fund $62.5M Seed

42AI is an Israeli startup that came out of stealth on November 2, 2026 with a $62.5 million seed round funded by its founders and Infinity Group, not mainly by outside investors. CEO Amit Gal-Or and CTO Ehud Ezra built a behavioral world model that, the company says, forecasts how brokerage customers will trade. Chairman Amir Gal-Or, Amit's father, founded Infinity Group.

Last updated: November 3, 2026

What is 42AI and what does it do?

42AI is an Israeli startup that builds what it calls a behavioral world model, software meant to estimate the probability that a specific person will make a particular decision, even in a situation that person has not faced before. TechCrunch editor Ram Iyer reported the launch on November 2, 2026, and FinSMEs describes the company as Tel Aviv-based.

Its first customers are financial brokerages. 42AI says 10 large brokerages use the system to manage liquidity, margin requirements and hedging exposure, and that revenue is above seven figures, a number the company would not narrow. Customers pay either a flat fee or a share of the value the platform helps them gain.

The company says it is also exploring gaming, fraud prevention and cybersecurity, and one day wants to help robots and AI agents understand people. Ezra told TechCrunch the model must be trained on the rules and context of each new domain, so those expansions are not immediate. For the Israeli market in those sectors, see Olam's Israeli cybersecurity guide.

Who are the 42AI founders?

42AI has three co-founders named by TechCrunch: CEO Amit Gal-Or (עמית גל אור), CTO Ehud Ezra and chairman Amir Gal-Or (אמיר גל אור), who is Amit's father. The founders also supplied part of the seed funding.

Founder	Role at 42AI	What public sources say
Amit Gal-Or	CEO and co-founder	Described the three-year development effort to TechCrunch. Globes reported in January 2025 that his father put him in charge of OMGene.AI as CEO.
Ehud Ezra	CTO and co-founder	Explained the model design to TechCrunch. The Startupim directory lists him as OMGene's CTO, and his LinkedIn profile places him in Tel Aviv.
Amir Gal-Or	Chairman and co-founder	A founder of the Infinity venture group, which Globes said held about 150 investments in January 2025. Wikipedia describes an Israeli businessman, born in Haifa in 1962 and a former Israeli Air Force pilot, active in venture capital, technology and East Asian enterprises.

TechCrunch says the team also took advice from experts in psychology and PTSD, and from Dan Shechtman, who won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Globes had already named Shechtman as an adviser to OMGene in 2025, which is the thread the next section follows.

Did the 42AI team build something similar before?

The same people appear in a related venture launched in 2025. Globes reported in Hebrew on January 14, 2025 that Amir Gal-Or was launching OMGene.AI, a decision-support system built on DNA samples and AI, with himself as chairman and his son Amit as CEO. Public profiles list Ehud Ezra as OMGene's CTO, and a 2025 post on his LinkedIn page describes a Sheba Longevity Conference 2025 talk by Gal-Or and Ezra on using large language models to interpret genomic and exposome data.

Globes reporter Gali Weinreb described the plan in detail. The system takes a DNA sample, links what is known about the genome to health, psychological and social traits, and produces a report on a person's strengths. Amir Gal-Or called it a report on each person's range of genius (מרחב הגאונות). OMGene had 12 employees and had received $3 million from Infinity, and he said he intended to raise $20 million more. It would start as a nonprofit research institute, which he compared to OpenAI, and turn commercial later, selling to organizations instead of consumers.

Globes listed three advisers: geneticist Prof. Rivka Carmi, former president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and an Infinity director; Nobel laureate Prof. Dan Shechtman; and psychiatrist Prof. Eyal Fruchter, director of the Maale HaCarmel hospital, who would run research. About 100 people had given DNA samples, and Gal-Or said a study with the Israel Defense Forces would map strengths in people diagnosed with post-traumatic stress.

The overlap with 42AI is substantial. Shechtman appears in both: Globes named him an OMGene adviser in 2025, and TechCrunch names him among 42AI's advisers in 2026. TechCrunch also says 42AI's three-year effort combined psychology, neuroscience and genetics. TechCrunch's report does not mention OMGene, the Globes report does not mention 42AI, and neither company has said whether 42AI is OMGene's successor. The shared people, adviser and science point to a connection, but it is not confirmed.

Who is Amir Gal-Or and what is Infinity?

Amir Gal-Or (אמיר גל אור) is a founder of Infinity, an Israeli venture group that Globes said in January 2025 held about 150 investments worth about $2 billion. He told Globes that over the previous three years Infinity invested mainly in China, averaging 12 new investments a year, and that OMGene had no connection to China.

Globes describes him as president of the Israel-China Chamber of Commerce, and in May 2025 it covered the launch of his book "Working with the Chinese" (לעבוד עם הסינים). His earlier venture Infinity Medical, a research partnership listed on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, raised about NIS 40 million in its initial offering in early 2021, per Globes. In January 2025 Globes wrote that Infinity Medical faded along with other listed research partnerships after the 2021 boom.

Who funded 42AI's $62.5 million seed round?

The founders and Infinity Group funded the $62.5 million seed round over three years, so the round was not raised entirely from outside investors, Amit Gal-Or told TechCrunch. Infinity was founded by Amir Gal-Or, who is also 42AI's chairman and a co-founder.

FinSMEs reports that 42AI plans to use the money to scale its world modeling systems, widen its onboarding pipeline for global financial institutions and fund research that combines neuroscience, psychology and predictive analytics. The table below compares the round with two other Israeli launches this autumn.

Company	Round	Amount	Who led or funded it	Source
42AI	Seed	$62.5M	Founders and Infinity Group	TechCrunch
Zenzap	Total funding at emergence from stealth	$44M	Bessemer Venture Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with The Garage	Ynet
Phantom GI	Seed	$5M	Pitango HealthTech, with RAD Biomed and RUNI Ventures	CTech by Calcalist

The difference is who carries the risk. In the Zenzap and Phantom GI rounds, outside venture firms took positions. At 42AI the money came from insiders, and the company says it plans to raise more. Olam's observation is that any later round will be priced by outside investors, who will put a value on a company whose first $62.5 million was set by its own founders. Pitango, which led the Phantom GI round, is listed in the Israeli VC Fund Directory.

How does 42AI's behavioral world model work?

42AI's model turns a person's recorded interactions into numerical traits, then feeds those traits into a transformer-based model that outputs probabilities for possible decisions. The company says it infers underlying psychological tendencies instead of extrapolating from a person's past actions.

The system reads a customer's existing records, such as completion of identity checks, onboarding, support calls, money transfers and trades.
It picks up signals in those records, including sentiment and voice in support calls and how often a person calls.
It converts the observations into mathematical representations of traits.
A transformer-based world model produces probabilities for decisions under different circumstances.
A separate language model writes the explanations that accompany each prediction.

Ezra said the model is trained to keep a person's tendencies steady in simulation. If a usually risk-averse trader is suddenly modeled as a risk-taker, the training counts that as a miss.

Gal-Or said the team first studied thousands of people with psychological assessments and behavioral scenarios, then added government and biobank datasets covering more than 2 million people. Customer datasets now cover almost 30 million people, he said.

How accurate is 42AI's model?

42AI claims 98% accuracy in predicting market trades, but Gal-Or clarified to TechCrunch that the figure measures whether trading flows land inside a predicted range, not whether each trade was called correctly.

The company also reports an F1 score of 0.8 to 0.85 for predicting trading direction and volume. An F1 score balances correct predictions against false alarms and missed events, which makes it a stricter test than the headline percentage. All of these figures come from the company, and TechCrunch's report cites no independent evaluation.

Gal-Or also claimed that one brokerage gained roughly $30 million in additional value through dynamic hedging. That is a customer result reported by the company, and it was not verified in the coverage.

Both founders acknowledged limits. Gal-Or said the model cannot see everything a person experiences, and Ezra said accuracy falls when important context is missing, such as a trader changing course on a friend's advice.

What are the privacy and misuse concerns?

The central concern is that a brokerage able to anticipate its customers' decisions could use that knowledge for its own benefit, a risk TechCrunch raised with the founders. Ezra called it a valid concern, and the founders pointed to regulation, monitoring and an internal ethics committee.

TechCrunch noted the founders did not explain what would stop customers from using the technology against the people it profiles. Gal-Or said the model never learns a person's identity and the company says it does not need personally identifiable information. TechCrunch observed that the company still creates individual behavioral profiles from linked customer activity.

Amir Gal-Or made a data-privacy commitment about OMGene in 2025. He told Globes the project would not cooperate with Chinese parties because of the importance of data privacy, even though Infinity invests mainly in China. TechCrunch's report on 42AI includes no comparable statement about the company's data, customers or investors.

For Israeli brokerages and regulators, the practical question is whether pricing, margin and hedging decisions based on predicted client behavior are disclosed to those clients. That question is Olam's, not one the founders addressed.

Where does 42AI fit in Israel's funding year?

42AI arrives in a year of very large Israeli deals. Globes reported that Israeli startups raised $2.5 billion in September 2026, and Olam's ranking of the biggest Israeli exits puts Google's $32 billion Wiz purchase first and CyberArk's $25 billion sale second.

Most of those headline deals are in cybersecurity. 42AI is a different kind of bet: an AI company selling behavioral prediction to financial firms, funded first by its own founders. For the wider picture, see The Israeli Economy and Olam's Venture and Exits coverage.

What should readers watch next at 42AI?

Six checkable developments will show whether 42AI's claims hold up.

Whether the company names its first outside investors when it raises more money.
Whether 42AI publishes an independent evaluation of its 98% and F1 figures.
Whether any of its 10 brokerage customers agrees to be named.
Whether the company confirms that it grew out of OMGene.
Whether 42AI repeats OMGene's stated rule of no Chinese partners on data, given Infinity's China focus.
Whether regulators ask how predicted client behavior is used in margin and hedging decisions.

The customer count is the most checkable claim. A named brokerage would test the company's central commercial statement more directly than any accuracy figure.

Frequently asked questions

What is 42AI?

42AI is an Israeli startup that says it has built a behavioral world model that predicts how individual people will decide, first applied at financial brokerages.

How much did 42AI raise?

42AI announced a $62.5 million seed round on November 2, 2026. The money came from the founders and Infinity Group over three years.

Who are the founders of 42AI?

The co-founders are CEO Amit Gal-Or, CTO Ehud Ezra and chairman Amir Gal-Or, who is Amit's father.

Is 42AI the same company as OMGene?

Not confirmed. Globes reported in January 2025 that Amir Gal-Or launched OMGene.AI with his son Amit as CEO, and Nobel laureate Dan Shechtman advises both ventures. Neither company has said 42AI is OMGene's successor.

Who is Amir Gal-Or?

Amir Gal-Or is a founder of the Infinity venture group, president of the Israel-China Chamber of Commerce according to Globes, and the chairman and a co-founder of 42AI.

Which companies use 42AI?

42AI says 10 large brokerages use its system. The company has not named them.

Does 42AI use personal data?

The company says its model does not need personally identifiable information. TechCrunch observed that it still builds individual behavioral profiles from linked customer activity.