Investment - October 2025
DEAL SUMMARY
Company Name / Newsbound AI
Website / https://www.newsbound.ai
Offices / Tel Aviv, Israel & Los Angeles, CA
Sectors / Communications, Artificial Intelligence
Founders / 2
Year Founded / 2025
Number of Board Positions Held by Joule / One
Total Joule LP V Investment / $1,000,000
Total Size of Round / $2,000,000 (Pre-seed)
Notable Co-Investors / State of Mind Ventures (Israel)
LP V Ownership / 11.0%
DEAL DYNAMICS
One of Joule's key differentiators in Israel's tech ecosystem is the desire and ability to find overlooked investment opportunities. Given the relatively small size of Israel's private sector, the magnitude of many operational inefficiencies found in enterprises abroad are not recognized by much of the country's investment community. Particularly when it comes to marketing and communications, normally an afterthought for Israeli businesses, technologies for these sectors are quickly dismissed. When we were introduced to Newsbound we immediately understood the potential to disrupt an $80 billion a year public relations industry characterized by reactive rather than proactive strategies, expensive and ineffective agency relationships, and manual media management that still relies on cold calling and Excel spreadsheets. This particular problem hit close to home for Joule Co-Founder and General Partner Brian Rosenzweig who has an undergraudate degree in Journalism with an emphasis on Public Relations and has had professional exposure on both the agency and client side. Newsbound's introduction of automation and Artificial Intelligence into enterprise communications operations are timely, natural, and in great need. To catapult Newsbound into the market with an enhanced product, a core R&D team, and an initial sales and marketing function, Joule V is co-leading the company's $2M pre-seed round alongside Israeli venture fund State of Mind Ventures. Brian will represent Joule V on Newsbound's Board of Directors.
TECHNOLOGY DESCRIPTION
According to Muck Rack research, 60% of surveyed PR professionals expect Artificial Intelligence to play an increasingly larger role in their jobs especially when 84% of their time is spent on media relations (manually constructing stories, researching journalists, and pitching relevant persona). Despite that outsized effort to cultivate and maintain relationships with relevant media outlets and journalists, 72% of those surveyed said low response rates were the primary obstacle to securing a placement and nearly 50% said news cycles were shortening noticeably. Yet, PR remains a mission critical component to brand integrity, thought leadership, and reputation management, all of which can add and/or preserve meaningful shareholder value. For this reason, PR captures 8% of global marketing dollars, $24 billion of which went to U.S. PR agencies in 2024 alone. However, satisfaction with those agencies has been on a steady decline in recent years with only 33% of clients claiming to be pleased with the results of their agency (2023). As a result, enterprise communications teams have turned to AI to supplement and speed up their PR efforts and are using AI twice as much as their agency teams. Despite the willingness of corporate communications departments to use AI, there remain very few tools dedicated to making them more effective in achieving their objectives. Enter Newsbound, which is building an Artificial Intelligence workflow that manages entire PR programs for clients, ultimately replacing the agency altogether. Using an autonomous agent, Newsbound instantly finds patterns in a seemingly chaotic news world and applies code and AI to craft a strategy that is proactive and precisely targeted at the most relevant journalists at the right time.
While Newsbound Version 1.0 is focused on media relations, over time and with the maturation of their technology, this can become a comprehensive media management hub that can automate high value aspects of enterprise communications:
-Crisis Management
-Media Training
-Advanced Reporting and Analytics on Market Trends/Sentiment
-Competitor Tracking
-Journalist Relationship Management
-Content Marketing
-Investor Relations
MARKET ADOPTION
For the first 12-18 months, Newsbound will focus on high-growth VC-backed B2B technology companies in the U.S. These smaller early adopters have both budget and a significant need to build brand awareness as they look to scale. In return, Newsbound can build an exceptional beta product and generate meaningful revenue to showcase their best-in-class technology and the corresponding market demand, which should in turn lead to their ability to attract more customers across a wider set of industries. At present, Newsbound has eight paying customers and is already generating $180,000 in annually recurring revenue (ARR) in their first 10 months in business. By the end of 2025, they expect to be generating over $500,000 in ARR with nearly double the customer base.
EXECUTIVE TEAM
CEO Ran Peled is based in Netanya, Israel and has spent much of his career in marketing and public relations. Prior to Newsbound he served as Chief Marketing Officer or VP of Marketing at four high profile Israeli tech startups. He was also the Israel General Manager of 5W, a New York-based PR agency, which in 2024 was named a Top 10 Financial PR Firm in the U.S. What we like about Ran is that he 'comes from the problem' and has experienced the industry pains as an agency operator and a client. Ran is also a trained Emergency Medical Technician and achieved the rank of Captain in the Israeli military's psychotechnic unit, which uses psychology to alter human behavior.
CTO Matan Arazi lives outside of Los Angeles and is a serial entrepreneur having been through three exits (liquidity events), two of which were companies where he was a co-founder. Prior to his startup career, Matan was at SAP (NYSE: SAP) where he was responsible for ensuring appropriate implemention of technology solutions amongst the company's Fortune 100 customers. Matan was a member of the Israeli military's vaunted 8200 and 81 cyber intelligence units and is a domain expert in building scalable AI agents.
JOULE VALUE-ADD
One of Joule's primary concerns to address in our due diligence was the applicability of Newsbound to larger enterprise customers, both those with a more consumer-focused lens and those in heavily regulated industries. To conduct this validation, we connected Newsbound CEO Ran Peled to the Chief Communications Officer at Inspire Brands, the $32 billion food retail giant that owns brands such as Dunkin, Buffalo Wild Wings, Arby's, and Jimmy Johns. We also facilitated a call with a former EVP of Corporate Communications at Wells Fargo. While Ran had spoken with sizable companies in his own validation, these were persona to whom he does not have access that come with feedback and a perspective that he had not yet heard. He admitted that this insight will help shape how he thinks about selling upstream to bigger corporations as their platform matures. In addition, this former Wells Fargo executive liked the pitch so much that she asked Joule if we would be open to her working with Newsbound in an advisory capacity where she can help Ran and Matan on their enterprise offering and go-to-market motion. We are currently in the process of trying to facilitate that relationship.
