The punishment was not the labor itself, but the absence of an end point. No finish line, endgame, or closure.

Jonathan Langer, co-founder and CEO of Act Security, argues that the image fits much of modern cloud security. Security teams work through an ever-growing list of findings, including vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and risky settings, one item at a time. “Nobody ever finishes the list,” Langer told me. “That’s the dirty little secret in cybersecurity.”

His company has built its brand around this, even including the message “don’t be a Sisyphus.” When we spoke, I wanted to understand whether that was simply a memorable metaphor - or a useful way of thinking about an industry that keeps finding more work for itself.

Langer’s thinking about this began at Medigate, the medical-device security company he previously co-founded. Its technology could show customers what devices they had and the risks associated with them. But customers eventually asked a fairly obvious question: Now what?

The dashboard problem

“Now I know. Now I have all this risk. Now I have all these issues and findings. What do I do with it?” he recalled them asking. The idea with Act is to reduce the access that makes attacks possible, including permissions that allow an application or person to reach systems they do not need.

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The problem was documented long before today’s AI boom. Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 analyzed more than 680,000 identities across 18,000 cloud accounts for its 2022 research. It found that 99% of the cloud users, roles, services, and resources examined had excessive permissions left unused for at least 60 days. (That measures identities with excessive permissions, rather than the proportion of all permissions going unused.)

Langer’s approach rests on a premise that an attacker needs access to enter an environment, move through it, and extract data. In cloud environments, permissions granted at deployment tend to persist because teams fear that removing them will break applications. Narrowing an over-broad permission at its source can resolve many findings at once, rather than one ticket per symptom.

Act Security was founded in 2025 and left stealth this summer. It has raised $60 million, comprising a $20 million seed round led by Team8 and Bessemer, and a $40 million Series A led by Notable Capital. And it is selling a solution to this problem.

Unused does not mean unnecessary

The obvious challenge here is that unused access does not immediately label it as unnecessary. Some permissions exist for emergencies or infrequent operations. Langer said Act tries to reconstruct a developer’s original intent from documentation, tickets, observed traffic, and code scanning, and removes only access that exceeds it. It also checks new deployments to prevent excessive permissions from returning.

Without that second step, cleaning up existing access would simply begin another cycle.

As with most cybersecurity solutions, the margin for error is narrow. Even a 90% success rate, he said, would mean disrupting production in the remaining 10% of cases, which he called unacceptable. He described the target as “five nines,” or 99.999% accuracy. This is an aspiration - Langer did not cite customer results during our conversation.

Will the permissions return?

Understanding an organization well enough to change its permissions safely requires more than recognizing that something has been idle. Recent AI incidents in the news underline why those boundaries remain important.

Langer remains optimistic that better controls can contain most attacks, even if cybersecurity problems cannot disappear completely. “This world that we live in, physics still applies. If there is no access between one sandbox and another, or a sandbox to the internet… and we use strong deterministic controls, even if you have the smartest AI out there, it cannot defy the laws of physics.”

Cybersecurity may never have a finish line. But that does not mean every task should repeat indefinitely. The test is whether removing unnecessary access today leaves an organization harder to attack tomorrow, without disrupting the work those permissions were meant to support.

[Note: In the recording, I mistakenly referred to Sisyphus as a god. He is a mortal king of Corinth]

[Preview: Why Act Security built its brand around Greek mythology]

This week, I spoke with Charles Asher Small about how those all connect, and what he believes institutions and Jewish communities should do next.

Small leads the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP). He described its ambition to connect academic research with public policy, and our conversation followed that path: from a broad diagnosis of democratic fragmentation to questions about evidence, university leadership, and Jewish identity.

His opening argument was that antisemitism thrives amid wider social and institutional weaknesses. He described the extreme left, extreme right, and radical political Islam as different forces attacking the democratic centre. In his analysis, hostility towards Jews provides a point of convergence between movements that otherwise have little in common.

Foreign influence and the institutions shaping opinion

That led us to ‘strategic entryism’, the term his team uses to describe ideological influence entering established institutions. Small focused on the Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar, arguing that funding and networks can advance the movement’s ideas within Western universities and cultural life, something I have covered separately at JNS. He sees universities as especially consequential because they educate future journalists, professors, and political leaders.

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He argues that the financial pressure faced by universities makes them more receptive to outside money, while the ideas circulating within them eventually reach wider society - a serious allegation about institutional influence.

“If you think of what happened at universities on October the 8th, 2023, this to me is a watershed moment where people, I think, were shocked,” he said. “But this has been sort of in the works for decades.”

I wanted to understand how his team measures the impact of the funding it identifies, beyond pointing to protests or shifts in rhetoric. He cited ISGAP’s 2023 “Networks of Hate” report, saying universities receiving Qatari funds had “300% more instances of antisemitism” than those that did not, although he acknowledged the difficulty of scientifically proving the broader ideological relationship he described.

The exchange raised an essential question: how do we establish what money changes, as well as where it goes?

Criticism, antisemitism, and the question of belonging

We also discussed his concerns about propaganda and social media. While the central focus of ISGAP has been the Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar, Small described Iran, Russia, and China as contributing to an environment that fragments Western societies through infiltration and propaganda, including the use of bots.

It was here I wanted to challenge him. Universities have long been places of protest, and I believe Israel’s government is as open to criticism as any other. So where does legitimate political opposition end, and antisemitism begin?

“We have to define antisemitism in a scientific, comprehensive manner that allows for criticism,” he said, accepting that Israeli policies can be criticized. But institutions must also recognize rhetoric and movements that dehumanize Jews.

Later, he spoke about Jewish families questioning whether they could remain in countries where they had lived for generations (something I have written about before), and framed this vulnerability as a warning about the condition of democratic citizenship.

The new Hebrew University-European Forum Barometer offers a passing echo of those concerns: Israeli respondents overwhelmingly viewed Israel as safer for Jews than Europe, while Jewish Israelis reported strengthened Israeli identity. Those are perceptions, rather than a test of Small’s explanations, but they show how immediate questions of safety and belonging have become.

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When I asked what he would do as a university president, Small’s answer began with education. Students should study democratic principles and understand their responsibilities as citizens, he argued.

“To live in a democratic society, every generation has a choice.”

We discussed greater transparency around foreign university funding and ISGAP’s efforts to turn research into policy through the DETERRENT Act, a congressional bill designed to increase oversight and lower reporting thresholds for foreign gifts and contracts at colleges and universities that receive federal student aid. The House of Representatives passed the bill in March 2025, and it has been referred to the Senate.

“Jewish Consciousness” and life after October 7

The conversation's final turn came when Small described ISGAP’s Jewish Consciousness framework, which draws parallels from South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement and the influence of Black Consciousness.

He argued that we Jews should define ourselves by drawing on our own traditions, knowledge, and history rather than accepting labels imposed onto us by hostile outsiders.

I raised what I called “the hijacking of history”: How Israel’s critics exploit language associated traditionally with Jewish persecution, and apply it against Jews themselves. “One of the things that we need to do is define ourselves based on our terms,” he replied.

That thought brought the episode’s different strands together. Small’s proposed response combines research, institutional accountability, democratic education, and a deeper understanding of Jewish identity. Our conversation moved between what others say about Jews and what Jews can say about themselves.

Three years ago, questions were urgent and immediate: security, safety, who was funding what. This episode suggests those questions remain, but have evolved beyond how institutions should respond to antisemitism, toward who gets to define what being Jewish even means while that fight continues.

[Preview: “Strategic Entryism”: How Qatar’s money entered America’s universities]

When I covered Israel’s first dedicated Physical AI conference for JNS in September, the discussion centred on taking intelligence out of screens and putting it into machines, and how Israel could subsequently build an industry around robots and autonomous systems.

But while companies work on building these machines that house AI systems, young people are already discovering what it means to have relationships with them.

Some Israeli evidence offers a starting point. An Israel Internet Association survey, conducted by Geocartography in November 2025 among 502 Jewish teenagers aged 13–17, found the following:

• 55% reported using AI chatbots as a friend,

• 49% for emotional advice, and

• 18% as a romantic partner.

(These figures include rare use, not necessarily ongoing relationships, and the sample does not represent all Israeli teenagers.)

But looking across the Atlantic, Common Sense Media’s AI Use by Tweens and Teens census surveyed 1,204 American children aged 9–17. Among respondents who used or interacted with AI:

• 37% had used it to discuss feelings or personal problems. Among those,

• 25% agreed that they sometimes felt AI understood them better than most people did.

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It does not mean a quarter of children prefer AI to people. It suggests that some young people who already discuss personal concerns with machines experience something resembling understanding.

When I heard how Israel wanted to transform Startup Nation into an “Edge-Up Nation,” few were asking what it means that the next generation of users already talks to machines like friends.

Confiding isn’t trusting

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Hi folks,

I wanted to share a clearer rhythm for The Spiro Circle going forward, so you know what to expect and when you’ll hear from me.

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My paid subscribers have helped fund the necessary equipment and software I use to speed up episode production and research new stories to tell. This platform has remained a one-man show - and the support so far has made a big difference in how it grows in scope and scale.

Going forward, I want to give the publication a more consistent rhythm, with room for more meaningful projects and something worth opening whenever I land in your inbox.

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- JS

“He came with Claude to the room and asked to keep Claude open because he must be in contact with Claude and give him [updates]… because Claude is working and he must be reactive to him. Otherwise Claude will be stuck.”

She said no. “It wasn’t easy for him to close the laptops slowly, slowly.” He couldn’t understand why, in that moment between founder and therapist, the chatbot needed to be left at the door.

It’s a funny image, but it speaks to something much larger happening among founders in tech.

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Yael Daniely has spent years researching the psychology of the individual founder, but also the relationship between co-founders and, interestingly, the relationship between a founder and their family spouse. Over her career, she has helped individuals and pairs work through trauma, anxiety, financial concerns, and (increasingly) the impact that AI has on their roles and identity.

She described that moment in her office as a symptom of something bigger than one dependent client. AI isn’t just changing how founders build companies; it’s becoming a relationship for some of them. “Everyone says that their best friend now is ChatGPT... they can share all their dreams, secrets, fears, and emotional burdens and issues with their partner with ChatGPT.”

Daniely is not dismissive of AI as a source of support. She said a conversation with a chatbot in the middle of a sleepless night may help someone calm down, and that some tools can complement therapy. Her concerns are placed in founders who put too much emphasis on a responsive machine that can supply everything a person needs from a relationship.

“They cannot completely take over the connection and the relationship that’s happening in the room with the therapist,” she said.

AI has entered the chat

The intense capital around these technologies is mirroring the emotions. Global startup funding hit $506 billion in the first half of 2026, the biggest half-year in venture capital history, with AI startups accounting for around 77% of all that investment.

Three companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI) that build addictive chatbots were behind $237 billion of that total.

Against this backdrop, the impact of AI is actually two-fold. Not only are founders forming attachments to their AI tools, but they’re also watching the technology overhaul the entire process of work, causing them to develop existential questions surrounding self-worth and identity.

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For CTOs, she said, the shift has triggered something closer to professional grief. She shared how some feel they are losing their profession, which they connect to a sense of self. For CEOs, it triggers an anxiety if they see a competitor raise funds quickly, and interpret that news as evidence that they are too slow, too old, or building the wrong thing.

Daniely doesn’t think the answer is rejecting the tools; rather, monitoring “how you control AI versus AI controlling you.”

But that founder who couldn’t close his laptop is the extreme version of a very ordinary 2026 problem: tools designed to make founders faster are starting to make some of them feel like they’re already behind, all while making it easier to swap human connection for an algorithmic companion.

Including, it turns out, inside the therapy room.

You can connect with Yael Daniely on LinkedIn and check out more of her work here: https://yaeldaniely.com/

[Watch a preview: The Founder, the Therapist... and Claude?]

An emergency investment can save a promising startup at the moment private capital freezes. But it cannot, on its own, settle whether the company’s most valuable work and people remain in Israel in the years that follow.

Bin faced multiple crises in his tenure - from the pandemic to domestic challenges to the fallout from the war. But what his successor may face could guide Startup Nation for generations.

Here are five questions I would ask Bin’s successor. They are not accusations; they are a way to judge the job beyond the next headline about funding or exits.

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UN Secretary-General António Guterres had just used his address to call for a multilateral AI risk framework. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei were preparing to appear before the Security Council. And President Trump, predictably, was telling the room that the US had no interest in slowing down.

Eventually, the Security Council session happened - specifically because it felt AI’s security implications weren’t getting enough attention.

Yoshua Bengio, who co-chairs the UN’s scientific panel on AI and is considered a “Godfather of AI”, went first and told council members the dangers posed by advanced AI are “real and imminent.” Amodei warned that AI could become a risk to humanity itself, while Altman pushed for shared global benchmarks to measure AI capabilities and the safeguards companies claim to have in place.

I asked Piskunov the obvious question: does America actually have the leverage to just ignore all of this?

“It’s still quite important to separate rhetoric from the actual steps that would be made,” he replied. It made much of what is happening at the UN this week sound less like policy and more like theater. Effective theater for some, perhaps, but theater nonetheless.

Piskunov is the founding partner of KAAN Ventures, where he's spent the past decade backing deep-tech investments across the US, Europe, and Southeast Asia. More recently, he's shifted into advising governments (Pakistan, South Africa, Kazakhstan, South Korea, among them) on how to build an AI strategy from a position that isn't the US or China.

He doesn’t think Trump’s refusal to engage is dangerous or ignorant, as many believe. He thinks his position makes strategic sense, given the shape of the game governments are playing.

“The AI race is a game where if you lose your first place, it’s almost impossible to catch up given how rapidly everything is developing,” he explained. If that’s true, then every voluntary slowdown is a gift to whoever doesn’t slow down. And if calls for the US to slow AI development don’t apply to China, is that who we want to win and lead this revolution?

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As for a potential third place: The EU used to be a contender, but he points out that “the EU is just too over-regulated right now” to remain a key player, and its national champions can’t compete on data or scale anymore.

Rather than simply staying out of the conversation around AI regulation this week, President Trump went the other direction completely - as is so often the case.

"The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now," Trump said (adding that he thinks AI should be referred to instead as ‘superintelligence’ or ‘SI’).

Which brings us to the paradox that started this whole conversation. The same tech executives publicly warning about AI risk and pitching Trump for guardrails are, in Piskunov’s words, making “a very cynical case.” They understand their own limitations more intimately than they let on, and they know that if they can’t out-innovate their competitors, their next best move is to get those competitors regulated.

Safety concern and competitive strategy, in other words, aren’t necessarily different things.

Piskunov thinks the real value lies in the psychological fight, not the race to regulate. Discussions happening this week “open up the Overton window” for the public and show that governments are taking the risk seriously, even if nothing binding follows just yet. And that may be enough for Guterres or Bengio for now.

The week will end with Trump meeting with Xi in Washington - his first visit since 2015. In an act of goodwill, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that the two countries will extend their trade truce to January, set to originally expire in November. Perhaps they’re saving this bigger fight for later.

America’s current position isn’t just a rejection of multilateral concern about AI. It sees voluntary restraint or an international framework as a move guaranteed to lose against those unwilling to restrain themselves. And so far, no one in New York can argue otherwise.

You can connect with Alexander on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-piskunov/

[Catch a preview: Is Trump Right to Ignore the UN on AI? This Advisor Says Yes]

When I asked what draws him to it, he put it down to a philosophy he lives by. “I think it’s a theme in life of being a little bit of an explorer,” he told me. “I don’t want to say ‘living on the edge’, but trying to see how far you can go, how hard you can push, and do it in a very structured way.”

For Krieger, now General Manager of Cloud Security and Exposure Management at CrowdStrike, risk is not about recklessness. “It’s not just about jumping off a cliff or diving hundreds of feet underwater,” he explained. “It’s more about taking on a challenge and trying to see how far you can get… That’s how I’ve approached extreme sports, or work, or almost everything I do in life.”

The idea of “structured risk” is interesting to me. I learned it personally at a young age when obtaining my SCUBA license: Plan your dive, dive your plan, I was told. It’s something that also grounds my decisions as I grow my independent media venture after departing from corporate newsrooms last year.

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Krieger was the right person to speak to about this idea and how he applied it across his career. He started in corporate America’s telecom sector, running a business unit inside a large, publicly traded company, until he left to pursue something else. “Very early on I realized that moving fast and being able to get really good results is something that can only happen in Startup World,” he explained, which is also what attracted him to Israel’s startup ecosystem.

He went on to found and run several companies, most notably Reposify, an external attack surface management company which CrowdStrike acquired in 2022. CrowdStrike's leadership asked him to help bring more “founder DNA, startup DNA” into the organization.

Krieger credited the mentors of his early startup years with teaching him that line between risk and recklessness. “They had a very unique combination of very strong conviction and an extreme, structured, almost scientific way of how you get to being successful,” he told me. It comes down to preparation, not appetite: “You want to take risk, but it’s not just any risk. Where’s the passion? Are you really all in? What is the plan? Are you actually building a plan, or are you just trying to wing it?”

The new speed of risk

That same instinct now shapes how CrowdStrike approaches its own market, which has hit $243.3 billion, and a stock price circling within distance of an all-time high. Exposure management, which is the practice of identifying and prioritizing an organization’s most exploitable weaknesses, was largely a background chore before AI adoption pushed it into boardrooms. “It’s no longer a question of ‘why do we need this,’” Krieger said of the shift. “It’s ‘how do we move 10 times faster? How can we be ahead of the curve?’”

This mindset gets him safely out of a cave, or back on the ground with both feet, and it’s what separates a security strategy from a scramble. But it requires work.

“You really need to build that muscle. It’s not natural. People are risk-averse, but how do you transform risk aversion into something that allows you to take risks, enjoy the journey, and do it in a way that you become successful?” His question stayed with me until long after our meeting.

The AI era is asking everyone to take risks. Company pivots, career changes, market shakeups… all of them will require us to make decisions or take actions that will impact our personal and professional lives. “It boils down to basic human nature and being a good person. People want to do good; people want to be successful. It doesn’t matter if it’s in a small company or a big company,” he concluded. “I think [it’s about] not losing the edge that you have with a startup, and taking that into a larger organization, and bringing that impact.”

[Watch a preview: Why this CrowdStrike manager skydives, cave dives, and calls it “Structured Risk”]

Last week, a story went live on Politico Europe that made waves in Israeli social media spaces.

How ‘Made in Israel’ Is Powering European Security makes the case that Europe’s push for technological and strategic sovereignty is colliding with a growing reliance on Israeli defense firms. It’s a contradiction many of us in Israel have identified for a while, especially given how politically hostile the bloc has been toward the country in recent months.

But that hostility, it seems, ends at the same place Startup Nation’s booming defense sector begins. The paradox that Europe is growing politically distant from the very country it is becoming technologically dependent on is now impossible to ignore.

The piece, shared widely among influencers and even by the official Israel War Room account on X, opens on a scene almost too on-the-nose: Greek military officials landing in Tel Aviv on the last day of August to sign a €3 billion deal, Achilles Shield, for a full Israeli-built air defense network.

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It’s a story I’ve been tracking for a while, through conversations with investors and founders working the European-Israeli corridor directly. One investor active in that space, who has watched European capital and Israeli innovation become increasingly inseparable in recent years, explained how “some of the countries that are our biggest criticizers are still buying a lot of defense technology from Israel.”

The fact is that Israeli companies bring the tech and talent that European sovereign-capital efforts are desperate for, no matter how loud the political criticism gets. As I explained in a feature for JNS in December 2025, more than 1,600 Israeli tech companies now employ over 30,000 people across Europe. Growth is running at nearly 5% a year, concentrated in exactly the sectors Europe’s own strategic-autonomy agenda has flagged as priorities: AI, cyber, and defense.

Read more

When I recorded the first episode 18 months ago, I had a rough idea of what this show could be. I wanted it to be a place where long-form conversations about Israeli tech, geopolitics, or society could get broader attention.

Now, with a growing audience across 20 countries and partnerships with international media channels like Forbes, I am proud to see what it is becoming, and that these conversations are getting the attention they deserve. Startup Nation yearned for long-form English conversation, and I am pleased to be helping fill that missing gap.

For the 100th, I brought in Nitay Milner, co-founder and CEO of Orion Security, and Emily Fontaine, Global Head of Venture Capital at IBM Ventures, to talk about why every major company should rebuild its data security strategy in this AI era.

I find it fitting that our conversation on how a large corporate company saw potential in a scrappy Israeli startup was positioned as the 100th episode.

Thanks to all who have joined to share their stories so far, and thank you to all those who keep tuning in.

Onwards to 200. - JS

The data loss prevention industry has organized itself around a relatively stable threat model.

A disgruntled employee may copy files to a USB drive. Or a phishing attack could expose credentials to an outside attacker. Maybe someone accidentally CCs the wrong person on an email with sensitive information. Solutions focused on perimeter controls or policy rules were imperfect, but understandable when the threats were often caused by humans.

But that model is no longer sufficient. According to research by Cyberhaven Labs, whose 2026 AI Adoption and Risk Report analyzed data movements across 222 companies, nearly 40% of all AI interactions now involve sensitive data, with the average employee inputting proprietary information into an AI tool once every three days.

Threats don’t disagree insofar as they disaggregate, accelerate, and, in some new cases, remove the human from the equation entirely.

Nitay Milner, co-founder and CEO of Orion Security, offered a framework for understanding how the landscape has changed. In a recent episode with Emily Fontaine, Vice President and Global Head of Venture Capital at IBM, which backed ORION’s $32 million Series A in February 2026, he described the three categories of traditional data leakage that the DLP industry was built to address: human error, malicious insider activity, and external attackers.

“[Perhaps] I accidentally did ‘Emily@IBC’ and not ‘IBM’,” he said, by way of illustration, “and sent the entire board deck to the wrong person. That happens a lot. I call it keeping honest people honest.”

The second category, he noted, involves deliberate exfiltration, what he called the “Snowden” scenario. The third involved external actors penetrating an organization and quietly siphoning data over time.

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Milner co-founded Orion Security in 2024 with CTO Jonathan Kreiner. It aims to replace traditional DLP (data loss prevention) tools with an automated, context-driven platform. Using LLMs and specialized AI agents, the platform continuously detects and analyzes data loss indicators in real time, capturing context for content sensitivity, data lineage, user identity, behavioral intent, and environmental purpose.

New anatomies, new leaks

Traditional categories of DLP remain relevant, of course. But Milner identified two new vectors that are reshaping the problem. The first is data extraction into third-party AI: employees uploading sensitive documents like earnings calls, customer records, or source code to unmanaged AI platforms before those materials are cleared for external use. “Taking the earnings call, which is super sensitive data, before the earnings call report was published, and uploading it to like an unmanaged ChatGPT or Claude,” he said. “It’s very, very sensitive, and data is now in the hands of a third party that you don’t have any agreement with.”

The second vector is data exfiltration not by humans at all, but by AI agents operating inside the enterprise. “AI agents doing human work inside the organization, having access to super sensitive data,” Milner explained. “Think about an AI agent email assistant that has access to your Google Drive, takes the entire customer list and sends it to the wrong person. That’s data exfiltration by AI.”

The scale of this emerging risk is becoming measurable. According to a 2026 Cloud Security Alliance report, 82% of organizations already have AI agents operating in production environments, while only 17% enforce runtime access controls consistently across those deployments.

A separate finding from Proofpoint’s 2025 Data Security Landscape report found that 32% of organizations identify unsupervised data access by AI agents as a critical threat.

Fontaine framed the underlying problem as one of movement, not just volume. “Data is a huge asset that must be protected, more so than ever before,” she added. “It’s moving across clouds, it’s moving across applications, agents, ecosystems. It’s moving across so much more than it was ever before. And we have to make sure it’s secure, that it is governed correctly.”

IBM Ventures, the strategic investment arm of IBM led by Fontaine, operates a $500 million fund focused on AI and quantum technologies — and its bet on Milner and the team reflects IBM’s belief that the arrival of large language models has fundamentally broken the assumptions on which traditional data security was built, creating entirely new leakage paths that legacy DLP tools cannot detect.

A new era for DLP

That governance challenge is exactly what today’s DLP industry is no longer built to handle. Policy-based systems depend on known patterns, like a credit card number matching a regex or a file name triggering a rule. They cannot, by design, interpret context or whether a particular data movement constitutes a legitimate business action or an exfiltration event.

Milner’s breakdown offers enterprises a useful starting point to identify which of the five categories (legacy or AI-era) represents the highest unaddressed exposure in a given environment, and build from there. “Understand your organization,” he concluded. “Based on this real data, get to decisions, train your employees, and help them understand how to use data safely.”

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[5-minute preview: Is your AI leaking company secrets? IBM & Orion Security explain]

Now, one Israeli investor thinks the backlash could create an opening for a very different kind of consumer product, and for a new generation of Israeli founders.

Oren Charnoff is the Co-founder and a General Partner at Sticker Ventures, a Tel Aviv early-stage fund that invests exclusively in Israeli B2C startups. He sees the settlement as validation of a thesis his fund was already investing behind, based on changing consumer habits among young people. “We want to find more companies whose goal is not to increase time spent on the app,” he said. “We hope to see more ‘IRL’ things being built by Israelis.”

He points to two U.S. examples he admires. The first, Tin Can, is a landline-style phone that plugs into the wall, paired with an app that lets parents approve who their kids can call; Charnoff says it’s doing roughly $80 million in annualized revenue. The second is Board, a digital game console built entirely around in-person play. “The only way that you can interact with it is with another person with you,” he said.

Closer to Sticker’s own market, Charnoff cites Edikted, the Israeli-founded Gen Z fashion label, which The Wall Street Journal recently reported as achieving roughly $460 million in revenue: “They crush it on retail. They crush it for offline discovery.”

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Startup Nation’s advantage in the changing market

The shift makes it perfect timing for Israel’s tech DNA to tap into adapting markets. Startup Nation has accumulated decades of expertise in adtech, gaming, fintech and cybersecurity, producing a generation of founders trained to measure, test and optimize. Add to that a new type of internet-native, young immigrant to Israel who is a product of globalization, and those skills can be unleashed on the world’s biggest GDP category: consumers.

“The same quants who do anomaly detection in cyber can optimize the budget, channel and yield of consumer growth,” Charnoff said. He traces the lineage directly to Israel’s earlier tech waves. “Adtech is one of the founding mothers and fathers of B2C,” he said, pointing to the exodus of former ironSource employees now building consumer companies of their own.

The craving to steer away from online apps and toward “In Real Life” extends into dating apps, both in his portfolio’s orbit and out of it. Companies are moving away from “unlimited swipes whose goal is to maximize dwell time” toward an AI concierge model that delivers one or two curated introductions a week, rather than an endless feed of profiles.

According to Charnoff, 38% of Sticker Ventures’ deployed capital sits in the Health & Wellness category - framing the appeal generationally: millennials were “an experiment of unlimited internet access”, he told me, while Gen Z is driving “a huge trend to get back into IRL... experiences.”

Charnoff and Sticker Ventures aren’t betting that the attention-economy giants disappear. But the “hipster move” into B2C investments is placing new bets on the next generation of consumer winners built for the time people spend away from their news feeds, not the time they spend scrolling through it.

“B2C’s been a big part of Israel’s ecosystem for a long time,” he concluded, listing success stories like Waze, Oddity, Superplay, eToro, Wix, Simply, MyHeritage, and others. “We’ve always been doing this… I just think with AI, there’s a renewed interest to do it… It’s just way more attractive to be a B2C entrepreneur now.”

[Preview: Why building B2C in Israel is suddenly a "hipster move"]

Let’s set the scene: We are both former journalists, now running separate podcast operations (one in English, one in Hebrew), and talking about what happens when an interview format becomes part of an election strategy. Katsovich is the co-founder and partner at Fusion VC, a pre-seed platform and a longtime Israeli podcaster, and expects that trend to accelerate as election day approaches.

“If you look at the trend, I would assume... they’ll be interviewed by more and more podcasters... the closer we get to election day,” Katsovich told me.

The 2024 U.S. election showed just how powerful podcasts could become as a political campaign tool, with candidates increasingly opting for long-form conversations that offered more time and unfiltered depth - something traditional television can rarely provide.

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Israel’s next election, scheduled for October 27, is already generating a growing political podcast ecosystem, from dedicated election shows to established interview programs. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s campaign has leaned into a circuit of small, friendly podcast studios in recent weeks, trading hard questions for a more intimate, folksy format that lets a candidate control the narrative in ways a more adversarial Channel 12 or Channel 13 panel never would.

Katsovich sees the same pattern and traces it to an obvious source: “Everybody now follows Trump’s steps and tries to interview [on] as many podcasts as they can.”

His show, The Guy Katsovich Podcast, now reaches, he told me, “more than 200,000 people... every month,” almost entirely inside Israel. He’s hosted Yair Golan, Gadi Eisenkot, Bezalel Smotrich, Simcha Rothman, and with an election bearing down, he expects the guest list to grow: “I might do a roadshow for all the politicians that wanna come on the podcast.”

Israel appears to be the latest country that is redistributing its political access during election cycles. Katsovich’s read is that as October nears, “those podcasts will carry more and more weight in how people make their decisions,” because a long-form sit-down is “a real opportunity to really meet and see a politician for one hour” in a way a ninety-second clip cannot replicate.

But the format only works if it stays open. “All the politicians that came to my podcast didn’t ask for preparation, and there were no preconditions,” he told me, before admitting some guests want questions in advance, or want to see the cuts before publication. “This is like... kills the whole point of a podcast,” he said - and I agreed. “If you wanna really do an open conversation, this is not the format” for anyone trying to manage their message.

Startup Nation’s election role

But access is only half of the equation. What politicians choose to talk about matters too. When I pushed him on whether topics like tech and AI sovereignty will actually move votes — a theme this campaign has already flirted with, and one I have discussed on another podcast with ILTV — he identified a key thesis for election messaging. “If in America you vote for economy, in Israel you vote for security, and that’s it.”

[Watch me on ILTV: Maayan Hoffman and I explore whether Startup Nation should weigh in on Israel's first election since October 7]

Whereas the American mantra once promised that “it’s the economy, stupid”, Israel sees things a little differently. As Israelis go to the ballot box for the first national election since October 7, high-tech, cyber, and defense are all what he called “intercollided” into a single binary: are you the guy who keeps the country safe, or not?

That’s the paradox sitting underneath this whole moment. Hebrew podcasting is gaining exactly the kind of reach and intimacy that could reshape how Israelis size up a candidate — and it’s happening at the same time as candidates are working out how to use that reach without actually being tested by it.

[Watch a preview: Israel’s podcast boom could change the next election]

Opposition has more than doubled across 49 states over the past year, and in the first quarter of 2026 alone, an estimated $130 billion in data center projects were blocked or delayed by local resistance.

It’s not even a culture war. The backlash against them cuts across party lines: Republicans tend to object on tax incentives and grid strain, whereas Democrats oppose on environmental and resource use. The reasons may differ, but their mutual opposition is a rare instance of bipartisan alignment in American politics.

Into this landscape steps Phinergy. It’s an Israeli cleantech company whose aluminum-air backup generators have become an alternative to diesel in the AI infrastructure race, seeing early support from players in an impressive Google- and Microsoft-led innovation consortium. I spoke to its CEO Emmanuel Levy, who laid out a thesis that the “NIMBY” reflex against data centers collapses once three specific, solvable grievances are addressed.

“People are caring about [them] and are afraid... whether it is pollution, whether it is noise, or it is water consumption,” Levy told me. “If you’re able to explain why a new data center can come without this price on the shared resources, you’re able to bring the debate back to where it should be.”

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It’s a clean, testable claim. In Colorado Springs earlier this year, a proposed data center drew objections almost identical to the ones Levy’s technology is designed to neutralize: noise and air pollution from backup diesel generators, and water consumption. The developer countered with a water-efficient, closed-loop cooling design and pledged 60 to 100 permanent jobs. But it didn’t defuse the fight.

Longtime residents cited broken promises tied to a chip plant and a cryptocurrency mine previously sited on the same land, and the developer told local reporters he had never encountered this level of public opposition, despite having built a similar facility elsewhere without incident. The complaints were the same three Levy names, yet the outcome was not.

Why do they need to be in our neighborhoods, anyway?

Those opposed to data centers don’t want them “in their backyard” - but that’s precisely where they need to be. Whereas training AI models can in fact be anywhere, the inference stage of AI - that’s getting the answers back to the customer who inputs prompts - needs strong latency to ensure smooth communication. And those are fast becoming critical infrastructure, which means backup generators need to be precisely alongside those initial centers. “More and more services are AI-based; they need their AI to be as close as possible to the market,” Levy explained. “So that’s the reason why inference in this case is localized next to communities.”

Think of it like being closer to your internet router at home: a reasonable comparison, until you realize that McKinsey forecast confirmed that by 2030 there will be an additional 140 gigawatts of power consumption by data centers. It means that the equivalent of 140 nuclear power plants will need to be set up in four years in order to manage the computing power. “You understand why there is a bottleneck,” he added.

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Another question arises: whose job is it to close this trust deficit? Levy describes a cooperative, three-layer division of labor: new technology needs to be “socialized” to the market, regulators need to update rules that still legally define backup power as diesel-only, and developers need to carry the message to communities and win consent.

Phinergy was selected from a field of more than 70 proposals by the Net Zero Innovation Hub, a consortium formed by Google and Microsoft specifically to source alternatives to diesel backup power, with the pitch vetted privately by senior industry advisors (including a former chairman of Vertiv's technology board and a former Microsoft data center technology executive) before hyperscalers would take it seriously. "It's rarely cold calls," Levy said of how deep tech actually reaches Google and Microsoft. "Without that, it's very, very difficult for people to take you seriously."

Phinergy’s pitch for cleaner data centers is the start of the battle. Removing diesel noise and emissions from their footprint retires one legitimate grievance from a list that has grown to include broken trust, property values, and a broader unease about ceding land and resources to AI infrastructure. International polling on the same backlash lists the objections in similar order: water, energy, land use, noise, air pollution.

But it still needs to overcome the lingering challenge of a lack of community consent. Clean power may be necessary to end the data center fight. On the evidence so far, it isn’t sufficient.

You can learn more about data centers and how Phinergy can fix the bottleneck in the entire episode.

[For now, here is a preview: The NIMBY problem with AI data centers, explained]

Turns out there is a number that can make that argument: $6.83, the price of a pound of ground beef in the US as of July 2026.

Beef steaks averaged $12.80 a pound back in May, up 16% year-on-year; the national cattle herd is sitting at its smallest size in 75 years. These Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers show a worrying trend for families and young people seeking affordable protein sources.

Chunk offers clean-label, plant-based whole cuts that look (and cook) just like beef. And today’s price rises may be a way for the fake meat industry to undergo somewhat of a comeback.

Golan has been watching this trend as closely as I have. “You don’t need to just talk about the need for the price of [fake] meat to go down,” I said to him. “You can also talk about the price of meat going up.” His answer: “Exactly.”

He’d already walked me through the math before I said it. “Ground beef in the US used to cost $4 [per pound]. Now it’s $5, $5.36. A steak is $10 to $20 a pound.” That was true when we recorded this episode in June, but beef has kept climbing since, which is, for those of us doing the weekly shop, the whole point of his pitch.

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Chunk’s bet was never to compete with beef on ideology. People like me who genuinely like eating meat aren't suddenly going to stop because someone tells us it's better for the planet. “The experience needs to be good enough. The price needs to be good enough, ideally cheaper than meat,” he added. He was blunt that this is a demographic shift, not a moral one. “People are less altruistic, I’d say, at least externally, in how they talk about the food they consume.”

Ultimately, beef isn’t getting cheaper anytime soon. Forecasts put 2026 beef price increases as high as 18%, and analysts aren’t projecting relief into 2027. Chunk doesn’t need to win me over on taste alone. It needs the gap between $6.83 and its own shelf price to keep doing the argument for it.

It might be time that the alternative meat market comes back for seconds. And those at the dinner table may finally be ready for what’s on the menu.

[PREVIEW: Rising beef prices are doing Chunk Foods' marketing for them]

Amit Spitzer, Glilot’s CTO and CISO, built it largely on his own, without a dedicated budget, while running the fund’s security operations in parallel.

“We need some super agents, some super tools, some ‘super employee’,” he told me. “That were able to connect to all the tools and all the processes and basically help streamline every manual work that used to be done up until that point.”

Arik Kleinstein, Glilot’s co-founder and managing partner, added that before the agent existed, an investment decision required five to ten diligence calls conducted manually. Now, the firm can screen advisors, make contact, present a company, and schedule calls at a pace that would have been unimaginable three years ago. And since Glilot is a seed and early-stage investor, operating in a market where the window between a promising founder and a closed round can be very short. An ‘employee’ like Elliot can help VC funds find their next gold mine.

Yet for all of its assistance, Kleinstein maintains that the agent cannot do the actual job. “If you invest very early, you invest basically in two things,” he said. “One, the team, and in their imagination. And AI is not a team, and AI doesn’t really have a good imagination.”

The difference between what AI accelerates and what it cannot replace carries broader implications for how the industry should think about the technology it is rushing to adopt. Even I, as a writer, admit to using the technology in my work; transcriptions take seconds instead of hours, and I have tweaked my agents to be harsh in their review of my work before I submit to a (human) editor. It means I have more time for research and deeper conversation with my guests.

In Glilot’s instance, the fund is as committed to AI as any in the market, and it evaluates every investment, in the words of managing partner Lior Litwak, “through a GenAI lens.” But Kleinstein and Spitzer make a sharp distinction between AI as infrastructure and AI as judgment. While AI in our workflows is indeed transformative, the ability to assess an unproven founder's leadership potential remains out of reach — at least for the investing Glilot does.

“All the analytical part, to look at the technology, to look at the markets, to look at the products, all the checklist that every VC is doing… that can be significantly augmented with AI,” Kleinstein said. “But to assess the quality, the leadership, the ability of a founder, many times a first-time founder, never done it before, to actually build a team, that’s something where AI just cannot help you.”

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Spitzer adds another dimension to this argument. Describing his CISO position as “part of my soul, not just my experience,” he stated that the people who get the most out of Elliot will not necessarily be the most technical members of the team. They will be the ones who know what to ask, and how. “You still need the experience of the person,” he said. “Because now you need to know what to ask the AI, how to ask it, how to navigate in the path of AI. And that skill is important with AI and before AI, but now it’s making it even more critical.”

That idea of “tribal knowledge” inside an organization or team to carry the qualities needed to thrive in the AI era was discussed in a previous episode of The Spiro Circle. AI may have access to an organization's information, but it doesn't automatically understand which pieces of that information matter, or spot what an experienced human employee would notice that isn't written down.

This reframes the debate about AI and employment and the fear that it will “take our jobs”. Currently, it appears that there will be a big shift in which part of a job it takes, with a recent IIA/Zvriran study on Startup Nation suggesting that while AI isn’t the primary reason companies are reducing their headcounts, the technology is cited by 10% of companies as the cause of hiring pauses - a threefold increase from six months ago.

In Glilot’s case, Elliot absorbs the data-gathering, the scheduling, the pattern-matching across thousands of founder meetings. What it leaves behind is soft skills, such as the ability to sit across a table from someone who has never built a company before, and decide whether to bet on them.

“The emotional part, the charisma, that’s especially important if you’re a very early-stage investor,” Kleinstein concluded. “That’s much more important than any data I can crunch.”

[Watch a 5-minute preview: AI can do the diligence. But can it pick the founder?]

But then he said it took him four to five days.

“It was so hard for me to install,” said the co-founder and CPO of Native Security. “And I am within AWS! I’m the product leader for that. What does it mean for a customer going in the first time trying to use that? At best, they give up; at worst, they misconfigure it, and then they don’t have active security coverage.”

That initial moment planted the first seed. But the second came a month later, when Ordo attended his first Executive Briefing Center session on behalf of Amazon. There, a room of executives from Fortune 100 and Fortune 50 companies had one message for the young product leader sitting across from them: “Why are you showing us the problem after it happens? Why can’t we just prevent it?”

“I remember them telling me, ‘Why do you even allow me to get to that place? Why don’t you just give me the knob to say this can never happen in the first place?’” Ordo recalled.

It was those two experiences, operating a product too complex for its own builders to operate, and a customer too exhausted to keep reacting, that became the founding logic of Native Security. The Tel Aviv-based cloud security startup emerged from stealth in March 2026 with an official $42 million in funding (he says they have already secured more, up to $55 million), and a collection of Fortune 100 customers already running its platform in production.

According to industry research, 80% of cloud breaches stem from misconfigurations — resources left exposed, permissions set too wide, settings that drifted after an engineer’s late-night change. Among companies that use multiple cloud providers, only 33% have a unified security strategy across them. Ordo’s argument to me is that the tools to close that gap have always existed inside AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle - but enterprises cannot operationalize them at scale.

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Native’s answer is what Ordo calls a control plane, a platform that lets security leaders specify an outcome in plain language, such as: “My sensitive data should never be exposed to the internet.” It then translates it into enforceable technical controls across all four major cloud providers simultaneously, using those providers’ own native capabilities rather than adding another external layer.

Before any policy goes live, the platform simulates its impact by surfacing which services might break, or which cross-cloud dependencies might be disrupted, so security teams can act without fear of taking down production.

“The building blocks are there, they’re strong, they’re powerful,” Ordo said. “But they’re hard for customers to use.”

Ordo co-founded the company with Amit Megiddo, CEO, who led Amazon GuardDuty, and Eyal Faingold, CTO, who served as VP of Cloud Security Products at Check Point. Between them, the three founders have shipped security products used by tens of thousands of enterprise customers globally.

The initial $31 million Series A was led by Ballistic Ventures, whose roster includes Phil Venables, former CISO of Google Cloud. He joined the round and, later, the board, even calling Native’s approach “the next big evolution in cloud security.” The company currently employs around 50 people across Tel Aviv and the United States, drawing talent from IDF cyber units, Palo Alto Networks, Wiz, and CyberArk, with a target of 90 by the end of 2026.

The founding question was whether the knowledge they accumulated inside those organizations could be turned into something different. Notably, knowledge of where the tools broke down, where customers gave up, and where the cycle of detect-and-react became self-perpetuating.

“There is a reason this hasn’t been done before,” he concluded. “It’s incredibly difficult to achieve. The technical problems we’re solving are very hard.”

[5-MINS PREVIEW: The founding story of Native Security]

But Yuval Ariav, Founder and Managing Partner of Symbol, doesn’t give me that answer. Ask him what he looks for in a founder, and he’ll acknowledge that integrity and grit matter, but then he sets that all aside.

“If I had to put one overarching theme for us, it’s depth,” he told me. “We like to see that founders went to the validation threshold the capital market requires — and then way beyond it. Because what that tells us is that they are really interested in the problem, that they really understand it.”

Much of the theme of today’s conversation is about depth, and how to avoid “non-deep” thinking (I try to avoid the term “shallow”). For Ariav, the ability to go deep is the willingness to go so far into a problem that you exit the comfortable zone of apparent mastery and enter the uncomfortable zone of knowing how much you don’t know. “We like to see people whose level of expertise forces them to say, on some things, ‘we don’t know.’ Because that’s how you really know they know their stuff.”

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Symbol is a $50 million pre-seed and seed fund Ariav co-manages with Racheli Kogan, and bets on founders working outside the mainstream of Israeli venture, in sectors the local capital community has traditionally dismissed. We spoke soon after Business Insider named Symbol to its 2026 Seed 100, the first time an Israeli fund has appeared on a list that includes Sam Altman, Accel, and Greylock.

The ranking’s stated criteria, which highlighted those who identify technologies before they become mainstream categories, are basically Symbol’s entire thesis.

The problem is that depth is vanishing

There’s a paradox at the center of Ariav’s argument: That the quality he bets on is becoming scarcer precisely as building companies gets easier. Because of AI, he notes, “building products has never been easier, faster, cheaper.” When there are more founders, lower barriers to entry, and more buzz, the very environment that Symbol is making a contrarian bet on is becoming full of less intellectual effort.

“The capacity for depth… it’s not just that you understand something deeply,” he said. “It’s that you are fine with sitting on your ass at home and spending six hours diving into god-awful McKinsey super boring reports to understand some fundamental truth. That is a skill set that is rapidly fading from the world.”

Research found that average sustained attention on a digital screen dropped from 150 seconds in 2004 to 47 seconds by 2024. Ariav, who teaches a course at Columbia University on data, AI, and society, watches this in real time. “Our collective attention span is going way down,” he said. “At a time when the world is more complex than ever.”

Contrarianism isn’t the answer

Here is where Ariav diverges from the standard VC contrarian pitch. Being reflexively contrary, he argues, is just as lazy as following the consensus.

“Being reflexively contrarian is also easy. You look at Twitter [X], and you just add ‘no’ in the beginning of whatever somebody says.” What Symbol looks for is different: founders who have gone deep enough to discover something the market hasn’t seen. “When you meet the best founders, at some point they will say something to the effect of: we’ve observed something the market doesn’t understand. At that point, they shine a spotlight on a hidden truth.”

For Symbol, it is about finding the pre-consensus thinking across a world that is no longer operating in the very depths that depend on new discovery. And with a world that changes as AI becomes more embedded in our lives, the ability to think, explore, and innovate is becoming a commodity in and of itself.

[Watch a preview: The "Depth" Problem: Why great tech founders are getting rarer]

“You always need to make decisions when you don’t have all the information,” says Galili, co-founder and CEO of Mars Security, a Tel Aviv-based threat detection startup that raised $9 million in 2025. “The most dangerous thing to do — if you’re investigating a breach, if you’re conducting an offensive operation, if you’re trying to decide which product line to invest in — is to wait. Targets are moving and evolving. There’s a lot of chaos and multiple unknowns.”

It is a philosophy shaped by his real-world experience in the Israel Defense Forces, confronting actual life-or-death consequences. Galili left the IDF at 39, relatively later than most who leave after their mandatory three-year commitment, which he considers an advantage. The extra years gave him something that fast-track civilian careers rarely produce: a visceral comfort with operating under conditions that would paralyze most executives.

“The more chaos that you live through,” he said, “the better you will thrive in chaos.”

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That thesis now underlies how Galili runs his founding team and how he thinks organizations should respond to a security breach in progress. His core conviction is that an imperfect action consistently outperforms a perfect decision arrived at too late - or one not performed at all. “I believe that an action, even if it’s the wrong one, is always better than not acting,” he explained. “An action will help you understand reality. You need to act… and then have the flexibility to understand that you made a mistake and change.”

I pointed out that there is something almost Shakespearean in how he thinks about cybersecurity. Hamlet, history’s most famous illustration of the cost of indecision, understood perfectly what needed to be done but died precisely because he couldn’t bring himself to do it. The play is a 400-year-old case study in strategic paralysis, and one that Galili would recognize immediately as a security failure as much as a human one.

History, it turns out, doesn’t repeat itself - but we all know it can rhyme. Delay was Hamlet’s ‘fatal flaw’. In cybersecurity, it remains one of the most common that can still cost enterprises their data.

This is not merely philosophical for Galili. The detection gap that Mars Security is built to close between the moment an attacker enters an organization, and the moment the organization realizes it is partly a technology problem and partly a mindset one. Security teams have been conditioned to gather more data before acting. Attackers, meanwhile, are moving across identities, cloud environments, SaaS platforms, and corporate networks in hours, not days.

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“You need to be good all the time,” Galili said. “The attacker has one advantage: he has the initiative. If you take this from him and start being proactive, looking all the time at how they’re evolving, they don’t have a chance.”

The best piece of advice he ever received from a commanding officer? He doesn’t hesitate: “Love the chaos.”

The ability to embrace chaos in 2026 is as applicable to building a startup as it was to running operations in the years before - even if contexts and technologies evolve. And the leaders who thrive are never the ones who waited for more certainty before moving. They’re the ones who always kept moving.

Last October, thieves walked out of the Louvre with crown jewels worth more than $100 million. French investigators later found that only one of the two cameras covering the break-in point was even working, and staff didn’t have enough screens to watch the footage that did exist. The whole operation lasted minutes.

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Imagine that: The Louvre, home to the most famous painting on earth, couldn’t tell you in real time what was happening to the jewels twenty feet away. It didn’t know where its own “Mona Lisa” was, so to speak.

And a few days ago its gallery finally reopened - this time, without the stolen jewels.

That’s the trap Toni was warning me about, except she wasn’t talking about paintings. Her metaphor was directed at CISOs who need to know the most important assets in their enterprise, and make sure those are more protected than just applying blanket protection over everything. “Find your Mona Lisas,” she said. “This is the most important. You will not be able to close everything. It’s too much. It will never be fast enough.”

The value of each asset varies by company. A shoe manufacturer’s factory floor matters more than its HR files. A bank’s Mona Lisa is the data itself, sitting in very specific places. “The question now is: How can I protect my most critical things? [Because] not everything is the Mona Lisa,” she said. “Not everything needs to be protected the same.”

This is where Arte’s own work gets specific. The company helps enterprises identify what parts of their data require more attention (and protection) than others. It then specializes and tailor-makes a solution that helps them protect their Mona Lisas from theft or hacking. The company was founded with co-founder and CTO Asaf Ohayon at the end of 2025, and Toni herself comes from a background in the Israeli Ministry of Defense as Director of Critical Infrastructure & Data Center Cybersecurity.

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Another example may be a hyperscale AI data center, where its Mona Lisa isn’t necessarily a database. It might be the chiller controller. Bad actors wouldn’t even need to breach a firewall to take an AI cluster offline. All they would need to do is make the room too hot to run.

This sounds obvious until you actually try to do it. Security researchers estimate that roughly a third of large businesses can see less than three-quarters of their own assets at any given time: Think of it as the digital equivalent of a museum that isn’t sure how many rooms it has, let alone what’s in them.

I asked her to help me quantify it: how do you actually know which door is the one with the painting behind it? To distinguish between the Mona Lisas and what I called “The James Spiro Original Scribble”. Her answer was to identify what you’d protect first if you could only protect one thing, and build outward from there. “Make sure your Mona Lisa is protected,” she said, “and put it as number one priority.”

Every laptop or every forgotten API endpoint is indeed an attack surface or entry point. And for a long time, the instinct in cybersecurity has always been to try to lock all of them at once. But Toni’s point is that this instinct is now outdated, because when attackers can use AI to move at machine speed, treating every asset as equally precious means treating none of them as precious enough.

The Louvre is now spending close to a billion euros to build the actual Mona Lisa her own dedicated room. Most businesses won’t get that budget. CISOs will have to actually know where their Mona Lisa hangs before someone else finds out.

[Watch a preview: “Not everything is the Mona Lisa” — Cybersecurity priorities, explained]

We all know the big ones: Google acquired Wiz for $32 billion. Palo Alto Networks spent $25 billion to absorb CyberArk. ServiceNow bought Armis for $7.8 billion. When the final tally was complete, strategic mergers and acquisitions in the cybersecurity sector had reached $81 billion - more than four times the volume of the prior year, according to data compiled by Notable Capital and Morgan Stanley.

For Oren Yunger, Managing Partner at Notable Capital and one of the architects of the firm’s annual Rising in Cyber report, the significance of those deals runs deeper than just their valuations. “The ceiling has kind of been shattered,” he told me.

“You can build businesses that are just massive. You can do things that we, in the past, thought were unimaginable in cybersecurity,” he added. “Companies should get acquired between $200-400 million dollars — that’s the best you can do. Now we’re seeing companies that really are paving the way to the next set of companies to go and build bigger and stronger.”

For much of the last decade, cybersecurity exits were measured in hundreds of millions, not the tens of billions we see today. The Wiz deal alone, which became the largest high-tech exit and business deal in Israel's history, poses a new question to a new generation of founders: If they could become a $32 billion business, what is possible for us?

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The M&A wave of 2025 coincided with a shift in how enterprises think about the AI era and the risks that come with it. In 2024 and early 2025, the defining question for enterprises deploying AI was whether they could build agents capable of autonomous action. Yunger now argues that that question has largely been answered and a new one has emerged.

“The big question that we’re seeing is: can you put it in production, can you scale that agent, can you trust its operations?” he said. “Security is just a huge part of this question that needs to be answered at enterprise scale.”

The Rising in Cyber 2026 report, which surveyed nearly 150 chief information security officers from the world’s largest companies, puts precise numbers on the gap between deployment and protection. Seventy-one percent of respondents said their organisations already have AI agents running in production environments. But only 11% described their tooling to secure those agents as mature. That gap is where Yunger sees the next wave of investment flowing, and where the next generation of large cybersecurity companies will be built.

The broader cybersecurity sector is projected to reach $255 billion by 2029, up from $153 billion in 2025, according to IDC estimates. Early-stage investment is accelerating: Series B rounds grew 74% to $3.3 billion in 2025, with average deal sizes jumping 75% to $49 million. In a year when most software categories saw venture funding decline, cybersecurity’s earliest rounds were the only segment to grow year over year.

The momentum has continued into 2026. CrowdStrike acquired SGNL, Palo Alto Networks purchased Koi, and Sophos acquired Arco Cyber — all in the first half of the year. The platforms that spent 2025 making transformational acquisitions are now targeting the AI-native capabilities they need to stay competitive as the threat landscape continues to evolve.

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Microsoft, which dominates five of the largest cybersecurity verticals, is adding capabilities faster than at any point in its history, with CrowdStrike and Palo Alto doing the same. But their acceleration has not crowded out newer startups. If anything, it has raised the stakes for founders who can identify the problems that the large platforms have not yet solved.

“Security companies today are answering those questions,” Yunger said, “and the ones to follow will eventually accompany every single technology shift that is happening in the market and will continue to do so for as much as I can think of.”

Yunger claims the thesis is confirmed by Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, who he said has described engineering as converging into four enduring disciplines. One of them is security engineering: a category he considers permanent regardless of how AI reshapes the rest of the technology industry. “Doesn’t matter how AI is affecting our markets, what jobs AI potentially will threaten and maybe change… Security is here to stay.”

For founders building in the space today, that is both a reassurance and a challenge. The ceiling “has been shattered” and the market is expanding faster than we all predicted. Large companies are acquiring quickly, and the venture dollars are flowing earlier.

What founders may be asking themselves now is if they can also build something the platforms may have no choice but to pay to absorb. And Wiz has shown them that the answer may be worth $32 billion.

Read the Rising In Cyber report

[Watch a preview: The Cybersecurity Ceiling Just Got Shattered]