What revenue threshold makes a high-tech company a success story? Until recently, an annual revenue rate (ARR) of $100 million was considered a status symbol that signaled a company was on the right track. That “right track” typically leads to an IPO on Wall Street, where today the minimum revenue threshold needed to attract serious investor attention, not just Reddit communities, is around $300 million. At that level, the expectation is that a company with a working business model should already be turning a profit.

However, as with everything in our lives lately, artificial intelligence is upending long-held assumptions and habits. Just last week, Loveable, a company that allows users to write code without programming knowledge, simply by typing prompts, announced it had reached an annualized revenue rate of $100 million just eight months after its founding. In doing so, it broke the record previously held by Israeli cybersecurity company Wiz, which had reached the same milestone in two and a half years.

Still, these cases are outliers that don’t prove a new rule. Alongside this new generation of “AI-native” startups, some of which will likely become not just unicorns but decacorns (valued at $10 billion and up), there remains a cohort of more traditional unicorns that have been maturing over the past few years. Since the tech bubble of 2021, their luster may have faded, but in the quieter aftermath of frenzied funding rounds, many have turned their focus to the real work: building viable businesses rather than just racking up valuations.

In this project, Calcalist highlights Israeli tech companies that have passed the $250 million revenue threshold, a level that positions them for the next critical phase: reaching profitability. This, in turn, will better equip them to remain independent or pursue the path to a public offering.

These companies represent a different breed. They haven’t rushed to sell themselves to tech giants, and haven’t yet gone public let some of them may have hoped to do by now, they all share one key trait: they generate significant, recurring revenue in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

Interestingly, most of the companies on this list are not recent startups. Coincidentally, or perhaps not ,the majority were founded around 2015, making them about a decade old. Many have also faced serious challenges along the way. Rapyd saw its valuation fall from over $12 billion to $4.5 billion today. Via abandoned its consumer transportation model and pivoted to enterprise software, becoming a major provider for public transit systems. Navan had to reinvent its business entirely after the COVID-19 pandemic decimated business travel, and it is now the closest among Israeli unicorns to achieving an IPO.

In 2020 and 2021, the market was euphoric. Nearly every company that raised funds achieved a $1 billion valuation. But while valuations were always publicly celebrated, revenue figures remained one of the industry’s best-kept secrets. As for profits, those are less secretive, mostly because they rarely exist. In presenting these success stories, it’s also important to acknowledge the notable absentees. Several unicorns that once boasted valuations exceeding $5 billion, like Tipalti and Fireblocks, are missing from the list. Their absence underscores the gap between inflated valuations and actual business performance. It also explains why so few unicorns in Israel, and globally, have managed to go public: the public markets apply far more realistic valuation metrics.

A prime example is the story of Riskified and Forter. Riskified went public at a valuation of around $3 billion but now trades below $1 billion. Forter, which has stayed private, retains a $3 billion valuation despite generating less revenue than Riskified. The small number of companies that have managed to surpass the $250–300 million revenue threshold highlights the extent to which venture capital investments were driven not by sound business fundamentals but by FOMO, the fear of missing out on the next big thing.

The result? A growing wave of mergers and acquisitions aimed at “cleaning up” portfolios bloated with overvalued, underperforming companies.

Minute Media Founded: 2011 Annual Revenue: $300 million Capital Raised: $260 million Latest Valuation: $2 billion Employees: ~500

A little over a year ago, Minute Media made headlines around the world when it emerged as the surprise winner in the race to acquire the publishing rights to the iconic American magazine Sports Illustrated. Although the Israeli unicorn had already made a long string of acquisitions, this was its most high-profile move to date, largely because Sports Illustrated is a household name far beyond just sports fans.

The acquisition was also seen by some as a surprising move, a sort of “step backward” for a high-tech company suddenly finding itself in the seemingly outdated world of print magazines. But for Minute Media, the real story was never about print. It was, and remains, about the platform.

The Israeli company has developed a digital platform that enables the creation and distribution of sports content. Fans or athletes who wish to create content can log into one of Minute Media’s platforms, open a user profile, and begin producing content, using either media already available in the system or uploading their own photos and videos.

Once the content is created, it is reviewed by Minute Media’s editorial team, who assess the quality of the material. When needed, especially for first-time users, they provide feedback to the creator. After passing through Minute Media’s technological processing, the content is then distributed via one of the company’s owned platforms or through content-sharing agreements with partner websites.

Today, Minute Media reaches hundreds of millions of monthly users, who collectively generate tens of thousands of content pieces each month, in multiple languages.

Lightricks Founded: 2013 Annual Revenue: $250 million Capital Raised: $335 million Latest Valuation: $1.8 billion Employees: About 500

Jerusalem-based Lightricks rose to fame with its content editing apps, including Facetune and Photoleap, which gained widespread popularity, even among American celebrities, about five years ago. That period also marked the company’s last major funding round.

Recently, however, the AI revolution has shaken up the creative software industry, forcing Lightricks to reevaluate its strategy. Filters, once a competitive differentiator, have become commoditized, prompting the company to undergo several rounds of layoffs and, more importantly, to rethink both its core product and business model.

Today, the game is no longer about simply adding visual effects or filters. The new battleground is enabling individual content creators to function like full-scale production studios. Lightricks now faces the challenge of operating in a field that has drawn the attention of nearly every major AI player.

In response, the company is working to turn this disruption into opportunity. Lightricks has begun developing its own generative AI models, designed to be more cost-effective than those offered by Google or OpenAI. It recently launched a proprietary video generation model that, according to the company, can produce visuals comparable in quality to those created with tens of millions of dollars in traditional production budgets, but at a cost of just a few cents.

Lightricks’ model is also notable for being the only open-source video generation model developed by a Western company; all other open models in the space currently originate from China.

With this announcement, Lightricks hopes to spark its own “DeepSick moment”, a breakthrough that puts both the company and Israel on the global AI map. While not on the scale of large language models (LLMs), the video creation market is undergoing radical transformation driven by AI, with a total market potential estimated at $600 billion, according to Lightricks.

The key commercial shift is the ability to create video advertisements without building physical sets, using only generative AI. Even major film studios are beginning to incorporate AI-generated content into their productions, signaling the start of a new era in media creation.