Eyal Elbahary and the Trouble After Yes

A customer says yes. Somewhere in the seller’s organization, several other people are about to acquire a problem. Someone must approve the discount. Someone must make the contract reflect it. Someone must eventually send a bill that bears a recognizable relationship to what everybody agreed. The handshake has excellent publicity. The handoffs do most of the work.

Eyal Elbahary has built a company around those handoffs. As CEO and co-founder of DealHub.ai, he occupies a decidedly practical corner of the technology business: the rules, prices, approvals, and documents that let a commercial promise survive contact with an organization. His subject is the machinery of selling. His recurring question is who gets to control it.

The story runs through established software companies, a founding team formed at Panaya, an early business called Valooto, and a substantial change of direction. It reaches a new chapter with DealHub’s acquisition of billing company Subskribe in November 2025 and a $100 million growth round announced in January 2026. Across those changes, Elbahary keeps returning to the same inconvenient distance: the space between deciding to do business and being able to do it.

Before the startup, the price tag

Before he founded DealHub, Elbahary worked at Mercury Interactive, Check Point, NICE, and Panaya. His roles included go-to-market work at Mercury, portfolio marketing at Check Point, commercial and pricing strategy at NICE, and leadership of Panaya’s SAP line of business. These were jobs concerned with how software reaches a customer, how it is packaged, and what a company asks in return.

Pricing deserves a moment here. A price on a website can look reassuringly simple. Inside an enterprise software business, it can carry an entire set of decisions: which products belong together, which customers qualify for particular terms, and who may authorize an exception. A salesperson encounters the answer as a quote. Finance encounters it again when the money is due.

Elbahary’s eventual co-founders, Eyal Orgil and Alon Lubin, were part of the Panaya connection. Investor Yoni Levy has described Panaya as the place where the entrepreneurial team came together and developed its views on sales software. That gives this founding story a concrete workplace origin. Three colleagues had a shared commercial environment before they had a shared company.

In 2014, they co-founded the business that became DealHub. Elbahary became CEO. Orgil brought sales and marketing experience; Lubin brought the technical background and became CTO. The partnership put commercial questions and the engineering needed to answer them inside the same founding team. Their shared employment history also gives the company’s beginnings a recognizable setting: people who had worked in the same software business deciding to build another one together. The company’s first name was Valooto.

When more software meant more distance

By December 2017, Valooto was announcing a $3 million Series A led by Cornerstone Venture Partners, with Shaked Ventures participating. Its vocabulary centered on customer engagement: understanding how a prospective buyer interacted with material, following progress through a deal, and helping the seller decide what to do next.

Elbahary’s diagnosis was unusually awkward for a software founder. Digital tools could put distance between salespeople and their customers. A prospect might read, compare, and investigate without the seller knowing much about that activity. Adding another tool did not automatically restore the connection. The company wanted a shared view of the transaction as it developed.

He described the problem as “distancing salespeople from their customers.” The phrase is a useful marker of his early thinking. The buyer was already moving through a digital process; the seller needed a better way to understand that movement. Valooto’s pitch joined engagement information to the work of advancing the sale.

This matters to the later story because DealHub’s scope did not begin and end with calculating a number. The relationship around the quote was part of the business early on. A proposal could contain correct arithmetic and still leave the buyer struggling to get colleagues aligned. A selling tool had to consider what happened on the other side of the screen.

The handshake has excellent publicity. The handoffs do most of the work.

The trouble after yes

A company willing to start again

In 2021, Elbahary described a substantial pivot that had happened roughly three years earlier. It involved a new name, a change in product focus, and a change in business focus. His account amounted to a fresh start for the company. The important detail is the breadth of that change: the outward identity and the work underneath it moved together.

He described the business as moving beyond quote generation toward managing stages of the deal remotely, understanding digital buyer behavior, and recommending actions. The company was building a wider workspace around the transaction. Its DealRoom could bring proposals, supporting material, contract work, and participants from both sides into a shared digital setting.

A room is a helpful metaphor because a business purchase rarely belongs to one person. The seller may have a contact; the buyer may have a committee. Giving those participants somewhere to work on the same deal addresses an ordinary organizational difficulty. A PDF is a document. It is a rather cramped meeting place.

The June 2021 financing provided another milestone: $20 million in a Series B led by Israel Growth Partners, with Cornerstone participating. Levy’s investment account emphasized the founders’ experience of the problems they were addressing and their continued contact with customers. Elbahary’s restart had become a business that a new investor was prepared to help expand.

The dinosaurs in the quoting department

A year later, Elbahary put his name to an exuberant funding announcement. DealHub had secured a $60 million round, and the company reported total investment of $90 million. In a post devoted to sales software, he found room for dinosaurs. Early configurators, he joked, had appeared “only briefly after dinosaurs roamed the Earth.”

The joke carried a complaint about old machinery. Configurators helped companies keep product choices consistent with what they could actually supply. Elbahary wanted quoting to work inside a broader commercial process, with business users able to adjust rules as the business changed. A tool could be technically capable and still be troublesome to operate.

His preference for business control became a repeated theme. In his writing, revenue operations teams should be able to maintain commercial logic without turning each pricing change into a development project. The appeal is easy to understand: people responsible for the deal want the ability to change its rules while the opportunity still exists.

There is also a less procedural glimpse of Elbahary in his public posts. Sharing a company gathering, he wrote, “I cherish moments like these,” and celebrated bringing 150 colleagues together for an evening of fun. The post records a particular source of pride: the people assembled around the company. For once, the gathering required no explanation of configure, price, quote.

Following the promise all the way to the bill

The Subskribe acquisition in November 2025 extended the work further downstream. Subskribe brought subscription management, consumption metering, and billing capabilities. DealHub said the businesses would be integrated into one platform with a unified data model and user experience. The intended connection ran from the original quote into the continuing financial relationship.

Consider a hypothetical software contract with a base subscription and charges for additional usage. At signature, both sides can agree on the structure. The bill still depends on what happens afterward. Usage must be measured; changes must be reflected; the terms must remain consistent. This example explains why a founder interested in quoting would eventually become interested in metering.

For Elbahary, expanding into billing made the promise behind the product longer. The company would have to account for events that occur after a salesperson has moved on to another opportunity. A renewal, an amendment, or a consumption charge can test whether the original commercial logic has traveled intact.

Then came Riverwood Capital’s $100 million growth investment, announced on January 20, 2026. DealHub identified international expansion and development of its Agentic Revenue Hub as intended uses. For Elbahary, the next stage brought both more capital and a broader operating brief. The company he leads was asking to handle more of its customers’ revenue process.

An AI agent needs to know who can say yes

By March 2026, Elbahary’s published argument had become more explicit about authority. He distinguished observing revenue after an event from controlling the decisions that produce it. In his view, a record of a closed deal is insufficient if the organization cannot reconstruct which terms were approved and what changed afterward.

That position gives his enthusiasm for AI a particular shape. An agent acting on a quote needs the relevant pricing rules, contractual context, and approval boundaries. Elbahary argues for putting those constraints inside the transaction process. The ambition is to let software act while preserving the organization’s ability to explain and authorize the result.

He makes that argument as a founder competing for enterprise customers. His criticism of developer dependence and his preference for revenue operations control are positions he advances in the market. They are also consistent questions across his public work: who can change the price, who approves the exception, and how does the next team know?

The names have changed along the way: customer engagement, revenue amplification, quote-to-revenue, agentic execution. The decisions have become more numerous. Elbahary’s story is held together by the attempt to make them travel together. The customer’s yes is still the attractive moment. He has spent the years since Valooto building for what comes after it.