DEAL SUMMARY

Company Name / Hear
Website / www.hear.ai
Offices / Tel Aviv, Israel
‍Sectors / Artificial Intelligence, Contact Centers, Customer Experience
Founders / 2
Year Founded / 2024
Number of Board Positions Held by Joule / One
Total Joule LP V Investment / $1,500,000
Total Size of Round / $3,200,000 (Seed)
Notable Co-Investors / Vertex Ventures (Israel)
LP V Ownership / 12.5%

DEAL DYNAMICS

Joule has long believed that the most enduring vertical AI opportunities emerge where there is a clear operational pain point, a clearly defined buyer, and a category where AI can replace incumbents whose moats were features, dashboards, and workflows rather than intelligence. The enterprise contact center fits this profile precisely. Contact centers sit at the intersection of revenue conversion, retention, regulatory risk, and customer experience for nearly every consumer-facing enterprise, yet they remain operated through manual review processes and dashboards that explain the past rather than direct what to do next.

Our Israel-based Partner Dafna Winocur Biran has known Hear's CEO and Co-founder, Noam Fine, for over a decade. Throughout Noam's prior journeys — building, scaling, and exiting AI-for-Customer Success companies including Sensiya (acquired by I.AM+) and Over.ai (acquired by Vonage) — Dafna and Noam developed a deep mutual trust. When Noam and his longtime co-founder Yossi Marouani decided to build Hear, the third and most ambitious company in their fifteen-plus-year partnership, Dafna was one of the first investors he called.

In their initial conversations Noam was contemplating a $5M raise — a size consistent with what has become the over-capitalized norm in Israel today. Joule's view, reinforced over many years of pre-seed and seed investing in this market, is that founders who raise too much too early at inflated valuations dilute themselves prematurely, lock themselves into growth expectations they cannot rationally hit, and ultimately compress the range of acceptable outcomes. Over several weeks of work with Noam and Yossi, Joule made the case for a leaner, more disciplined Seed round that would let the team prove the next set of milestones before stepping into a larger Series A round of funding.

The team ultimately landed on a $3.2M Seed round, co-led by Joule and with participation from Vertex Ventures (Israel) — Joule investing $1.5M, Vertex investing $1M, and approximately $700K coming from select strategic angels. The round preserves cap-table health and gives Hear the runway to drive meaningful ARR growth beyond the $1M+ in Committed ARR the company already has acquired.

TECHNOLOGY DESCRIPTION

Contact centers run the business — they own revenue conversion, retention, churn risk, regulatory compliance, and customer experience — but they operate blind. The relevant data sits across the tech stack -- CRM, CCaaS, WFM, analytics,LMS, KMS, UCaaS, and (increasingly) AI agent systems. None of these tools tell an operator what to do next. Existing analytics products surface what happened; they don't make decisions or take action. The result is lost revenue from missed upsell signals, regulatory exposure from sampled QA reviews, persistent agent inefficiency, and an inability to scale customer experience without scaling headcount.

The broader contact center software market is projected to grow from approximately $50B in 2025 to over $340B by 2034. The narrower agentic-AI-in-contact-center segment, which is the most directly relevant to Hear, is forecast to grow at a 44%+ CAGR through 2034, expanding from $4.8B in 2024 to $190.5B in 2034. The category is undergoing the same generational reset we have seen in other enterprise software stacks: AI is not adding a feature — it is replacing the entire workflow. The historical differentiators of contact center software — features, dashboards, and UX — are now being replicated by AI agents at a fraction of the cost.

Hear is an agentic AI platform purpose-built for that reset. The system continuously ingests every customer conversation — voice and digital — across the entire contact center, understands them in business context, decides what matters based on revenue, risk, and opportunity signals, and executes actions across both human agents and AI systems. Operators get 100% interaction coverage instead of the 2-5% they get from manual QA; compliance teams get real-time monitoring instead of sample audits; and CX leaders get a single source of truth that ties every conversation to outcomes the business cares about.

Hear's product is delivered as a usage-based, modular SaaS platform: customers pay based on data analyzed and can layer in paid modules for QA, compliance, sales and upsell intelligence, agent coaching, and operations. The architecture is designed to interoperate with existing Contact Center-as-a-Service (CCaS) and CRM stacks (Genesys, Verint, NICE and others) rather than replace them — a deliberate design choice that has materially shortened the sales cycle and lowered customer switching cost.

MARKET ADOPTION

Despite being only ~18 months from operational start, Hear has built a remarkable early footprint. The company has signed 25+ logos and carries $1.05M in committed Q1 ARR, with $3.56M in total open deal value across the pipeline, and has seen approximately 500% international pipeline growth over the last three months. Customer interactions processed to date exceed 2,000,000, voice minutes analyzed exceed 9,000,000, and the platform has executed over 40,000 autonomous AI actions.

The early customer base is heavily concentrated in Israeli enterprise —including Israel Discount Bank, Maccabi Healthcare Services, Ayalon Insurance, Harel Insurance, Issta, Assuta Medical Centers, Neopharm, AVA Trade, UnionGroup, and Champion Motors (Audi Israel) — and is now expanding internationally through both direct and partner channels. Two reference cases worth highlighting:

Hear unlocked an estimated $5M in annual revenue upside for Israeli travel platform Issta by surfacing missed sales and upsell opportunities in inbound conversations, and reduced manual QA review effort by 70% at Israel Discount Bank, avoiding an estimated $2M in annual regulatory exposure.

Hear has also been selected for Google Cloud's Springboard Co-Sell Program, a curated initiative for high-potential AI companies aligned with Google's enterprise go-to-market strategy. This is meaningful both because it provides a credentialed distribution channel for U.S. expansion and because it represents independent technical validation from a hyperscaler. Within 18-24 months Hear is targeting a meaningful ARR step-up off this base, at which point the company expects to be positioned for a substantially larger growth round.

The competitive landscape splits into roughly four quadrants: tool-based point solutions (Balto, Replicant, Observe.AI), contact-center infrastructure incumbents (Genesys, Verint, NICE), and enterprise analytics layers (Cogito,Cresta, CallMiner). Each plays in either high-effort/high-cost orf eature-bolted-on territory. Hear sits in the white space at the intersection of zero-touch and autonomous intelligence — fully agentic, vendor-agnostic, and built natively for an AI-first contact center stack. We believe this is the right architectural bet for the next decade of CX infrastructure.

EXECUTIVE TEAM

CEO Noam Fine is among the most experienced operator-founders in the AI-for-CX category globally. Over the past 15+ years Noam has co-founded four companies focused on applied AI for communications, including Predictad, Sensiya (acquired by I.AM+, Will.i.am's AI venture) and Over.ai (acquired byVonage). Following the Over.ai exit, Noam led the AI division at Vonage (NASDAQ: VG), subsequently acquired by Ericsson. The pattern recognition Noam brings to Hear — what works in contact center AI, what does not, where enterprises actually buy, and how to build a category-defining product — is in Joule's view unmatched among current founders in this space.

CTO Yossi Marouani is Noam's longtime co-founder and the technical force behind each of their prior companies. Yossi has 12+ years building production AI inside real contact center stacks, leading large-scale AI platforms, real-time voice systems, and enterprise deployments — including end-to-end ownership of the operational, technical, and regulatory complexity that Hear is now solving for its own customers. Yossi has built and led engineering teams through both startup and post-acquisition scale at Sensiya, Over.ai, and Vonage.

The team's working partnership across four companies and two successful exits is itself an investment thesis. It is rare to see this depth of co-founder continuity at the seed stage, particularly in a category as operationally complex as agentic AI for the enterprise contact center.

JOULE VALUE-ADD

Joule's most direct contributions to Hear in this round are twofold. First, as described above, we worked closely with Noam and Yossi to rightsizethe round from a $5M target to a $3.2M Seed — an outcome that materially de-risks the business from both a cap-table and valuation perspective and gives the team the flexibility to drive into a stronger Series A position 18-24 months from now.

Second, during the due diligence period Joule began making direct introductions between Hear and prospective U.S. enterprise customers in Joule's network. This was a substantive part of our diligence — we wanted to test U.S.enterprise demand for the platform ahead of writing a check — and several of those introductions have already converted into active commercial conversations. We will continue to drive U.S. customer and partner introductions through the post-investment period. Hear's existing footprint in Israel is highly defensible, but the scale opportunity in the U.S. mid-market contact-center segment is where we believe the next 10x of company value will be built. Joule's networks across the U.S. enterprise CX, developer, and security ecosystems are well-suited to accelerate that motion.

In parallel, Dafna will join the Hear board and work alongside Noam and Yossi on high level strategy, future round construction, executive hiring (particularly U.S.-based GTM leadership over the coming year), and competitive positioning as the agentic-AI-in-CX category matures.

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