Solid, which emerged from stealth Wednesday with an announcement of a $20 million seed round, is the second company founded by CEO and co-founder Yoni Leitersdorf. He previously founded Indeni, which he sold to BlueCat. Its field — enterprise data accessibility — may not sound especially exciting. But investors Team8 and SignalFire actively courted Leitersdorf and are likely expecting significant returns. Just don’t confuse him with his younger brother, Din Leitersdorf, CEO and co-founder of AI video company Decart, or his older brother, Yoav Leitersdorf, managing partner of venture capital firm YL Ventures. And if this sounds like a segment from a celebrity news show, that is no coincidence.
The extended family also includes Yonatan Leitersdorf, described in Israeli media as a “poster child of the moneyed elite” and owner of AL Capital; nightlife app entrepreneur Guy Leitersdorf; serial entrepreneur and Skyline AI CEO Amir Leitersdorf; Einat Leitersdorf, a senior executive at construction tech company Buildots; and several other well-known figures in various fields.
Is there an explanation for this family phenomenon?
“To be honest, I’ve asked my father and my uncle the same question,” Leitersdorf said. “There’s some kind of bug that I can’t explain. I don’t have a good answer, but it’s a question that comes up a lot.”
Returning to Solid, the company may offer an answer to fears of a so-called “SaaS-pocalypse” — a doomsday scenario for software-as-a-service companies. Last week, investors expressed concern that the business model of large SaaS companies could collapse in the face of cheaper, more efficient AI applications that could replace them. The result was a sharp drop in the share prices of many software companies, in New York and Tel Aviv.
Solid built an AI-based tool from the outset that enables large enterprises to extract insights from the vast amounts of data they accumulate, with the goal of generating business value.
The company addresses a familiar problem: the business meaning layer of organizational data does not update at the pace of the organization’s operations, creating gaps between teams and becoming an operational bottleneck. Existing tools, including AI-based ones, struggle to generate reliable insights.
Solid’s platform aims to solve this bottleneck by connecting enterprise data to AI agents while preserving context, generating accurate business information and recommendations for action. Data reliability, the company says, is its secret sauce.
“How does this connect to the SaaS-pocalypse?” Leitersdorf asked, answering his own question: “Because we don’t charge customers based on the number of people asking questions. We don’t count seats like SaaS used to. Instead, we charge based on the number of questions asked and the amount of data processed. That’s the big change in this world: you can now price based on the value the customer receives, not the number of users.”
Solid’s tool is already in use at several banks, technology companies and large organizations in Israel, though the company declined to name them. One client it has publicly disclosed is U.S.-based SurveyMonkey, which provides SaaS tools for creating surveys, forms and collecting data, and then offers customers insights based on the collected data.
One Israeli client is a large health care organization. “They have thousands of employees and they bring us in to help staff get much faster answers to their questions,” Leitersdorf said. “They have huge amounts of data collected over decades. Imagine a manager who wants to ask what the quality of service was last month, or what diagnoses we had last week. Usually he turns to an analyst who works for several days and produces reports. It’s a very long process and, from that manager’s perspective, the information isn’t really accessible. Our technology lets him ask the question directly and get a reliable answer within seconds.”
‘They wanted to invest more money. We told them we didn’t need it’
Solid was founded in 2024 by Leitersdorf, who serves as CEO, and Tal Segalov, the company’s chief technology officer. Both are data specialists who began working together during their military service in Unit 8200, the Israel Defense Forces’ elite signals intelligence unit.
The company has offices in the United States and Israel and employs 20 people. Solid was established under Team8’s venture creation model, in which the firm identifies problems requiring solutions and helps build companies to address them, rather than only investing in existing startups.
Team8’s initial investment was expected to be smaller, but U.S. venture capital firm SignalFire significantly expanded it.
“They came to us and said, ‘Guys, we want to put in more money,’” Leitersdorf said. “We told them, ‘Honestly, we don’t need more money right now. We’re just at the beginning.’ But they said, ‘No, we want to invest more money and on very, very good terms.’ Team8 also strongly believes in the company and joined in, and that’s how it became a $20 million round.”
That is an unusual sum for a company at your stage and in your field. How do you explain it?
“The potential is enormous. The solution is relevant to health care organizations, banks, telecom companies — it’s relevant to so many different organizations. We’re not the only company moving in this direction. There are others thinking about how to do this. But we’re unique in how we build what’s called the semantic layer in a very reliable way, and the potential is really, really big.”
Let’s talk a bit about you. You sold Indeni in 2023 and a year later founded Solid.
“Yes, I stayed there for a few more months. That was part of the agreement. But very quickly the itch started — that restlessness of ‘I have to build something else.’ When ChatGPT came out in 2022, I was already familiar with it and I immediately recognized the potential. But the hallucinations were crazy and you really couldn’t rely on anything it produced. Still, it was clear it would improve. By the end of 2023 I really wanted to build something connected to ChatGPT and data. My partner felt the same drive and we decided to join forces and build Solid.”
That’s probably the same itch your brothers Yoav and Din have — and Orian, who was the youngest doctoral student at the Technion?
“And we also have a sister, Dana Leitersdorf, who doesn’t appear in the tech sections but is very strong in hotel interior architecture and is also an entrepreneur with a very large business of her own. I can’t explain it. My father was a physician his whole life and dean of the medical school at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and my mother taught at a teachers college in Jerusalem. So I can’t explain it.”
Do you ever find yourselves discussing high-tech at family dinners?
“Yes, all the time. It comes up a lot.”
A collaboration among all of you could create a superpower.
“The truth is, there’s something we’re working on, actually with one of our cousins. It’s just beginning to take shape, and it will be very interesting. Finally, a collaboration between two branches of the family.”