Within this context, one Israeli startup has spent four years building the communications infrastructure that conflicts like this one keep exposing as absent. Commcrete, which raised $29 million in seed and Series A funding — backed by investors including Mobileye founder Amnon Shashua — makes narrow-band satellite connectivity solutions that connect to geostationary satellites 36,000 kilometers away without requiring line of sight or clear skies.

Some of these devices are small enough to fit in a jacket pocket, and all are resilient enough to operate in all weather conditions.

Most defense companies outsource the ethics of who they sell to — to export regulators, to governments, to the comfortable abstraction of compliance departments. Itzik Daniel Michaeli, the company’s co-founder and CEO and a former senior commander with over 25 years in Israeli special operations and intelligence, does not.

“There are the good guys and the bad guys,” Michaeli said. “It exists. And Hollywood can keep on pushing out those great movies about good guys and bad guys because eventually you saw that when the bad guys mean that they want to destroy you or to harm you, they’re putting their efforts, their money, everything on that.”

Commcrete’s products — Stardust, a 150-gram unit enabling voice, text, location and distress signalling; Flipper, which converts any radio into a satellite-enabled system; and Bittel, which extends those capabilities to vehicles — address a $200 billion global SATCOM market. Its tech is already deployed in active conflict zones, integrated into drone platforms, and operating in the hands of defense, public safety, and emergency response customers across multiple continents.

Since the start of the US-Israel war with Iran, GPS and navigation interference has surged across the Persian Gulf, disrupting shipping, aircraft, and emergency services across the region — exposing the degree to which modern infrastructure depends on satellite connectivity that can be jammed, spoofed, or seized.

Reports from analysts at CSIS and navigation intelligence firms have flagged evidence that Iran may be accessing China’s BeiDou satellite navigation system, boosting the accuracy of its missile targeting in the process.

Commcrete’s architecture is built for this environment. The system uses a proprietary waveform and protocol that make it near-invisible to adversaries. So if a user isn't transmitting, they don't exist on the spectrum.

During live demonstrations, the company invites customers to try to find Commcrete’s signal on the spectrum. Michaeli claims they can’t, which explains the company’s reported 82% demo-to-acquisition conversion rate.

While Michaeli doesn’t disclose his customers, he does disclose who he would - and would not - sell to. “You don’t want to put the weapon in the hands of your enemies, in the hands of your future enemies,” he said.

The question of who can get access to such technology comes with another layer of complexity, one that is specific to Israeli defense companies operating in the current geopolitical climate. Commcrete sells to customers in countries that cannot or do not publicly admit they buy from Israel.

Germany has spent recent years pressing Israel on West Bank policy while simultaneously proceeding with multibillion-dollar defense deals and resuming weapons export approvals. Finland’s president condemned Israel for violating international law, then purchased the David’s Sling air-defense system from Rafael. France blocked Israeli firms from the 2025 Paris Air Show and prohibited Israeli munitions from crossing French airspace. Israel ultimately ended all defense trade with the country in response.

Share

Half his meetings occur in countries that have publicly criticized Israel and the company has been banned from three major international exhibitions. But the phone kept ringing regardless. “Some countries and some authorities are saying… with the same sentence, ‘we can’t buy your stuff but we really do like your stuff so maybe we can buy your stuff only if you… don’t mention that we’re customers’.”

The ongoing conflict has already answered the question of whether the market for what Commcrete builds is real. But the question that remains, and one that Michaeli has appointed himself to answer, is whose hands it ends up in.

“With great power, which is our technology and our capability to do that and to manufacture that, comes a great deal of responsibility,” he concluded. “I really believe in that. And I think that’s part of the game. You have to be in it. You have to understand it. You can’t avoid it. If you don’t understand the landscape of all those layers, you can’t be in the game.”

[5-minute preview: Selling Israeli defensetech in the face of political pressure]

The rules most people grew up with (“don’t talk to strangers online”, “never open the door to someone you don’t know”) have been dismantled by the platforms we now use without thinking. Sharing economy platforms like Uber, Airbnb, Amazon Marketplace, and DoorDash run entirely on the assumption that strangers can be trusted at scale.

Share

“We live in a generation that buys everything online,” said Yair Tal, CEO of AU10TIX. The Israeli identity verification helps organizations confirm that a person is who they claim to be when opening accounts, making transactions, or accessing services online. “We trust people that we don’t know. We go on a car share ride in the middle of the night in a place that you would never go into someone else’s car. This is where we live today.”

The question AU10TIX answers is simple: how do you know the person on the other side of the screen is who they say they are?

Before digital onboarding was a mainstream category, Tal was Senior Vice President and Head of Enterprise at Payoneer, trying to serve users in places where conventional verification breaks down. “‘The address is the house near the tree behind the garden’,” Tal recalled. “This is the home address. How do you validate that this is the right person?”

That problem of having to verify identity across emerging markets, for unbanked freelancers in Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Pakistan who needed access to global platforms, forced AU10TIX to build systems that Western banks never had to imagine. That early stress-testing became the architectural foundation for what the company does today.

Deepfakes Broke Identity - At Scale

The threat landscape, however, has changed faster than most anticipated. For most of identity verification’s history, fraud was fundamentally an individual problem. The scale was manageable, and the detection logic was straightforward: check the document, match the face. Deepfakes and AI-generated identities broke that model entirely. What was once a manual, one-at-a-time problem is now industrial.

“If we see for a specific company that there’s payments going into APAC of about 20,000 fake IDs in a day, we need to block them,” Tal said. “We’re not talking anymore about the individual. We’re talking about the massive scale of applications that companies are seeing — and it’s so easy to create them with deepfake.”

Detection can no longer happen at the document level alone, and AU10TIX’s automation-first architecture is designed precisely for this volume.

Privacy vs. Security: “The Two Number Ones”

Complicating matters further is the regulatory environment, which is pulling companies in two directions simultaneously. Governments are demanding stricter identity verification while also tightening privacy protections, creating what Tal calls a structural conflict with no easy resolution. “It is not that you can say that my highest priority is privacy and the second priority is security,” he said. “Both of them are your first priority.”

The practical answer AU10TIX has arrived at is to collect only what the decision requires. A platform that needs to restrict under-18 purchases doesn’t need a user’s address, employment history, or document number. It needs one binary answer.

The pub bouncer, Tal argued, doesn’t care where you live or what you do for work. He needs to know if you’re allowed to order that beer.

The stakes of getting this wrong are no longer abstract. Companies that have failed at the identity layer haven’t just faced regulatory fines. They’ve put people in physical danger. “We recently saw companies that lost their data, their reputation, their customers,” Tal said. “They took the wrong people into their cars. People stayed in the wrong apartments.” The sharing economy’s entire value proposition - that a stranger’s home or car can be trusted - collapses the moment that verification layer fails.

The next ‘frontier’ is digital government IDs and QR-code-based national verification, to the delight or horror of everyone. The promise is that they will introduce stronger source-level authentication, but new fragmentation challenges for companies operating across borders. Critics will be skeptical of government or private company attempts to collect, store, or exploit personal information.

The infrastructure will keep evolving, but the principle remains fixed. “The digital identity is the only way for us to keep the trust going,” Tal concluded. Whether companies, governments, and society can achieve the careful balance of safety, privacy, and security remains the next challenge.

[Preview: The Painful “Necessity” of Digital Identity]

For some, it seems slow, stagnant, and tied up in regulatory bureaucracy. For others, it is a champion in responsible data protection and privacy laws that spread across the world.

Either way, the continent should not be disregarded when we discuss tech ecosystems and innovation coming from startups and large corporations.

The bloc has undergone a bit of scrutiny since Mario Draghi delivered his report on European competitiveness to the European Commission in September 2024. Its diagnosis showed slowing productivity, demographic challenges, rising energy costs, and increased global competition as the forces putting pressure on Europe's long-term prosperity.

Europe's productivity gap with the United States was being driven, in significant part, by a failure to adopt technology at scale. What followed was a significant reorientation of sovereign wealth toward tech investment: governments funneling capital into venture funds, seed programs, and national innovation vehicles, all aimed at catching up.

“Europe realized that the US is taking care of the US, especially today,” said Eran Westman, Managing Partner of Planven, a Zurich-based fund with roughly $300 million in assets under management. “And if Europe wants to have its own independence on the technology, it can also be, of course, in defense and other aspects, Europe should take care of Europe.”

Westman joined Planven in 2024 to lead its Israeli expansion. His vantage point sits at the intersection of European capital and Israeli innovation, which he sees can offer a structural opening that Israeli companies are uniquely positioned to fill. Companies born out of Startup Nation can bring something to Europe's sovereign capital push: decades of accumulated instinct for scaling across borders and for navigating unfamiliar regulatory regimes.

Israel’s Numbers in Europe

Many companies in Israel immediately consider expansion and look toward the US. And the perception of European-Israeli relations in tech tends to be shaped by political noise. The reality, documented in hard data, tells a different story.

For example, a report published in late 2025 by Planven, EIT Hub Israel, and KPMG mapped the footprint of Israeli technology companies across Europe and found not retreat but deepening integration. As I wrote for JNS at the time, more than 1,600 Israeli tech companies now employ over 30,000 people across Europe, with a 4.8% annual growth rate over the past three years.

The report highlights strong alignment between Israeli strengths in AI, cybersecurity, healthtech, defense, and climate tech and EU strategic priorities for 2024–2029, particularly in security, sustainability, and digital infrastructure. That alignment matches the sectors that Europe has identified as the most urgent need for strategic autonomy and where Israeli companies have the deepest bench.

Read the full JNS story

In September 2025, Planven exited Nozomi Networks — an Italian-Swiss company protecting operational technology infrastructure across power grids and railways — in a billion-dollar all-cash sale to Mitsubishi Electric. The company had been profitable for approximately 18 months before the deal closed.

Its exit demonstrates that a company built at the intersection of European engineering and Israeli-style security expertise can produce a world-class outcome, and it can also show the EU's emerging defensetech conversation: Protecting critical infrastructure is not a peripheral tech problem. It sits directly inside the strategic autonomy agenda that the Draghi Report put at the center of European competitiveness policy.

The data shows that European-Israeli business collaboration has continued to grow through the current conflict period — a signal of the difference between political weather and structural economic logic. “The continent may protest Israel politically, but economically, it is building a future that relies on Israeli innovation,” I wrote last year.

The Antisemitism Tension

The same period that produced these numbers also saw documented rises in antisemitism across European cities, EU-level noises about sanctions on Israel during the latter stages of the Gaza conflict, and a political climate that has, at various points, made the Israeli flag a contentious symbol in European public spaces.

Subscribe now

Westman is careful on this point, and it is worth taking his care seriously. He speaks from a specific vantage point: the deal table, the LP meeting, the board room — and he is explicit about what he can and cannot claim. “I have not met with any antisemitic comment, a question, or approach during the time that I’ve been... I speak with the ecosystem, other VCs, investors, LPs, companies, partners, all the ecosystem.”

He notes that he does encounter concern about operational continuity for Israeli companies during wartime. Questions about whether engineers can still reach the office. About what happens to a company when its CEO is called up for reserve duty. These are legitimate business anxieties, not antisemitic ones.

“There were some noises in the EU in the later part of the Gaza war in August, September of last year,” he acknowledged. “Maybe there will be some sanctions from the EU on Israel. So these were some issues that were maybe coming — but again, nothing that I can directly connect to any antisemitic comment.”

Looking Ahead

Westman is optimistic about the decade ahead. The deal flow he reviews weekly has improved materially in quality over his two years at Planven. European founders are arriving at first meetings with more global ambition than he had seen before. The capital environment, for all its structural gaps, is maturing.

But the honest version of the story holds the tension rather than resolving it. European sovereign capital is being deployed by the same governments whose foreign policy toward Israel remains complicated and variable. The business relationships have proven durable so far. Whether that durability persists as the geopolitical environment continues to shift is the question nobody in Westman’s world can fully answer.

What the numbers show, and what his experience confirms, is that the economic logic of the Israel-Europe tech relationship is stronger than the political conversations around it. Europe needs what Israel has built. And Israeli companies, for all the complexity of the European market, cannot afford to ignore a customer base of 450 million people sitting a few hours’ flight away.

The fund, one of the first in Israel to explicitly target defensetech, had already placed bets on the idea that the US-Israel alliance was evolving from a diplomatic relationship into something more structural. Founders Lital Leshem and Lee Moser imagined a technology pipeline backed by private capital, battlefield data, and a generation of founders who had seen war up close.

“When an Israeli company wants to sell today to the DoD, we have the mutual understanding that we stand for the same values, and we fight together,” Moser said. A former Israeli diplomat and chief of staff to Ambassador Michael Oren, she spent years in the corridors of Congress lobbying for Israeli defense systems.

The Data Point Advantage

“Most of the entrepreneurs in Israel are graduates of elite information units… Add to that the revolution of AI and add to that what the world sees right now,” she added. “You got yourself a superpower. Superpower with data from the battlefield.”

Israel’s defensetech sector has long been seen as a natural evolution of cybersecurity, which in turn was born out of Israel’s need to create robust security measures upon its establishment in 1948. The US-Israel alliance has been strong since its inception.

But what makes this defense relationship different in 2026 isn’t just the joint operations. It’s what Moser calls Israel’s data advantage: 80 years of continuous conflict compressed into a body of operational intelligence that no other country can replicate. “Unfortunately, we’ve [needed] to fight for 80 years,” she said. “And this data can be translated to save people's lives in all aspects.”

Founders in today’s Startup Nation era who build on that data are a different breed from the fintech and cybersecurity entrepreneurs who came before them. They’re coming out of active reserve duty, returning from the battlefield with firsthand knowledge of what the technology gaps actually are. “They know exactly what the pain is,” added Leshem, who was herself at the IDF Southern Command’s Central War Room by 9 am on October 7. “They’re coming with their own ideas and a lot of motivation to grow it and implement it. And it’s actually happening.”

America First, India Next

The loop that battlefield experience feeds into startup formation, which then feeds into defense procurement, is something I have witnessed over the last few years. And it is accelerating beyond the US–Israel axis. From India to Europe, governments and institutions are increasingly looking to plug into Israeli defense innovation, whether through partnerships, procurement, or investment.

One of Protego’s portfolio companies, Xtend, recently closed an $11 million contract in India for its drone-integrated robotics system. The US remains the primary go-to-market, but the alliance architecture Protego is betting on extends globally.

The Information War

One final aspect of our conversation focused on the changing battlefield and how the country’s fights have migrated from land and sea to online. Moser was unambiguous about what she sees as an equally urgent front: the information war, waged through AI-generated content, foreign influence operations, and weaponized social media ecosystems.

“What was real? What was fake? I think what we see today is like the first AI war,” she said. The conflict with Iran has only sharpened that point: deepfake propaganda, coordinated disinformation, and AI-generated imagery have become standard tools of modern conflict, running parallel to every kinetic operation.

Protego is actively backing founders working in what Leshem calls the “cognitive war” space, treating information integrity as a defense problem with the same urgency as drone protection or force projection. “Everything that has to do with the cognitive war or the information war, that is something that we’re seeing a lot,” Leshem said. “A lot of entrepreneurs are going in this direction.”

[5-minute preview: Israel's defense sector is creating global alliances]

Four weeks into Operation Roaring Lion, the Israel Innovation Authority has surveyed 637 executives to find out what the war is actually doing to Startup Nation.

The numbers aren’t pretty, but they’re not surprising either.

The most urgent finding is what’s happening to capital. 71% of companies say the security situation has disrupted their investment processes. Of those, 37% are facing delays, 23% have had investors stall or postpone decisions, and 11% have already canceled their fundraising processes entirely.

For a startup that is months away from closing a round, that last figure could potentially mean the end of the company’s life.

The Damage Isn’t Even

The financial impact isn’t evenly spread across the country. Companies in Israel’s north and south are canceling fundraising at roughly double the rate of those in Tel Aviv and the center: 18% versus 8–10%.

Even though the center may feel as though it is the target of larger physical attacks from Iran and its proxies, it’s a reminder that the war doesn’t look the same from a startup in the Galilee as it does from a WeWork in Sarona. Smaller companies are bearing a disproportionate share of the economic pressure: roughly 12–13% of firms with fewer than 50 employees have abandoned capital raising altogether.

This is happening against an already difficult funding backdrop. Israeli startups raised $15.6 billion in 2025, but the number of deals fell to just 717 (the lowest in a decade), with half of all capital concentrated in rounds above $100 million.

Subscribe now

This means that the money is here, but it’s flowing toward the big and the established. For everyone else, Operation Roaring Lion is closing a door that was already narrowing.

Small Companies, Outsized Risk

Then there’s the question of whether some companies survive this at all. 12% of respondents say that if the security situation continues for another month, their company may close. Startups with fewer than 10 employees represent the majority of companies in Israel’s ecosystem, and among those, that figure climbs to 17% - with an additional 40% expecting to downsize or delay projects.

It doesn’t take long for development to slip. 87% of companies report some delay in meeting product or launch milestones, with 42% calling those delays significant. Meanwhile, nearly half (48%) of all companies say that more than a quarter of their workforce is currently absent: pulled away by reserve duty, security restrictions, or a childcare system that has largely stopped functioning.

Considering the Exit

And if the war keeps going, 31% say they’ve considered relocating operations overseas. Of those weighing relocation, 80% are internationally oriented companies, the exact companies whose global reach and foreign-currency revenues the broader economy depends on most.

If that sentiment turns into action, the consequences would extend beyond Startup Nation and into the broader economy.

“Israeli high-tech continues to demonstrate its resilience and its ability to operate even under challenging conditions,” said Dror Bin, CEO of the Israel Innovation Authority, acknowledging the strain while framing it in the context of the sector’s track record. “Experience from recent years shows that the sector has proven its ability to recover quickly. The current challenge is to enable companies to navigate this period and return to a growth trajectory once the conflict subsides.”

The recovery from Iron Swords was indeed faster and stronger than many expected, and Bin said the Authority is currently analyzing all survey responses and examining potential support mechanisms. “Should the security situation continue, the Israel Innovation Authority will act to formulate measures... to ensure the sector’s stability and its ability to continue growing and leading on the global stage,” he added.

The sector has proven it can absorb a shock like October 7. But as this new war appears to evolve into the next and newest ongoing conflict, it now depends on whether it can absorb a grind.

That’s the sentiment across the startup world right now. Claude can do new things each week that were once considered core products of companies, not just simple feature additions. Each week, founders watch their whole business become a footnote, and the post-mortems begin.

I recently spoke to Eyal Fisher, co-founder and CPO of Sweet Security, and former head of the cyber operations center in IDF Unit 8200, about this. Even though the concerns are real, the lesson is being misread.

When a major AI platform ships a capability that overlaps with an existing startup’s product, the instinct is to panic. Fisher pushes back on the reaction. “I think that in most cases, it’s a little bit too early,” he says. “If that capability will miss important things, really bad things can happen. So I’m not sure that everybody’s running to replace all the security tools with AI — yet this is a trend. This is where it’s going.”

After more than two decades in Israeli military cyber operations, he co-founded Sweet Security in 2022 alongside former IDF CISO Dror Kashti and Unit 81 veteran Orel Ben Ishay. The company has since raised $120 million, including a $75 million Series B led by Evolution Equity Partners, and grown its enterprise customer base tenfold. So when Fisher talks about what it takes to survive, he’s speaking from experience.

The Core Capability Trap

According to Fisher, founders who treat these announcements as an obituary are making a strategic error.

The deeper problem, he argues, is that founders are building companies around capabilities, rather than ecosystems. “Let’s say that you’re trying to invent some kind of system that can summarize calls,” he tells me. “That capability is a waste of time to develop today because AI is doing it like that.”

Companies that once developed transcription and call summarization as their core product a decade ago do face a reckoning: not because they ‘failed’, but because the ground shifted underneath them.

For example, I use a media platform to record my podcasts, and an instant transcription is available as an extra feature. I no longer need an entirely new service because it’s part of the suite I operate in. It’s great as a user, but Fisher said that founders need to consider this everywhere and build the moat around the capability, not inside it. “You need to make sure that it’s going to be easy to use, interact with everything else that you have in your company, have a full ecosystem.”

This pattern is already playing out across software: from media tools to sales platforms to developer products. In other words, the feature will be commoditized. But the platform and its integrations are harder to replicate.

What Every New Founder Should Know

Fisher is a founder with 25 years of experience behind him, as opposed to many founders who are only 25 years in age. His advice to young entrepreneurs starting today urges them to pursue things that AI cannot disrupt today.

“Go after things that cannot be disrupted today by AI,” he said. “You don’t want to build something that someone else can do exactly the same in like half a year… If you think that you can do something in half a year, someone else can do it in half a year as well.” But then came the truth underneath that advice: “At the end, AI will replace everything.”

For many users, including myself, features like transcription are now embedded into existing tools I use for video recording and editing - I’m not looking for a solo tool anymore. So, his advice is particularly relevant for founders thinking about what to build next.

If replacement is as inevitable as he says, then the question becomes how much time you have before it happens - and what you build around your core in the meantime. That way, you can avoid the dreaded update from a large AI giant that risks putting you out of business.

Sweet Security’s Own Answer

Fisher applies this logic to his own company. Sweet Security’s runtime sensor — the technical foundation of its cloud security platform — is written in Rust, a low-level programming language that makes it unusually difficult to replicate. “There is almost no other company out there that wrote such a sensor in that programming language,” Fisher says. “It’s very hard. It’s very complicated.”

But even he doesn’t treat that as a permanent shield. “Eventually, maybe it’s going to happen. Until that happens, what we are doing is building the ecosystem around it.”

The Bottom Line

For founders worried every time a major AI company posts on X, Fisher’s parting advice cuts through the noise: “Patience. One day you are here, one day you are here. You need patience and resilience. It’s a hard journey.”

The founders who survive the AI update cycle will be the ones who built the deepest and had the discipline to keep building when everyone else was busy panicking.

[5-minute preview: AI's Impact on Startups: Avoiding "The Core Capability Trap"]

“In order to make an experience… it can be thousands of workers,” Omri Dekalo explained.

The hidden infrastructure behind modern events is a fragmented labor force made up of temporary workers, contractors, and staffing agencies. It spans industries (from sports and concerts to catering, security, and hospitality) and often operates in clear view but with near-total invisibility.

“No one feels it, no one sees it,” Dekalo said. “It just works and it creates amazing moments.” But beneath that seamless experience is a system that, until recently, was anything but that.

Dekalo is the co-founder and CEO of Ubeya, an Israeli B2B SaaS platform positioning itself as an “operating system” for this invisible workforce. With more than 250,000 workers on the platform and clients including Wembley, Wimbledon, and the UEFA Champions League Final, Ubeya sits at the intersection of the gig economy, HR tech, and the multibillion-dollar live events industry.

It’s a space that, until recently, many will recognize as still being managed largely through WhatsApp groups or spreadsheets. Workers would check in via pen and paper, or be reassigned mid-shift with a handwritten note.

The scale of what happens behind the scenes at a major event is something most attendees never consider. A Taylor Swift concert is not a Champions League final - even if they sometimes use the same venue. Each event requires a completely different configuration of workers like caterers, cleaners, security personnel, stagehands, or bar staff.

Many of these workers don’t even work directly for the venue itself.

At Wembley, as at most major stadiums globally, a significant portion of the workforce is sourced through third-party agencies. Before platforms like Ubeya, coordinating all of them would take up space, time, and energy for all involved.

“It’s moments that people like remember for their whole life,” he said, discussing the excitement of attending a live event. “And in order to make it happen, there are a lot of stakeholders… that are doing a lot of work there. It can be thousands of workers that are coming early in the morning.”

Subscribe now

Ubeya's platform streamlines that complexity into a single system. Managers can check worker availability, book and approve staff, track time and attendance, and run payroll all from one place.

The platform also tracks which individual is deployed in which area, how much revenue they generated, how well they performed, and where they should be redeployed mid-event. "Suddenly this whole connection between the tech and the real life — that's the magic," Dekalo explained.

An Event Operating System for Post-Pandemic Performances

We are six years since the start of Covid-19, and while there was a dip in live performances for most of that time, the industry is experiencing a surge.

There are currently 500 stadiums under construction in the United States alone, part of a broader shift toward multipurpose venues that can host a football game one weekend and a global concert tour the next. Wembley, for example, now sits at the center of an entire neighborhood: hotels, malls, and restaurants are all built around the stadium as the anchor experience. The workforce required to run that ecosystem is only growing.

Ubeya has scaled roughly ten times in revenue over the past two and a half years, employs more than 50 people, and is operationally breakeven on $13.5 million raised to date, with enough cash for a run rate of 40 years.

“That’s a lot of Taylor Swift,” I said. “That’s a lot of heartbreak.”

[5-minute preview: The “invisible workers” behind your Taylor Swift concerts]

Since November 2025, I’ve been sitting down with investors and founders across Israel to explore the intersection of tech, business, society, and current affairs.

Nothing has been off-limits, and I’ve taken something valuable from every single conversation.

If you’re subscribed, you’ve probably seen these episodes land in your inbox (I aim for two each week). But realistically, not everyone has the time to watch full-length interviews — and that’s completely fine.

So over the past few days, I’ve started cutting some of my Forbes Israel interviews into shorter, 5–10 minute clips specifically designed to be easier to dip into and get the key insights quickly.

I’ve included a selection below. Some key topics include:

• The tech solution to the Strait of Hormuz challenge

• AI’s regulation race between the US, EU, and China

• Hacking Instagram

• Israel’s economy post-Iran

• The Google/OpenAI race

• and more…

Nine episodes are currently in post-production, with three more scheduled — so expect plenty more landing in your inbox soon, as well as another highlights post in the future.

Lior Dolinski | Agora

“Day One Mentality”: What we can learn from Jeff Bezos

A $400 trillion real estate industry is finally moving beyond Excel, led by a startup founded by veterans of the IDF’s Unit 8200.

Agora has raised almost $64 million, including a $34 million Series B last year led by Qumra Capital with participation from Insight Partners and Aleph. In 2025, it was named as one of Israel’s Most Promising Startups by Calcalist, and each founder was included in Forbes’ “30 Under 30” for their innovation.

Watch episode 36

Roey Eliyahu | Salt Security

This IDF soldier secured a Y Combinator investment to create a billion-dollar business

Hear how Roey Eliyahu took his army idea and turned it into Salt Security, a billion-dollar company backed by Sam Altman.

Watch episode 30

Noam Solomon | Immunai

“It’s like dancing with gorillas.” How startups navigate Big Pharma

In the United States, funding cuts threaten to slow basic research at the very moment when the complexity of biological problems is increasing. As public support tightens, the pressure grows to build new kinds of infrastructure that can help translate scientific discovery into long-term medical progress.

Watch episode 38

Aya Peterburg | S Capital

Israeli Investors: Measured in bad days (from Covid to NVIDIA exit)

“As an investor, I believe that our role is being measured in the bad days,” said S Capital investor Aya Peterburg. “Helping the founders find their way to a safe zone.”

Watch episode 34

Amir Fishelov | Square One Labs

“It doesn’t matter if Google will win the race or OpenAI... They all need the same infrastructure.”

Amir Fishelov shares why he started Square One Labs with Jonathan Bik and Yoav Galin.

The need for deeptech infrastructure, such as physical robotics, energy, or semiconductors, is essential regardless of who "wins" the AI race.

Watch episode 48

Gal Elbaz | Oligo Security

Hacking Instagram: A white hat perspective

Oligo Security’s Gal Elbaz says hacking and manipulation are the same skill. That insight is now a business worth $80 million.

Watch episode 60

Yonatan Sela | Square Peg

How is Israel's tech scene so resilient during wartime?

“Because of the level of uncertainty you experience here, I think people are just better suited for that than most of their counterparts in other parts of the world,” explained Yonatan Sela from Square Peg. “If you don’t know if you’re going to live next week, of course, you operate differently than if you’re operating in a perfectly stable environment: If you don’t know if you need to get a funding round done before a war breaks out, you operate differently with a different sense of urgency.”

The resilience that Israelis demonstrated in these last few years has amounted to historic deals like the $32 billion acquisition deal between Google and Wiz, or the IPO for eToro. “The tech ecosystem held up during the war and came out a lot stronger. And I think there’s renewed interest from international investors in Israel,” Sela said.

Watch episode 32

Yair Adato | Bria AI

AI regulation: A geopolitical game between USA, EU, and China

As giants like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI race to dominate AI, startups like Bria are trying to build a fairer system for creators.

The idea of companies having a central control in the direction of AI-generated content can be considered a geopolitical problem, not just a market one. We reference similar ideological fault lines that produced competing visions of the internet: Silicon Valley’s open innovation, Europe’s regulatory model, and China’s state control are now reasserting themselves around AI infrastructure.

The outcome of that contest, he argues, will matter more than any individual model breakthrough.

Watch episode 59

Yarden Gross | Orca AI

Why are ships suddenly losing GPS in the Strait of Hormuz?

As tensions rise between Iran and Israel, one narrow stretch of water is once again holding the global economy hostage: the Strait of Hormuz.

Nearly a third of the world’s seaborne oil passes through the corridor each day. This week alone, Iran deployed sea mines in the channel - and GPS spoofing, which is the manipulation of satellite navigation signals, continues to disrupt ships moving through the region.

For Yarden Gross, co-founder and CEO of maritime technology company Orca AI, this is exactly the kind of moment his industry has feared. “90% of the goods today in the world, $5 trillion a year, is moving through the seas,” he said. “When you see the disruptions happening, it’s usually when you see major events.”

Watch episode 57

Ezra Gardner & Travis Vap | Varana Capital & South Valley

What role will Tel Aviv play in Israel's post-war recovery after Iran?

As Israel navigates renewed conflict with Iran, the country’s stock exchange did something surprising. Instead of tanking, it did the opposite. The TA-125 Index climbed to record highs of around 4,200 points, which represents a 66% increase compared to this time last year. At the same time, the Israeli shekel strengthened against the U.S. dollar.

That isn’t to say the conflict hasn’t caused disruption and anxiety across the country, but it does demonstrate that there is confidence in Israel’s ability to bounce back from adversity.

Watch episode 55

Liad Elidan | Milestone

AI’s Impact on Code Review & Future Engineers

As companies rush to deploy generative AI, a new category of tools is emerging to answer a simple question: Is it actually improving anything?

Watch episode 58

Doron Zauer | Earth & Beyond Ventures

Deeptech's resilience in Israel's economic turmoil

Israel’s tech ecosystem faced turbulence during the war. But not all sectors felt it equally.

I spoke to Doron Zauer, General Partner at Earth & Beyond Ventures, to unpack what the last few years have meant for early-stage deeptech. While later-stage companies initially struggled with reliance on foreign capital, early-stage investing (particularly in deeptech) showed resilience.

As Doron put it: “We’re investing at the super early stage… a 10–12 year journey. So we need to be good estimators of trends and of sustained demand.”

Watch episode 31

“We wanted to hack Instagram because they’re Instagram, right? We don’t need a lot of motivation,” the co-founder and CTO of Oligo Security told me in a recent interview. What followed was a lesson in how modern cybersecurity actually works - not through confrontations with shadowy figures, but through the quiet exploitation of a single overlooked library buried deep inside one of the world’s most downloaded applications.

I’ve spoken to many cybersecurity companies over the years, each of which addresses safety and protection in different ways. Usually, I hear about how they try to prevent attacks. This was the first time I had heard from a white-hat hacker.

For those unfamiliar, a white hat hacker (or ethical hacker) is a cybersecurity professional authorized to identify security vulnerabilities in systems, software, or networks. By using ethical methods like penetration testing and scanning, they strengthen security before malicious hackers can exploit weaknesses.

Today, the company’s mission is to redefine how application security works in modern software environments. This is achieved by focusing on what’s actually happening at runtime, rather than just scanning code or assessing theoretical risks. Its Application Detection and Response platform now protects Fortune 500 companies and recently secured a partnership with AWS. The company was founded in 2023 and has raised approximately $80 million to date, backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Ballistic Ventures, and TLV Partners, as well as security veterans like Shlomo Kramer, Adi Sharabani, and Eyal Manor.

Elbaz and his team didn’t brute-force their way into Instagram. They found a vulnerability in an open-source image compression library built by Mozilla Firefox — the kind of invisible, unglamorous code that powers millions of apps without anyone realizing. The result was total access.

“The moment that we can literally execute code, you can take over the flow of the application, we control the application,” he said. “We are Instagram - and we have everything that we want over your phone. We have every permission that exists. We have access to the camera, to the gallery, to the memory, to your contacts, to everything.”

One thing that adds intrigue to my conversation with Elbaz is the way he thinks about what hacking actually is. For him, breaking into a machine and reading a person operate on the same fundamental logic. “Hacking is the art of controlling someone else’s mind, so to speak,” he explains. “Hacking is the manipulation of human beings who are behind the software. Phishing is the thing that brings them together because you trick people with technology.”

He carries that philosophy into how he runs his company. “As a founder, you sell to employees, to customers, to investors, to everything around you — you sell, sell, sell, sell. And people don’t get it, that it’s very similar to talking to a machine. A very random machine. But it is a machine.”

That mindset was forged early. Elbaz grew up in elite IDF intelligence units alongside his co-founders, CEO Nadav Czerninski and CPO Avshalom Hilu — childhood friends whose parents were themselves childhood friends — before going on to Check Point Software, where he spent years hacking the world’s biggest applications and presenting findings at black hat conferences and DEF CON.

The Instagram hack wasn’t just a headline. It was the founding insight behind Oligo. What struck Elbaz was that the entire security industry was oriented around catching attackers after they’d already won. He wanted to catch them at the moment of entry. “We thought, what about detecting the act of the breach? What if you can detect the root cause? What if you can catch the hacker when they’re trying to get in? Because after they got in, you lost.”

Subscribe now

The urgency behind that mission has only intensified. The same open-source vulnerability problem that Elbaz exploited manually against Instagram can now be discovered and weaponized by AI agents in a fraction of the time. “It used to take 30 days to weaponize a zero-day by the most sophisticated attackers. Today it’s minus one. Agents can actually find zero days and exploit them so they can do the zero to one by themselves.” The defender’s margin for error, already razor-thin, is disappearing entirely.

When I asked Elbaz which side of that equation feels more natural to him, the hacker or defender, he doesn’t hesitate. “Definitely the hacking one, a lot more fun. When it’s hacking, it’s pretty easy, right? It’s about yes or no, could I hack you or not? The proof is in the pudding.”

The man who spent his career finding holes in systems — digital and human alike — is now in the business of closing them.

[5-minute preview: Hacking Instagram, a white hat perspective]

“People think about this revolution as a technology revolution,” he said. “It has nothing to do with technology. It’s all about the economy and society. The technology is just an enabler.”

Bria AI is an Israeli company building licensed generative image infrastructure for enterprise clients. It ensures that AI-generated images and videos are controlled, accountable, and compliant by working with stock image providers like Getty and others. These, in turn, train its foundation models while also ensuring royalties and fair compensation for creators.

It has raised more than $66 million from VCs such as Red Dot Capital, Entrée Capital, IN Venture, and others.

When speaking with Adato, it was clear that he believes the product exists because a major obstacle to AI adoption isn’t just about model quality. It is about ownership, provenance, and legal usability.

One consideration in all of this is the concentration of some of the leading players in the AI space. As a handful of American hyperscalers like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI race to control the AI stack, Adato sees the distribution of benefits becoming dangerously narrow. “It’s a question of how the resources will split between current players, future players, and society,” he said. “There is a voice that wants to have all of the resources, all of the benefits of AI, for a few big companies. I think there will be a second voice that tries to split it more equally — because you don’t want to have three companies that basically control the world.”

Subscribe now

The idea of companies having a central control in the direction of AI-generated content can be considered a geopolitical problem, not just a market one. We reference similar ideological fault lines that produced competing visions of the internet: Silicon Valley’s open innovation, Europe’s regulatory model, and China’s state control are now reasserting themselves around AI infrastructure.

The outcome of that contest, he argues, will matter more than any individual model breakthrough.

AI’s Spotify Moment

The closest parallel may be the music industry's own reckoning a decade ago. The internet created a data distribution crisis that the music industry fought legally before Spotify resolved it economically — through per-use licensing, attribution architecture, and revenue sharing.

Generative AI is producing a data generation crisis that demands the same kind of structural solution. “Spotify said something really smart,” he explained. “Instead of buying the album, we will let you use it per use, per listening. And every time you hear a song, there is a mechanism behind the scenes to pay the artist.”

Bria AI is building that mechanism for visual artificial intelligence: an attribution engine that tracks which training data influenced a generated image and routes revenue back to the original creators. But Adato is candid about the gap between the vision and the current reality. He acknowledged Spotify’s failure in that the studios got rich, but the artists mostly didn’t. “We try to do it differently… but in many cases, the artist is simply not there.”

Share

The stakes go beyond fairness to individual creators. If synthetic media can replicate everything for free, the incentive to create erodes entirely. “The fact that we can monetize intellectual property is mandatory to continue to develop the economy and society,” he says. “If you cancel the concept of copyright, there’s no reason to create games and movies. There’s no reason to create a brand because it has no value anymore.”

Regulation, he believes, is coming to answer the question the market has so far avoided: Who gets to benefit, and on what terms? “Something will happen,” he says. “I don’t know when, I don’t know how. But something will happen.”

The revolution, it turns out, will not be televised - it will be generated. But whether the economy forming around it is a fair one remains entirely unresolved.

Watch a 5-min preview:

“AI regulation: A geopolitical game between USA, EU, and China”

Across industries, executives are urging teams to integrate AI into their workflows. Engineers want access to AI coding assistants, and consumers are constantly being introduced to new AI products whether they want them or not.

But amid the rush to deploy new tools, many organizations are overlooking a simple question. Is it doing its job and making anything any better?

“We are helping engineering leadership to govern AI and adopt it,” said Liad Elidan, co-founder and CEO of Milestone. The platform provides engineering leadership with something deceptively simple: an honest account of what AI is actually doing inside their organization. Not what the AI vendors tell them it’s doing — what’s really happening, measured against business outcomes that matter.

Elidan described it as a situation where the whole system is pushing forward at once: “The world’s adopting AI. Every person is using AI, either in their personal life or in their professional life.” But the result is that many organizations deploy AI tools before they fully understand what those tools are actually doing. And the metrics provided by those tools do not necessarily answer the questions executives actually care about.

This is giving rise to an emerging category of technology: systems designed specifically to measure the interaction between humans and AI tools inside enterprise environments. Milestone sits at the center of that category — sitting above the vendors, correlating usage data with actual engineering outcomes like code quality, review times, and delivery speed.

Elidan described this challenge as a shift in management thinking. “Now you add another animal into the play, which is AI itself.” Looking further ahead, he is optimistic about where this leads — for engineers willing to adapt. The profession isn’t contracting, he argues. It’s mutating into something far more powerful.

Subscribe now

“It’s very controversial,” he said, “but you can be much more independent now. And that is amazing.” The engineer who learns to work with AI tools effectively, who treats adaptability as a core professional skill rather than an occasional inconvenience, is not being replaced. They are being amplified.

Five years from now, Elidan predicts the best engineers won’t be defined by what they can write, but by what they can direct. “I expect that engineer to be almost a Superman engineer compared to the engineer of today,” he said. “He’ll have a hundred or more agents under his belt — agents that he can run, configure, and push forward.”

The future of software development, in other words, may be defined by the ability to manage how humans and AI work together and the wisdom to actually measure whether it’s going well.

Nearly a third of the world’s seaborne oil passes through the corridor each day. This week alone, Iran deployed sea mines in the channel - and GPS spoofing, which is the manipulation of satellite navigation signals, continues to disrupt ships moving through the region.

For Yarden Gross, co-founder and CEO of maritime technology company Orca AI, this is exactly the kind of moment his industry has feared. “90% of the goods today in the world, $5 trillion a year, is moving through the seas,” he said. “When you see the disruptions happening, it’s usually when you see major events.”

Subscribe now

Those events are now arriving in quick succession. The corridor is narrow, congested, and the world is watching it get weaponised. These tensions are creating a distinct kind of disruption, sending oil prices climbing and forcing shipping companies to navigate increasingly dangerous waters.

This is where a company like Orca AI can help. It has built a platform that collects data from onboard cameras and sensors, analyzes it in real time, and shares it across a network of ships. The company now has over 100 million nautical miles of data, compounding as more vessels come online.

In a GPS-denied environment, the system operates independently of all standard navigation instruments, using thermal cameras and computer vision to detect objects — including small boats, and now, sea mines — that would otherwise be invisible at night.

When spoofing is detected on one ship, alerts are shared with others approaching the same area. “They can actually take preventive actions,” says Gross. “They can be aware that reaching an area or a specific location, they’re going to have GPS spoofing there.”

For decades, maritime technology lagged far behind other industries. The reason, he argued, was structural: without reliable internet connectivity at sea, updating software across a fleet required physically boarding each vessel with a hard drive. The arrival of low-orbit satellite internet in 2023 changed everything. “I saw like a massive change,” says Gross. “It’s so massive changing the perspective of the shipping companies, how they look at technology.”

The longer-term vision goes further than smarter ships with human crews. Gross anticipates a shift in how the industry thinks about high-risk corridors — from large, expensive vessels requiring protection, to smaller autonomous craft designed for agility and expendability. “Imagine if you had a small swarm of smaller vessels that can actually take fuel and gas out of there,” he said. “If one is going to get hit, fine. It’s going to be a very small quantity and it’s not going to be like a hit on a major tanker.”

The Strait of Hormuz is narrow, but its implications are vast. What is playing out there right now is not just a regional conflict story, or an energy markets story. It is a story about whether the technology underpinning global trade can keep pace with the forces trying to disrupt it.

A new “Women in High-Tech Status Report” from the Israel Innovation Authority has highlighted that even though more women are studying tech-relevant programs like computer science, and young women are entering high-tech at record numbers, the country is failing to retain them in leadership.

As their career progresses, women account for only 24.3% of senior leadership positions and fewer than 11% of startup CEOs. The disparity is particularly stark in venture capital: startups founded by women raised roughly 4.5% of total funding. That number shrinks to an even smaller fraction when considering the bias toward second-time entrepreneurs, who raise capital at easier rates than first-time founders due to past success and trust from within the ecosystem.

What appears at first to be a social imbalance can also be seen as an economic constraint on the country’s innovation and growth. “It is not just a women’s issue,” said its author, Rachel Cooper Be’er, Chief Economist at the Policy Division, Israel Innovation Authority. “I think it is mainly an economic issue for Israel, where the high-tech sector is driven by its best minds and capabilities.”

National Implications

The consequences extend beyond improving bottlenecks and focusing on retention. Israel’s high-tech sector is a cornerstone of the national economy and a strategic asset for national security. Startup Nation makes up 11.4% of the Israeli workforce and is responsible for roughly 20% of Israel’s GDP and over 50% of exports.

Underutilizing half of the talent pool not only limits growth and innovation but also exacerbates a perceived labor shortage. The report suggests that the challenge is less about education or ability, and more about broadening the bottlenecks for women to advance, lead, and stay in the sector.

Closing this gap could unlock one of Israel’s largest untapped economic reserves and strengthen the country’s competitive edge on the global stage. “Fifty percent of the population is not applying their abilities or ideas towards building companies and creating more initiatives and more job opportunities for other people to work within their companies,” she added. “We’re definitely losing out. We’re all missing out.”

Read more

While the explosion of AI has certainly made the sector a fascinating place for technical discussions, there are also many areas where we can explore the human side of cybersecurity.

Take security operations centers (SOCs), for example. These SOCs operate within large organizations that rely on dozens of monitoring tools to detect suspicious activity across networks, devices, and identity systems. Each system generates alerts when something unusual occurs.

In theory, those alerts help security teams identify attacks early. But in practice, they can overwhelm the people responsible for responding.

“Over time, this became overwhelming,” said Guy Teverovsky, co-founder and CTO of Semperis. “We have been hearing from multiple customers that they are drowning under the amount of different alerts from different solutions.”

Organizations are now collecting so much security data that analysts often struggle to determine which alerts represent genuine threats and which are harmless anomalies. The change in new age cybersecurity means that challenges are not only technical, but they can have a lasting impact on the stress levels of industry workers.

Teverovsky said that when security teams face thousands of alerts every day, their most valuable resource becomes the ability to prioritize. Missing the one critical signal buried in a sea of warnings can allow attackers to escalate privileges, move through networks, or disrupt key infrastructure.

Subscribe now

“Prioritization becomes critical,” he explained. “You have to surface the most critical findings… otherwise you’re in a big problem.”

That pressure has pushed many cybersecurity companies to rethink how alerts are generated and delivered. Instead of flooding analysts with raw signals, modern systems increasingly attempt to contextualize threats, highlight the most dangerous activity, and recommend specific remediation steps.

Semperis provides threat prevention, detection, response, and recovery for Active Directory, the Microsoft directory service for connecting users with network resources. Customers who use its services get layered defense across the entire lifecycle of an AD-based attack, both on-prem and in the cloud.

The company serves over 1,000 organizations, including government agencies and a significant portion of the largest U.S. companies. It has raised a total of $369.5 million.

AI plays a role in helping teams process all this new information by helping security platforms analyze patterns across massive volumes of data. But even as automation improves, the human factor remains central to cyber defense.

Decision-making during a live security incident still depends on experienced engineers, analysts, and responders who must interpret signals, assess risk, and act quickly under pressure.

So in that sense, cybersecurity today is about enabling people to make the right decisions in an environment defined by constant digital noise.

As Israel navigates renewed conflict with Iran, the country’s stock exchange did something surprising. Instead of tanking, it did the opposite. The TA-125 Index climbed to record highs of around 4,200 points, which represents a 66% increase compared to this time last year. At the same time, the Israeli shekel strengthened against the U.S. dollar.

That isn’t to say the conflict hasn’t caused disruption and anxiety across the country, but it does demonstrate that there is confidence in Israel’s ability to bounce back from adversity.

"The stock market is a predictor of what the belief or expectation is about what's going to happen in the future, not what's happened in the past," said Ezra Gardner, Partner at Varana Capital. “The stock market in Israel is actually doing the right thing, because the signaling is that Israel is going to boom when this is over. Israel is going to be the winner, and Israel is going to deliver even more on the things that they’ve delivered on in the past, in innovation and helping the world.”

Gardner was supposed to arrive in Israel alongside South Valley CEO Travis Vap, and this episode was supposed to take place in a studio. But when their flight was cancelled hours before take off, we decided to continue our conversation as planned, this time virtually.

Subscribe now

It was already in the calendar, so it made sense to everyone. According to both men, not a single meeting with Israeli companies or officials was cancelled.

“To me, these people are in a geopolitical conflict that I can’t imagine because I’m not there and I’m not dealing with it,” said Vap. “But the fact that we’re on calls, on Zoom, on Teams, and it is...4pm, 6pm, 8pm, 10pm Israeli time. It’s just a little overwhelming… it just reinforces what good people there are, people that are focusing on much bigger things than what's happening right now on the ground.”

The case for the TASE’s trajectory may lie in this response to adversity that has become all too familiar since the early days of the pandemic. Gardner and Vap had been to Israel before (Vap only once) and were struck by the entrepreneurial culture embodied among its people. Despite the country’s challenges and an army mobilization rate that at one time reached 15% of the tech workforce, business rarely slowed.

Share

In fact, for Gardner’s deeptech and hardware portfolio companies — the kind involved in drones, semiconductors, and defense-adjacent infrastructure — closer to 50% of staff were called up. “The productivity actually went up. People worked 10 times harder when half of the staff was gone.”

Gardner spent the first half of his career in the public markets. His experience spans from J.P. Morgan to Michael Dell’s family office, MSD Capital, and running the US equities desk at UBS at an unusually young age. So, when he says the TASE is doing “the right thing,” it carries weight. He argues that the market isn’t ignoring the war - it’s pricing in what comes after it.

You can catch our entire conversation about the market’s response to the war in the video above.

This week, I spoke to Varon, who started BHforBitcoin, an online course where users can learn to understand Bitcoin, money, and global change. He does so through a specific lens: through the context of Jewish historical vulnerability to confiscation and monetary debasement, and the significance of Jewish self-determination in a shaky world.

“We don't know which country's money will get inflated,” he added.
”We don't know which country we might be kicked out of again. And we can say it's not going to happen, but we also know that it has happened.”

It’s only been a few generations since Jews had their homes, finances, and assets taken from them by the Nazis. Today, we can see how civilians caught in conflicts around the world can suffer the same fate. Even in stable democracies, access to financial systems can become politicized through practices like “debanking”, often conducted by the Biden Administration before legal protections were put in place.

He recently launched an online course titled Bitcoin and the Future: Why Jewish History Makes This Technology Impossible to Ignore. For him, Bitcoin is not primarily a speculative asset or a get-rich scheme - and he isn’t out to try to get people to stock up on the asset. Instead, he frames it as a conversation rooted in Jewish memory.

Sign up to BHforBitcoin

“Wherever the Jewish people have gone in their history, they’ve been entrepreneurs, they’ve created their own businesses, they’ve done well economically,” he said. “They’ve created wealth for themselves and their families. But we also see that there’s been, obviously, antisemitism that we’ve been dispersed from countries that we’ve lived in.”

Here’s the primary value for Varon, who has been following and investing in Bitcoin for eight years. “Imagine you were able to take that wealth with you and have a seed phrase or a code in your brain, in your mind, where you can show up in this new country. You don't have to start over.”

His course is concise, aimed at beginners, and is explained through the context of the Jewish experience. It is an introduction to fundamentals: supply caps, decentralization, and monetary policy - and explores why those ideas might resonate with a people shaped by exile.

Subscribe now

He describes Bitcoin as freedom from dependence on institutions that history shows are fragile, operating in empires that eventually fall. “No empire in the world has not fallen. It's a fact,” Varon said. “We have seen that empires fall.”

Critics, of course, would point to volatility. Bitcoin has experienced dramatic booms and crashes - at the time of writing, it sits at around $67,000, half of what it was worth at its October 2025 peak. Varon does not deny that. Instead, he describes it as an early-stage technology in price discovery and believes that its omnipresence alone signals its long-term health.

When pressed to define Bitcoin in one sentence, he offers a single word: “Freedom.”

His course is available via the link: https://bhforbitcoin.thinkific.com/products/courses/bitcoin-and-jewish-history?ref=a82aff

For years, he had operated on his own time. As the co-founder, decisions were immediate, and progress was measured in days, not quarters. But once moving into part of a larger company, movement required consensus.

“We had to do some mind-shifting,” he told me. “For example, large companies don’t move like startup companies, and employees cannot move things like founders can. So I had to find a new path for me to move the product in the direction that I thought was right, and the business in the direction that we thought was right.”

Milner spent three years at Aqua with co-founder and CEO Eilon Elhadad before they both left to start Echo Security. The company examines critical components of original open-source code and then rebuilds it from scratch while continuously updating it as new vulnerabilities are discovered.

It has raised $50 million in its first 10 months from Notable Capital, N47, SVCI, Hyperwise Ventures, and SentinelOne S Ventures. The experience did not slow him down, but it changed what he pays attention to when building again.

Subscribe now

Kill Your Darlings

Milner brings new insight and experience to a startup as a second-time founder - something he says offers perspective as he begins to build a new product. This includes knowing when to dive deeper into a product, or accepting when it might be time to change course and remain tuned to the market.

“We product engineers are all builders, right? They create stuff out of nothing, which is magical on its own, but you fall in love with it,” he said. “The more time you invest in a project, in a feature, in a milestone, the more you are in love with it and the harder it is to shift or pivot.”

For young startups or first-time founders in particular, emotional attachment could become a liability as a company grows and it becomes harder to question whether it should exist at all.

“You have to stay on your toes and be able to not fall in love with the thing you built and be willing to throw it away or to shift left and right to get the correct result of value proposition for your customer.”

At Echo, iteration is treated as part of the process rather than a correction. “It’s about repetitive change… in order to make sure you are on the right path,” he concluded.

And for that love? “I would recommend keeping it platonic.”

However, a new bill introduced in the Utah Senate threatens to end this era of ‘remote matrimony’. The proposed legislation seeks to end Zoom weddings by requiring at least one member of the couple to be physically present for the ceremony to be legally valid.

The trend began in 2022 after a landmark ruling whereby Israel’s Administrative Court instructed the country’s Population and Immigration Authority and the Interior Ministry to recognize any marriage conducted under the pandemic-era “Utah Wedding” framework.

Roughly 30% of all remote weddings conducted in Utah County involve at least one Israeli spouse. After Utah residents themselves, Israelis are the largest demographic using the service.

No civil marriage exists in Israel, meaning that the religious Chief Rabbinate can often apply strict or exclusive conditions on couples who seek to get married in the country. This includes same-sex couples, or those where one spouse is not deemed adequately “Jewish enough” to be recognized.

Subscribe now

Religious advocacy groups even began directing couples toward the Utah framework, and couples could later hold symbolic ceremonies with rabbis of their choosing, separating the legal act from the spiritual one. Even if a couple qualified for a religious ceremony, many would still seek a civil marriage, either by flying to neighboring countries like Cyprus or, in this case, conducting a religious ceremony on Zoom by someone in Utah.

If the bill passes, at least one member of an Israeli couple would again need to fly abroad to get civilly married to one another, reintroducing the geographic barrier that technology briefly erased.

Currently, the bill takes effect on May 6, 2026, unless something changes.

Instead of optimizing for speed alone, some of the biggest AI security companies are being built around principles closer to IDF intelligence operations that include constant simulation, adversarial thinking, after-action reviews, and learning under uncertainty.

To better understand this, I spoke to Ido Geffen, Co-Founder and CEO at Novee Security. Novee is an AI-driven cybersecurity startup focused on transforming how companies find and fix security vulnerabilities.

Rather than traditional penetration testing, which is manual, periodic, and slow, the company uses continuous, autonomous AI that simulates real-world attackers to proactively uncover hidden vulnerabilities and validate them in real time.

Subscribe now

Geffen described modern cyber defense as fundamentally imbalanced. Defenders must be perfect all of the time, whereas attackers only need to succeed once to penetrate a company. Its platform blends offensive cyber tradecraft with AI to close the gap between evolving threats and slower defensive testing processes.

“You can be perfect in 99.9% of the time, but then you have this one hole, and you lose the game,” he explained. “And the bad guy doesn't have these constraints… they just need one shot that will work.”

The new reality facing companies and cyber defense technologies means there is a shift in how to tackle these threats. Traditional enterprise software ships features, but companies like Novee continuously discover failure. This is where the mindset shifts from an engineering discipline to an intelligence discipline.

Geffen, who has experience in the IDF, including time spent in Gaza’s dangerous tunnel system, explained how the differences between preparedness and adaptability were a military skill he adopted and brought to the cybersecurity sector.

“One of the main things that I learned during those years is the ability of every soldier or a man in this type of unit to come up with ideas on how we can improve, what we can do differently,” he explained. “So I think this is one of the strengths of this type of unit. It’s hierarchy and all of that, but in the end, if someone comes up with a very good initiative, you can really change the way things are being done. And I think that, at least for me, it was very inspiring.”

The AI era is creating companies that operate in new environments where the problem space evolves daily - and cybersecurity companies are forced to keep up with the hackers. In those conditions, efficiency is key, and adaptability must operate alongside preparedness.

The company emerged from stealth last month with a $51.5 million funding raise across Seed and Series A in just four months since its founding in May 2025 - a huge testament to its tech, talent, and market position. Backers include YL Ventures, Canaan Partners, and Oren Zeev via Zeev Ventures.

As AI agents interact with complex real-world systems across finance, infrastructure, or healthcare industries, the companies building them will need to adopt strategies that resemble military intelligence: constantly testing reality, updating beliefs, and assuming uncertainty is permanent.

Founded by intelligence veterans Lotan Magal and Neal Tsur, Israeli startup AskIt built AI “synthetic personalities” of 122 real commanders from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The company uses AI behavioral modeling to predict how specific individuals would act in real situations by building detailed profiles from their cumulative life experiences rather than simply prompting a generic language model.

The headline question: Who should replace Ali Khamenei?

The synthetic generals answered:

• ~70% (85 commanders): a military leader

• <30% (36): Khamenei’s son

• 1 commander: a cleric

In other words: the clerical republic’s own security elite, at least behaviorally, prefers a general in charge.

Recent reporting has focused on succession uncertainty in Tehran and the growing political influence of the Guards during regional tensions and internal unrest. AskIt’s model suggests that the shift may be psychologically inevitable.

Subscribe now

"Our 'survey' analyzes the participants' underlying mindset, not necessarily what they would say or advocate for publicly," said Dr. Tsur, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of AskIt, who led the project. "The technology builds a behavioral profile for each commander based on their life experiences, military career, and the events that shaped them, enabling predictions of how they would respond in situations you could never ask them about directly.

"When we ran additional probing questions, we found that those who favor military leadership share a dominant concern for national security above all else. This pattern is consistent with what unfolded inside Iran during the 12-day war, when the IRGC seized control of the country's governance, and with the January protests," he added.

Share The Spiro Circle

How The System Works

The synthetic generals database draws on open-source data, but goes deeper into each commander's cognitive patterns using methodologies from psychology and socio-physics, making it possible to understand how these commanders think even in scenarios where they could never be surveyed directly.

Read more