The northern Israeli town of Nazareth. Photo: public domain.

CTech – Israel-based fintech startup Personetics Technologies is opening a research and development center in the northern Israeli town of Nazareth to support its recent growth, the company announced Sunday.

Founded in 2010, Personetics provides artificial intelligence-based personalization and customer advocacy tools to the financial sector, listing over 30 global banks as customers. The company also has offices in London, New York, and Singapore, and raised $18 million to date according to Pitchbook.

Personetics is seeing increased international demand for its products and is therefore recruiting additional resources for all of its locations, co-founder and CEO David Sosna said in a statement. Personetics has doubled its development team over the past two years.

It is encouraging to see a startup company like Personetics opening an office in Nazareth and creating new opportunities for skilled people who have thus far been barred from the Israeli startup scene due to location, said Fowzi Shakkour, who will head the new center.

Tsofen, a non-profit organization that promotes the integration of Arabs with Israeli citizenship into the local technology industry, assisted Personetics with the launch of the new center. Since the organization was founded a decade ago, the number of employed engineers in Nazareth jumped from 30 to over 1,300, a quarter of them women, said Tsofen CEO Sami Saadi.

Among the companies that operate outposts in the area are Microsoft, Amdocs, and Salesforce.com.