Israeli unicorn Gong today reported that its annual recurring revenue (ARR) exceeded the $500 million threshold at the end of April, reflecting annual growth of 55%. In March 2025, the company reported ARR of $300 million, so this is impressive growth - despite the gloomy forecasts that were predicted for the software company, which has developed a platform that records sales calls and provides recommendations to salespeople.

ARR is a non-accounting figure that indicates total revenue that could accumulate by the end of the year. Gong's accounting revenue is lower than ARR, and yet the high growth rate in the AI era, which is seen as a major threat to Gong, is a promising sign for the privately-held company’s main shareholders, which include Battery Ventures, Sequoia, Joshua Kushner's Thrive, Salesforce Ventures, Coatue and Franklin Templeton.

Despite concerns about a significant decline in the revenue of large software companies, a trend called SaaSpocalypse, "the apocalypse of software-as-a-service companies," companies like Gong that could have been hurt by AI are reporting growth - the latest example of this came just yesterday with good financial results and higher guidance from monday.com, which reported an increase in revenue of almost 25% year-on-year.

One of the biggest causes of concern about Gong's fate was Anthropic, which launches new software that automates organizational processes almost every week and the hypothesis was that this would also harm the market for software that automates organizational sales processes, in which Gong is a major player.

At the same time, Gong cofounder and CEO Amit Bendov has revealed that Anthropic is actually a Gong customer. "This is a complex system that is much more than recording and analyzing sales calls," Bendov tells Globes. "This is a system that monitors transactions that sometimes involve several dozen staff members, each of whom sometimes has hundreds and thousands of phone calls, emails, and face-to-face meetings with customer representatives - all of this information needs to be collected by the authority and according to the state's conditions, and insights and forecasts need to be generated - we have at least 500 engineers working on this system, which is quite complex, so this is not a product that someone can simply come and replace by using an AI engine."

Growing demand for AI-based products

Besides Anthropic, Bendov reveals that all but one of the AI giants are Gong customers. According to the company, Bendov attributes the growth in the last ten quarters to three factors: growing demand for AI-based products among giant companies due to the pressure to introduce AI into the organization - Gong currently serves five of the 10 largest companies in the US, and a significant increase in the number of deals exceeding $1 million per customer.

Bendov also cites the desire to reduce the number of suppliers as a factor that benefits Gong: the company provides a tool for communication between salespeople and customers, salesperson training and forecasting for the field, which replaces several suppliers at once. Among Gong's major customers besides Anthropic: OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Thompson Reuters and Uber.

"We increased the productivity of Anthropic's salespeople by 64% and returned about ten hours of work per week to the company's sales teams," says Bendov.

Like Monday.com and other software companies, Gong is also diversifying its business model. So far it has charged its customers per seat and will soon add a new method of collection based on the volume of use of tokens, the most basic processing unit of AI models. However, unlike publicly traded companies that must freeze hiring to garner investor support, Gong is hiring, and Bendov is interested in adding at least 100 more employees to its 1,700 employees - about 500 of whom are in Israel.

Despite the growth, the company is not currently considering an IPO - although it is preparing for one. "The market is not attractive at the moment, but we are preparing for a situation in which the IPO window will reopen," says Bendov.

Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on May 12, 2026.

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