Itamar ben Hemo, the CEO of an Israeli tech startup called Rivery, survived being shot in the chest while in combat in Gaza earlier this year and signed a $100 million deal with data management company Boomi in the U.S. this week.
The story is one of many similar ones in Israel — of men and women with jobs and families and lives who put everything on hold to fight for their country in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) after the October 7, 2023, attack.
The Times of Israel reported:
On October 7, 2023, Israeli expat Ben Hemo was in Israel on a visit from the US, as his family had moved back to Israel after his daughter decided to join the IDF. Following the brutal onslaught on southern communities by Hamas terrorists that day — some 1,200 people were killed in southern Israel and 251 taken hostage in the Gaza Strip — there was no other thought for Ben Hemo other than to immediately check his military gear and volunteer for reserve duty in his paratrooper unit to join the fighting, he told The Times of Israel on Thursday.
For the next three months, the 49-year-old major, who previously served many years in a paratrooper division around Gaza, participated in military missions — including the evacuation of survivors of the Hamas massacre in the kibbutzim and rescue actions in Gaza — while using breaks in combat to conduct management meetings every couple of days, either from his car or nearby border communities, he said.
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Ben Hemo was hit in the chest close to his heart by a bullet fired from a Kalashnikov assault rifle and suffered internal organ damage, and his commander was severely injured as well, he said.
After being injured in January, Ben Hemo spent three months recovering in the hospital, and slowly returned to his duties at work, aided by colleagues who kept the company going in the U.S. and in the United Kingdom.
Their hard work paid off, as Calcalist reported this week, with a massive, life-changing Silicon Valley acquisition:
Boomi, an American company founded in 2000 specializing in data integration, has announced the acquisition of Israeli startup Rivery. Rivery developed a platform for end-to-end ELT (extract, load, transform) which covers key processes for medium and large enterprises. The startup employs 80 people, all of whom are expected to continue working at the company following the acquisition.
While the financial details of the deal were not disclosed, market estimates place the value at around $100 million, with part of the payment likely to be in Boomi’s shares.
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Rivery operates in the data management sector and belongs to the new generation of technology companies offering an intuitive, no-code approach to data management. Its platform is used by over 450 clients worldwide, including Bayer, Citizen, and SodaStream. The company enables IT, data, and marketing organizations to efficiently manage end-to-end data integration processes. Joining forces with Boomi will allow Rivery to further enhance its services and capabilities.
Israel is celebrating the acquisition not just for the heroic efforts of Rivery’s CEO, but as a sign of continued confidence in the country’s tech sector, despite more than a year of war and the political unrest that preceded it.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
