Insurance software company Sapiens has moved its global headquarters from Israel to London after a £1.9 billion private equity buyout.
The move highlights the Startup Nation's success at founding tech companies, as well as the challenges it faces in scaling them up once they mature.
Sapiens announced the opening of its new HQ in Holborn, central London on June 1. It also said Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund had acquired a significant – though undisclosed – minority shareholding in the company.
Sapiens was established in 1982 by researchers and academics, largely from the Weizmann Institute of Science, who had set out to develop a "novel object-oriented application generator for use with mainframe computers" before the era of personal computers.
The company was listed on NASDAQ as a public company 10 years later, and went on to become one of the top 10 global providers of insurance technology software, with more than 600 clients, including Lloyd's of London, Hiscox, and Old Mutual.
In December 2025, US private equity giant Advent International acquired Sapiens, delisted it as a public company and set about making changes.
It cut 700 jobs, from a workforce of around 5,000, axed most of the executive leadership team – including long-serving CEO Roni Al-Dor – and announced a relocation from Holon, central Israel, to the UK.
It also began to narrow its product portfolio and to accelerate its AI strategy, with AI agents able to process 50,000 customer insurance claims in half an hour.
The practical impact on Sapiens' Israel operation may be modest – 40 jobs lost, 760 remain – but symbolically it marks a significant shift.
It is no longer an Israeli company, which is symptomatic of a classic Israeli tech dilemma – world-class innovation and R&D capability, but an inability to retain ownership and headquarters.
Formula Systems, the Israeli holding company based in Or Yehuda that owned 43.5 per cent of Sapiens since 2011, retains only a minority stake under Advent's ownership.
Sapiens says its new home at Space House, a 1960s Grade II-listed Brutalist office building, reflects its "growing focus on one of the world's leading insurance markets". It was formerly home to the Civil Aviation Authority.
The new HQ will also function as an AI Customer Experience Lab, says Sapiens, where insurers can work directly with Sapiens' teams to explore and test AI applications tailored to the industry.
Sapiens also announced that Abu Dhabi Investment Authority ("ADIA") had invested in Sapiens as a significant minority shareholder in the company.
"The investment marks a further step in Sapiens' growth under Advent's ownership and the acceleration of its AI strategy for the insurance sector," it said.
The participation of an Arab Gulf state - which only normalised relations with Israel through the 2020 Abraham Accords - in an Israeli-founded company reflects the shifting geopolitical alliances in the region, albeit through American private equity intermediaries rather than direct ownership.
Sapiens develops and sells the software that insurance companies need to run their business, primarily in homes, motors and commercial. It reported revenue of £446 million in the year before it was acquired.
"AI powered hyper-relevance is the new competitive advantage for insurers, and we are enabling this through agile intelligence and the ability to make decisions at the speed of thought," said Mike Ettling, executive chairman and interim CEO, at Sapiens.
"Our new offices are designed to deepen our collaboration with leading global insurance institutions at a time of enormous technological change for the industry."
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