Who Has the Power
US-based startup Fundamental is opening a new engineering hub in Tel Aviv, another move by a fast-growing AI company to deepen its reach into a global labor market while investors and executives keep tightening their grip on the tools that shape enterprise decision-making. The Tel Aviv-based development center is expected to launch on June 2, and Fundamental said it plans to hire dozens of employees for engineering and infrastructure roles by the end of 2026. The San Francisco-based startup currently employs 70 people and already has offices in San Francisco, Barcelona and a small presence in Tel Aviv.
The company was founded in October 2024 by Israeli entrepreneur Gabriel Suissa and serial entrepreneur Jeremy Fraenkel. Fundamental says it builds an AI foundational model meant to crunch large databases that underpin enterprise decision-making and predict risks and trends such as financial fraud, pricing and customer churn. In other words, the apparatus for sorting, scoring and steering business life is getting another layer of automation, with the people doing the work expected to fit into the machine.
What the Company Says It Is Building
Suissa said, “At Fundamental, we are building a new category of AI designed for the data that is the backbone of the business world, from financial systems to supply chains to hospitals.” He added, “To solve a technology problem of this magnitude, we need to recruit the best talent in the world, which is why the decision to open an engineering hub in Israel felt natural and obvious to us.” Suissa also said, “This is a long-term strategic investment on our part.”
The company’s language is polished, but the hierarchy is plain enough: the people at the top decide where the work goes, who gets hired, and what problems deserve the most resources. The workers are the talent pool; the investors are the ones with the leverage.
Fundamental said its Nexus model, built by former DeepMind alumni including Marta Granelo, is trained on billions of tabular datasets and is designed to analyze raw tables with almost no need for complex configuration, sometimes using just a “single line of code.” The startup says the model can process massive databases without the inaccuracies typically associated with traditional AI models.
Money, Investors, and the Usual Gatekeepers
In February, Fundamental emerged from stealth with its AI model and secured $275 million in funding from investors at a $1.45 billion company valuation. The funding round was led by US fintech investor Oak HC/FT, with participation from Valor Equity Partners, Battery Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Hetz Ventures. Among the startup’s angel investors are Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, Brex co-founder Henrique Dubugras and Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel.
That is the familiar architecture of corporate power: a startup, a pile of venture money, a billion-dollar valuation, and a network of executives and investors deciding what gets built and scaled. The people whose data and labor feed these systems are nowhere in the cap table.
Fundamental said it recently entered into a partnership with SAP to integrate its Nexus model into the software provider’s business AI platform. The collaboration is designed to help organizations analyze large volumes of tabular data and generate more accurate business predictions across areas such as finance, supply chains, operations and risk management. Earlier this year, Fundamental inked a partnership deal with Amazon Web Services to sell its Nexus AI model.
The Market Keeps Expanding
Alongside the partnerships, the startup said it has signed “seven-figure contracts” with Fortune 100 enterprises in the fields of oil and gas, finance and healthcare sectors. Those contracts show where the model is headed: into the systems that already organize profit, control resources and manage risk for the biggest institutions on the planet.
The company’s expansion into Tel Aviv is being framed as a talent play and a strategic investment. But the facts on the page are the same old story of concentrated capital, elite networks and corporate capture dressed up as innovation. Fundamental is growing fast, hiring more people, and selling deeper into the machinery of enterprise power.