Aleph puts $6m into a studio that wants to launch "dozens" of AI-native SaaS firms this year
Inevitable AI Group has raised a $6m pre-seed to mass-produce software companies. The plan is striking, the budget per venture is thin, and one figure in the announcement does not match the record.
A Tel Aviv venture studio has raised $6 million to build software companies at a rate that would have been absurd three years ago. Inevitable AI Group says it has launched five ventures since January and intends to launch “dozens more” before the end of the year.
The pre-seed round was led by Aleph, the Israeli fund co-founded by Eden Shochat. The studio was founded by Nimrod Lehavi, who previously founded and sold the crypto payments firm Simplex, and Ofer Bar-Or, a graduate of Israel’s Talpiot programme who spent seven years in its space programme.
The pitch
The argument is that AI has collapsed the cost of building software, so the constraint on a software business is no longer engineering but knowing what to build.
“We believe AI is changing the foundations of how software businesses are built, marketed, grow and exit,” Lehavi said in the announcement.
Shochat framed it as a transition rather than a collapse. “SaaS isn’t dying, it’s being reinvented,” he said. “AI gives customers the ability to create tools tailored to their needs on demand.”
Bar-Or put the thesis more plainly: “The biggest challenge in startups has always been finding something the market truly needs and then executing well.”
Forbes, which also covered the round, characterised the strategy more bluntly than the studio does, running it under the headline that Aleph is betting on cloning the SaaS giants - building AI-native versions of software categories that have already been proven by incumbents.
Do the arithmetic
The announcement does not name the five ventures already launched, does not identify the software categories being targeted, and gives no figures beyond the year-end ambition.
That matters, because $6 million against “dozens” of companies is a thin budget. If dozens means 24, the studio has roughly $250,000 per venture before overheads. If it means 36, closer to $165,000.
That is not necessarily a flaw - it is arguably the whole point. A studio betting that AI has cut build costs by an order of magnitude should be able to launch on a fraction of what a startup once needed, and it can fund winners later. But it does mean the model depends on most of these ventures being cheap to kill, and on the studio’s judgement about markets rather than on any single product succeeding.
It also means the interesting number is not the $6 million. It is how many of the five already launched are still running at year end.
One figure that does not match
The announcement says Lehavi “founded, managed and sold Simplex to Nuvei for 300MM.”
The contemporaneous record puts it lower. When Nuvei announced the acquisition on 6 May 2021, its own release described a definitive agreement to acquire Simplex for $250 million in cash. Globes reported the figure as $250 million, as did PYMNTS and Crowdfund Insider at the time.
There are legitimate ways both numbers can be true. Acquisition prices are often quoted as cash-at-close in one place and total consideration - including retention packages or earn-outs tied to performance - in another, and the gap between $250 million and $300 million is well within the range an earn-out can cover.
But the release does not say that, and a founder’s track record is doing real work in a fundraising announcement. Readers comparing the two figures deserve to know they differ. We have asked Inevitable AI Group which basis the $300 million figure is calculated on and will update this piece if the company responds.
Why this is worth watching
Venture studios are not new, and “we will launch dozens of companies” has been said before by people who launched three. What makes this one worth returning to is that it is an explicit test of a claim the whole industry is currently making - that AI has changed software economics enough to make software companies disposable.
If Inevitable AI Group is running twenty-plus live ventures in December, that claim has some evidence behind it. If it is running five, the constraint was never engineering cost.