From their offices in the industrial area of Herzliya Pituach, in recent years three young entrepreneurs have become the faces behind IPO transactions, mergers and acquisitions of leading technology companies around the world. In a saturated market of investment bankers, lawyers, accountants and venture capitalists, ARX decided to look at the capital market from a completely different angle.
“Arx, in the mind of Roman warfare, is the head of the tower that gathers intelligence and informs the commanders in the field about a threat,” says the company’s CEO Rotem Gantz, “we perceive ourselves in many ways as the heads of intelligence for the companies traded on the public market.” In many ways, Gantz explains, the company is a result of the military and personal background of the entrepreneurs: “We are a codex of data mining capabilities, technology and intelligence, the same areas we dealt with in the intelligence division, and of the deep understanding of the relationship between consciousness, communication and public opinion – knowledge that I have accumulated In my duty as an IDF spokesperson.’
Although this is an impressive group, with verbal abilities and technologies reminiscent of any other cyber company on the market, in an in-depth interview Barkes explains to us that the picture is much broader than that: “At a steady and steady pace we have become the center of knowledge and at the right hand of the most impressive CEOs in Israel and the world,” says a VP. To the company’s technology and strategy Yehuda Liebler, “We offer another chair on the board of directors of our customers – the data chair. By scanning and analyzing the data, we provide in-depth insights that ultimately enable growth and public credit for our customers.’
In the opinion of Arx, which they lead mainly in the Canadian and American markets, cyber attacks on public companies take on a different tone in the era of Reddit and “Mimz” stocks. A report by the American Securities and Exchange Commission extensively surveyed psychological attacks on securities, and the field of analysis of disinformation in social networks is discussed in many academic articles mainly from 2021. “Our value proposition helps provide clarity and transparency to a market that is full of uncertainty,” Liebler adds, “so that in the end our ability to warn of, for example, an organized attack by shortists or of volition in the fundraising market is the unfair advantage of our customers over others.’
Barks attribute their success among reputable and well-known listed companies around the world, among other things, to the fact that the bar for entering the stock exchanges is undergoing upheavals. “The year 2020 and the corona crisis completely changed the patterns of issuances in the stock market,” adds Nimrod Okun, the VP of the operation, “studies show that the extent of the damage caused by fake news and disinformation attacks was about 78 billion dollars in 2019, when about half resulted from psychological attacks around the market capital. In our estimation, since 2019 these numbers have only increased. These are huge scopes of damage, which remain unanswered, and our capabilities allow us to look at these threats through the glasses of cyber people.’
Indeed, the retirement of directors from the baby boom generation and the entry of many young people in their place, as published in Bloomberg, is a significant catalyst for start-up companies and knowledge-intensive ventures to join recruitment from the public. “The markets have experienced a significant decrease in the volume of IPOs in the past year, but the scope of manipulation actually continues to increase,” Liebler explains, “precisely the current market conditions, which pose a difficult challenge for companies considering an IPO, require much more comprehensive preparation, which entails advanced data and intelligence capabilities that until now have been are sorely lacking in the market.”
In the educated opinion of the entrepreneurs at Barks, the crash of the markets and especially the North American SPA deals were also inevitable. “You take a cyber entrepreneur, or software, or services, and one day it turns from a startup that sits in a shared office complex in Ramat Gan to a public company with a prospectus, bankers and short-sellers standing over it,” adds Gantz, “the data we hold clearly show that Israeli companies are experiencing many difficulties After their issuance in the North American markets. We are the only ones who look at the market from the perspective of the issuing company, and alongside it.’
And what does the future hold? In the opinion of the Barkes members, the need for complex intelligence systems is only increasing: “The fate of the capital market is decided,” concludes Gantz, “Whether the stock exchanges, regulators and bankers want it or not, trading is becoming more and more electronic, and less and less centralized. Like the industrial revolution, the internet revolution and the data revolution, the capital market will also become more immediate and technologically complex. As far as the world goes, Arkes is and will continue to be an arrowhead with robust and non-trivial capabilities that put the issuing entrepreneur at the center.’