AI has arrived in the communications industry the way it’s arrived everywhere else, and every agency has an opinion on it. Most of those opinions are defensive. And somewhere between the consultants who insist AI will never replace human storytelling, and the founders who run their entire content operation through Claude, there’s a conversation to be had about what’s actually happening.

Alona Stein has been in tech PR for 13 years. She’s co-CEO of ReBlonde, a Tel Aviv-based agency that has worked with everyone from Spotify to early-stage startups with two founders and a pitch deck. She’s seen cycles like crypto, NFTs, the pandemic, wartime operations, and funding winters, and can spot the difference between a gimmick and a structural shift in the industry.

We spoke about storytelling in wartime, finding founder stories, and, of course, the impact of AI on the media space.

“AI is bad news across the industry,” she told me. “It has the potential to change life for the best. The problem is the misuse… trying to replace things that are not yet ready to be replaced, or may not be able to be replaced at all.”

What she’s talking about specifically is content, and the loss of the “human touch,” which is so important for work like hers. Sending a personal pitch or writing a tailored press release are some of the things that public relations runs on.

“Even now, where AI is a lot sharper than it was three years ago, it is still incapable of writing a story like a journalist,” she said. “And I think you know that, and I know that, and a lot of our friends in the media know that. But somehow the media houses, or the person sitting with the money… they’re going to miss the mark.”

The result is a media landscape that is shrinking both in quality and volume. Fewer journalists, less trust in outlets, and generally more noise. And PR agencies are caught in the middle, competing for an ever-smaller number of slots with reporters who are covering more ground than ever before.

“Already you’re in a position where you have to really sharpen your skills and your stories,” Stein added. “And that’s even before we’re talking about pandemics and AI and wars.”

Here’s where I’ll admit my own bias. For those who don’t know, I’ve been on both sides of the pitch - as the journalist receiving it, and before that, the PR person crafting it. The pitch, at its best, is a sign of a strong relationship. It tells the person you’re contacting that you read their work, understand the beat, and think it’s worth their time. Today I am receiving AI-generated pitches, which say none of those things. And I notice it immediately: The subject lines, structure, and cadence all share the same formula.

And these relationships are where human touch can far outrank AI.

“We would never write a press release with AI. We would never send an AI-driven pitch to the media. I’m speaking to a person. The person expects me, especially if we have this long-lasting relationship, to tell them where I think the story is.”

The agencies that cut those corners will actively burn the infrastructure that makes their job possible: the relationships, the credibility, the basic signal that there’s a human being on the other end who has done the work.

But that’s not the only place where AI will affect the PR industry. Because Alona also understands what’s next.

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When I put it to Gidi Grinstein that Israel is winning the military war but losing the reputation battle, he didn’t flinch. “It’s a fact of life,” he said. But what followed wasn’t a media critique or a complaint about antisemitism on campuses, rather a more uncomfortable discussion about strategy, and who’s responsible for it.

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Gidi was the secretary of Israel’s negotiating delegation at Camp David, the youngest person in the room at the 2000 Summit, and spent seven years inside the machinery of the peace process. In my mind, he has earned the right to say uncomfortable things on this subject. Today, he runs Tikkun Olam Makers, a global initiative co-designing affordable prosthetics with people with disabilities — including a collaborative community in Ramallah. So he is not someone who speaks abstractly about coexistence.

“In the words ‘peace process’,” he told me, “the word process is more important than peace.” His argument is that Israel has to present itself as a party seeking peace; not because it guarantees an agreement, but because without that posture, you lose the political conditions that make any agreement possible. Fighting a war while refusing to articulate what you’re fighting toward is a losing position diplomatically - even when you’re winning militarily.

I pushed back. “Support for Israel and support for the IDF were way low even in the days after October 7,” I said. “It didn’t have to go until March 2025.” Did the decisions of the subsequent months really move the needle that much, or was the collapse baked in from the very early days of the war in Gaza?

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But Terra Security’s AI agents were watching.

AI agents flagged the change, verified a potential vulnerability, and then did something a human penetration tester probably wouldn’t have done. They kept looking. Eventually, they found two more vulnerabilities nearby, each individually insignificant. But they spotted a pattern and connected all three together.

“1+1+1 = 1,000,” said Shahar Peled, co-founder and CEO of Terra Security. The result was a Remote Code Execution (RCE), a cybersecurity vulnerability that allows an attacker to run malicious code on a target system or server from a remote location. It is considered one of the most critical vulnerability classifications of its type.

The customer found out from their vendor, not from an adversary.

Founded in 2024, the Tel Aviv and New York-based startup has raised $38 million across a rapid Seed and Series A, and counts Fortune 100 enterprises among its customers. Its core product is an agentic offensive security platform where swarms of AI agents are trained to think and act like “ethical hackers”, running continuously across a company’s attack surface.

The traditional model of penetration testing (hiring an external team once or twice a year to probe for weaknesses) was never designed to catch what Terra caught in that unnamed financial institution. “Until 2025, it happened on an annual basis mostly,” Peled explained. “Once a year, you hire someone externally to work for a week or two weeks... The reason you couldn’t do it continuously is that you couldn’t really train software to hard-code how adversaries think and act.”

But AI has changed all that. Terra Security’s agents scan for known vulnerabilities and simulate the reasoning of an attacker, chaining together findings and verifying whether a vulnerability is actually exploitable rather than merely theoretical.

But Peled is careful not to overclaim, and beat me to my own next question. “Are AI agents today better than any ethical hacker in the world? They’re not,” he said. “They don’t yet possess the creativity of the best ethical hackers. But they can be more scalable than anyone in the world. They can run continuously. They never sleep. They’re already better than the vast majority of ethical hackers in the world.”

With AI, there are no longer cyberattackers who wait for annual review windows. Adversaries now use tech to find entry points faster, adapt in real time, and strike before defenders can patch. A point-in-time test is, by definition, already outdated the moment it concludes.

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Terra’s idea is that continuous, AI-driven offensive security is the only architecture that matches the pace of modern attacks. The chained vulnerability Peled mentioned in our conversation was only catchable because an agent was watching the moment the code changed - and not six months later, when a consultant finally showed up.

“I still see too many organizations that say, ‘Okay, now we have AI in offensive security’,” he concluded, and as a slight warning to CISOs still budgeting for annual pen tests. “[They say] ‘I want to do the same thing I’ve done before, just faster, better, cheaper’. And that scares me.”

It suggests that the next major corporate data breach may not come from a sophisticated nation-state actor or a phishing campaign, but rather from an employee asking an AI chatbot to read or summarize sensitive company data.

That’s the reality Itamar Golan has spent the last two years building a company around. As co-founder and CEO of Prompt Security (acquired by SentinelOne earlier this year for $250 million), he has become one of the voices warning of the gap between how fast enterprises are adopting AI and how little they understand about where their data is going. According to him, most CISOs focus on traditional attack vectors, but the real risk is employees pasting IP addresses into unauthorized tools.

Prompt Security’s platform now detects nearly 20,000 distinct AI applications operating across enterprise environments. Golan clarified that the figure isn’t plugins or product variants, but 20,000 separate entities. “Today, essentially almost any SaaS application, website, native application running on your endpoint… we are converging towards a landscape where any one of those will be an AI application by itself,” he told me.

The visibility problem is one thing, but the training problem is another. Prompt Security’s research found that roughly 40% of AI applications, when surveyed at the configuration level, are set by default to train on the data they receive. “Not only has confidential data leaked out of your organization,” Golan explained, “it’s now potentially becoming part of the model’s brain.” Details like corporate strategy, personnel data, or legal documents will be available for everyone to see - and there is no obvious retrieval mechanism once embedded in a model’s training run.

The sectors most exposed are also the typically traditional ones that are now moving fastest to catch up: Financial services, insurance, and legal firms are adopting AI precisely because it performs exceptionally well on their core workflows. “They find themselves in this very tricky situation,” he told me. “On the one hand, they are adopting AI the fastest, and the potential gain is immense, but the risk of making a mistake is so big as well.”

It is a distinctly Israeli problem to be working on. Golan mentioned that when he surveyed the security stacks of Fortune 500 CISOs while building Prompt, he found that around 60% of the tools on their lists were built by Israeli companies. Startup Nation has given the world Check Point, CyberArk (acquired by Palo Alto Networks), and Wiz (acquired by Google). Now, Prompt Security, as part of SentinelOne, is trying to secure the AI layer that sits above all of them.

“We cannot stay blind,” Golan concluded. “We must admit that our employees are using hundreds or thousands of AI applications. A big portion of those are able to train on the data we are sharing with them.” Acknowledging that reality, he argues, is the first step to acting on it.

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I was, and still am, bullish on Foodtech - at least at the start. I tasted 3D-printed burgers in Tel Aviv and called them “technically perfect, albeit creatively void.” I interviewed investors who compared the industry to early mobile phones — primitive first iterations, but with everything still to come.

I wanted to delay a full embrace of alternative foods until the markets all caught up. Turns out many felt the same way. So years later, I wanted to revisit all of that with someone who’s lived it from the inside.

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Ilanit Kabessa Cohen has spent 25 years asking one question: what does it actually take to bring innovation to market? As the first Head of Innovation at Osem-Nestlé, a corporate venturing lead at Dole in Singapore, and now co-founder of the advisory firm URIKA, she’s seen the food ecosystem from virtually every angle — and she joins me to share what she’s learned.

Our conversation opens with an assessment of Israel’s position in global foodtech. Despite being a relatively small player in terms of total funding (roughly $16 billion globally), Israel punches well above its weight: driven by its kosher culinary traditions, research institutions, a culture of cross-domain improvisation, and the Israel Innovation Authority’s risk-sharing model that few other governments have replicated.

But Ilanit is candid about where the industry fell short. The first generation of alternative proteins disappointed consumers, investors, and believers alike. Not because the vision was wrong, but because first-generation products rarely win. She argues we’re now entering a correction phase, with more mature companies, better-tasting products, and a smarter understanding that the real action right now is B2B ingredients, not consumer-facing brands.

The most forward-looking part of the episode covers what she calls “animal-free technologies” — a next-generation wave that goes far beyond food. Think collagen produced via precision fermentation for use in cosmetics, pharma, and nutrition. Or how biomaterials could replace shark liver extract or horseshoe crab blood in medical testing.

She said how the next decade of opportunity lies in the convergence of food, health, and biotech - and finally, she discussed two opportunities: the Coller Startup Competition (now open, with a $100K prize) and URIKA’s Generate partnership program with CSM Ingredients for startups in sugar reduction and proteins.

He relocated to be closer to the North American customer base as the marketers stayed put. And after years of sitting inside both ecosystems at the same time, attending CMO sessions in Tel Aviv and building pipelines in the US, he’s reached a verdict most people in his position wouldn’t say out loud: the Israelis are better.

It’s a claim that cuts against the instinct of almost every Israeli founder he’s encountered - and every company I’ve spoken to over the years. “Normally, when I speak to startups that are born in Israel, they want to send their sales and marketing overseas immediately. [It’s] the first thing they want to do,” I told him during our conversation. But Canaani’s experience runs the other direction.

The Israeli edge, he claims, comes down to a cultural obsession with output. “When you talk with people in Israel, marketing leaders, it’s about how they built machines, how much the cost per meeting, how they’re running campaigns on Facebook and Google and all that.” American counterparts, he finds, often arrive at the conversation from somewhere else entirely. “A lot of CMOs and people in marketing I talk with in the US or Canada… can talk more about the brand, how things take time, like it’s a long-term investment.”

“Tachlas mentality” explained

He traces this back to something structural in Israel’s tech DNA: The concentration of adtech companies and the performance-marketing culture they seeded, and also what he calls “tachlas mentality”. He explained that this requires teams to be focused on results above everything else. The blend of that mindset with an unusually international talent pool (many ‘Olim’ from Britain, the US, or Europe) produces something Canaani finds hard to replicate in America.

But there’s a catch - and one worth remembering. The same intensity that makes Israeli marketing so effective in the early stages carries a structural weakness as companies grow. “In North America, things are much more organized. It’s clearer how they create the messaging and the product marketing and how to make sure there is alignment between marketing and sales,” he told me. Israel, by contrast, tends to run so fast that alignment becomes a casualty. “It seems like sometimes it doesn’t even matter if marketing speaks one language and sales speaks another. Let’s just run fast. It’s speed above everything else.”

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The American advantage, then, is less about raw marketing talent and more about institutional discipline. “In North America, maybe it’s hard in the startup phase, but once they’re a bigger company, they have better processes — how to run things, how to stay on point.”

So what Canaani is describing is a stage-mapping problem. Israeli performance marketing is almost perfectly calibrated for the zero-to-one phase: find the signal, iterate fast, fill the pipeline before the runway ends. But American marketing discipline becomes the dominant advantage once you’re scaling and when the team is distributed. Move fast and break things, but then slowly mold them into greatness.

The companies that figure out how to sequence both are the ones most likely to build something that lasts. Datarails, with teams operating on both sides and a CRO who has lived inside both cultures simultaneously, is running that experiment right now.

[5-minute preview: Why Israeli Startups Are Better at Marketing Than They Think]

I thought it was a powerful claim, especially from someone who spent seven years at the center of Middle East negotiations, and has spent years since thinking carefully about the region. It’s worth unpacking why Lebanon, specifically, and what a deal would actually mean.

Why Lebanon is different

The other active fronts carry structural barriers that Lebanon doesn’t. On Iran, Grinstein is blunt: there is currently no Zone of Possible Agreement — what negotiators call a “ZOPA” — between Israel and Tehran. Any deal will be a US-Iran arrangement made, in his words, “over Israel’s head.” Gaza is immobilized by the Palestinian Authority’s diminishing capacity and by the sequencing problem embedded in Trump’s own 20-point plan, which requires the PA to eventually govern Gaza without the institutional strength to do so.

Lebanon is different because the core dispute, the border, is technically resolvable. There are 13 contested points - fix them, and you produce a bilaterally agreed, internationally recognized border between Israel and Lebanon. “Every time that the state of Israel establishes a line which becomes a bilaterally agreed internationally recognized border, it is a monumental moment for Zionism,” he said.

The sequencing question

But a deal isn’t inevitable. Grinstein’s argument hinges on his reading that Israel is currently overloading the Lebanon talks with additional demands, which is why nothing is moving. But he believes the Americans will eventually strip the agenda back to the border alone. “The moment the Americans understand that, they will reverse and say, ‘let’s do a border deal’.”

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The result, according to my guest Gidi Grinstein, was that they landed exactly where everyone always lands.

“Even Trump ends up landing very close to where Nixon landed, to where Carter landed, to where Clinton landed,” he told me. “Because there is a gravitational force that is shaping these negotiations.”

Gidi Grinstein has seen the Middle East from angles most people never will. At 29, he was the secretary of Israel's negotiating delegation at Camp David and the youngest person at the 2000 Summit. He spent years inside the machinery of the peace process drafting texts, aligning teams, and managing the distance between what leaders said in public and what they were willing to accept in private.

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Today, he runs Tikkun Olam Makers (TOM), a global initiative using open-source 3D printing to bring affordable prosthetics to people who can't access or afford conventional ones. While we intended to speak mostly about TOM, our conversation stayed on peacebuilding, negotiation, and his view of politics today.

The force, he said, traces back to “the most brilliant and American diplomat of the last hundred years”, Henry Kissinger, and the architecture he designed in the 1970s. It was a framework built not around Israeli or Palestinian interests, but around American hegemony in the Middle East. Half a century later, and it is proving so durable for Washington that no administration, however disruptive, can break from it.

The 2020 Trump plan's "two nation states for two people" echoes UN Resolution 181 from 1947. The 2025 Gaza framework in places reads like a revamped version of the Oslo Declaration of Principles from 1993. “You would be stunned by the amount of similarities,” he told me.

What’s interesting this time around is that both countries - Israel and the US - face impending elections mere days apart, promising to shake up not just the political makeup for both sides, but potentially the leadership of one.

This creates what Grinstein calls the clock problem: Israeli and American leaders, under electoral pressure, always want a deal now. Their counterparts (Arafat then, the Iranians today) operate on an entirely different political timeline, with every incentive to wait out a weakened or transitional government.

“The synchronization of the political clocks is very important in getting the deal,” he said. Trump, he suggests, may be walking into the same trap by pushing hard before November while Tehran calculates what comes after.

The gravity doesn’t guarantee peace, but I realized it means the frameworks are always roughly the same so long as the Americans are involved. And so far, history is showing us that they always find their way back to them.

You can catch the entire conversation above. And expect more analysis from our conversation in future newsletters.

[5-minute preview: Watch Gidi explain this in a YouTube clip, “Trump Thinks He's Rewriting Middle Eastern History. He's Repeating It.”]

Military power used to depend on access to advanced weapons systems, often built through international supply chains and dominated by a handful of large contractors. Today, conflicts in Ukraine and Iran, and tensions with China, are highlighting bottlenecks on critical technologies and the instability of disrupted supply chains.

One Israeli company may have an answer to this new challenge. Udi Oster is the co-founder of eyesAtop, a startup building AI-native universal controllers for drone fleets. The company has spent the last three years making a case that the strategic asset in modern warfare isn’t any particular drone, but it should be the operating system above them.

“Locking in to one vendor with one platform is something that in today’s world is very difficult,” Oster told me. “You want to have the flexibility to get the best technology at the point of time of interest and use it immediately.”

Militaries around the world are accumulating drones from dozens of manufacturers, but without a common interface, any shared AI layer, or no easy way to retrain operators when hardware changes. EyesAtop’s platform intends to integrate into any drone, from any vendor, under one controller trained on over 500,000 hours of live IDF operational data.

The geopolitical context of conflicts and wars has expanded this market. Global defensetech VC hit a record $49.1 billion in 2025, nearly double the prior year, driven largely by autonomy and AI. American firms like Anduril have already moved into Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and Singapore, selling hardware to nations trying to face off against the Chinese military. eyesAtop is pursuing a different layer of the stack: not competing on the drone itself, but selling the so-called brain that integrates whatever drones those nations already operate or plan to buy.

Oster draws a sharp distinction between the American market and everyone else. America is its own category: It accounts for more than half of global defense spending, it has its own procurement logic, and its own concept of operations. EyesAtop already has a U.S. co-founder, a U.S. base, and existing deals with American military commands.

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For the rest of the world, the company offers a full-kit solution, where it selects the best available platforms globally, integrates them under its universal controller, and delivers a turnkey reconnaissance or strike capability to militaries that lack the R&D infrastructure to build it themselves.

“Most of the countries outside of the U.S. lack the infrastructure and the R&D budgets even to get to the same type of level as Israel and the U.S.,” Oster said. “I would look at these countries differently.”

The fundraising backstory underscores how fast the landscape has shifted. Three years ago, Oster says, virtually no Israeli VC would touch defense. The stigma was visible and impacted reputational and commercial opportunities. But the world changed after October 7, 2023, and today, funds are competing for allocations in a sector that now ranks among the top three investment themes globally.

The longer-term vision Oster sketches is more ambitious than any single product cycle. As robotic systems multiply on the battlefield, army headcount becomes less relevant than software sophistication. Today, wars can be fought by one operator controlling multiple autonomous platforms that were trained in actual combat. “Instead of having a whole company,” he says, “you have two people, but they would operate a company of robotic systems.”

He calls it "the ghost squad." For the allies now looking to build drone sovereignty in the middle of an active regional war, it may also be the next software contract they don't know they need. And that balance of power is moving up the stack.

[3-minute preview: Optimism in Defensetech and the future of deterrence]

But the other story, the one about what it actually takes to keep a company’s messaging intact in wartime, is harder to tell, and rarer to find someone willing to tell it honestly.

So I spoke to Alona Stein, co-CEO of ReBlonde, one of Tel Aviv’s more influential tech PR agencies. She has spent 13 years managing the gap between what Israeli founders want the world to know and what the world is prepared to hear. Since October 7, 2023, that gap has never been wider.

“There’s an axis,” she told me, “between showing resilience and chasing ambulances.” It sure sounds like a line from a crisis comms handbook, but the way she says it, it’s more like a warning.

The question of how to position an Israeli company is becoming existential. Do you lean into the Israeli identity, or quietly let the Delaware incorporation do the talking? In my journalism days, I lost count of the number of founders who told me: "Don’t write that we’re Israeli - we’re a ‘Delaware’ company.

During recent recordings of this podcast, we had a standing protocol for missile alerts. I would ask my guests if they wanted their run to the shelter included in the final episode in the event we were interrupted. The split was about 50/50: Half wanted to show Israeli pride, and the other half didn’t want to spook overseas investors or customers.

Alona knows that conversation well.

“Do we move forward with the fact that we’re Israeli-based and Israeli-formed? Do we just talk about that headquarters somewhere else? It really depends on the kind of personality they have as a founder, but also the kind of business that they run and the kind of clients they sell to,” she told me.

One example that came up, as it often does, is Wiz. The company went out to the world openly Israeli, and it never hurt them. But Wiz is Wiz. For companies with global client bases in sensitive markets, the calculation is different. She describes one client (a German company returning after several previous engagements) who pulled out at the last minute when their CFO discovered the agency was Israeli.

“Everything was already set. Even the kickoff date was scheduled. And then the guy said, ‘Listen, I’m so sorry, but our CFO was not aware that you’re Israelis and we have a policy that we can’t work with Israelis.’”

That's what ground-up narrative collapse looks like in practice: when public sentiment, left unmanaged for long enough, works its way into boardrooms. Alona traces the mechanics of it back to what happened after October 7, when she joined a pro bono initiative called Words of Iron, working to flag false information spreading on X about Israel.

“I understood that this is where the narrative starts. It’s driven [by] the people, it’s driven from the masses. And then it affects so high up, to the point where VCs pull back, clients pull back, because the public sentiment is so bad.”

The Iran conflict has added new layers to this. Nearly half of Israeli tech firms reported struggling with worker shortages during the conflict, and the ongoing conflict made it more difficult for entrepreneurs to secure funding in the short term, with global investors adopting a more conservative approach until the situation stabilised.

For PR agencies navigating this, the question isn’t only what to say, but it’s whether to say anything at all. “If the coverage is mostly around what is happening in the war and your story can’t contribute to what is happening right now, there’s no room for that.”

What makes her perspective useful is that she’s been here before. COVID, the post-October 7 period, now this. Each crisis has required a recalibration of the same fundamental question: what is your company actually contributing, and to whom?

“You can provide good value. You can talk about the product without throwing names for the sake of throwing names, especially for such explosive matters.”

During the lead-up to and throughout the campaign against Iran last year, 31 funding rounds took place — evidence that entrepreneurs kept building and investors kept writing cheques. But whether the narratives around those companies held are a different question.

When we speak, there isn’t a clean resolution. What Alona has is 13 years of knowing where the line is between resilience and so-called ambulance-chasing, and the professional discipline to hold it even when founders don’t want to.

According to U.S. Census Bureau data, 5.48 million new businesses were formed in 2023 — the highest annual total ever recorded. That number has barely dipped since, running at over 5.1 million annually through 2025, a figure that represents a near-50% increase on the pre-pandemic baseline. February 2026 alone saw a 12% year-over-year jump in new entity formations, according to Registered Agents Inc., which tracks state-level filings in real time.

To some, this looks like a boom. But if we look closer and learn the stories behind those new businesses, it looks a bit different.

Across the same period, the tech sector, once seen as the safe bet for educated young professionals, has been shedding workers at a pace that few predicted and fewer have absorbed. In 2025 alone, nearly 246,000 tech employees lost their jobs. In the first months of 2026, another 95,000 have followed.

Amazon, which reported record revenues of $716.9 billion last year, has already cut around 16,000 roles this year. Meta, spending up to $135 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, is eyeing reductions that could eliminate up to 20% of its workforce. Oracle conducted its single largest layoff event in recent memory, cutting 30,000 employees in one stroke.

The people standing in the rubble are doing something interesting: they’re not waiting to be rehired. They’re building something of their own. And those who were told to “learn to code” to keep up with yesterday’s job trends are coming out victorious.

The Galloway Thesis, Applied

I discussed this topic on The Spiro Circle this week with Tom Lahat, co-founder and CXO of Tailor Brands. Tailor Brands is an AI-powered platform that helps individuals form LLCs, build brand identities, and launch small businesses in the United States. It started as a logo generator; it has since evolved into what Lahat calls a “business-in-a-box” - handling everything from paperwork and EIN registration to insurance, permits, and legal structure. In its current form, it is effectively the infrastructure layer for a new kind of worker: someone who used to have a job title and now has a company instead.

It reminded me of one of my favorite writers and speakers on the subject. Scott Galloway has been making a version of this argument for years, most explicitly in his book The Algebra of Wealth, which I read last year. His claim, "Don't follow your passion. Instead, follow your talent," was contrarian when he first made it. It is beginning to look prophetic.

Lahat shares data, which he agrees tells a story about professional aspiration that the last decade got badly wrong. “The job that was desired five years ago today is nothing,” he said. “Being a developer was the best thing you could be. You could go into Meta, Amazon, or Google, and basically, you had a safe path. That thing changed.”

His observation relates to the speed of the current disruption felt nowadays, especially in the AI era. The roles that were most reliably insulated from economic downturns, like senior engineering, backend development, or data analysis, are the ones being targeted in the current wave of AI-driven restructuring.

According to research published in 2026, an estimated 44% of recent tech layoffs are directly or indirectly attributable to AI automation.

The Return of the Tradesman

Here’s where Tailor Brands can help this adjusted workforce. One of the less-discussed consequences of this shift is what it is doing to blue-collar labor markets. Skilled trades like plumbing, electrical work, construction, and metalwork spent much of the last 20 years being socially devalued in favor of knowledge-economy careers. Parents who once pushed their children toward law or medicine pivoted to an emphasis on software and high-tech.

The Obama-era cultural message was consistent: work with your mind, not your hands, and “learn to code”.

Well, not anymore. The market has begun to correct this. Lahat describes a user from North Carolina — a man who spent his twenties and thirties resenting the metalwork trade his father had pushed him toward — who has seen his income rise 15% annually for three consecutive years. Demand for skilled trades has increased precisely because AI cannot replicate them.

We reference the South Park episode that directly addresses this: An electrician cannot be outsourced to a large language model. These are the jobs Galloway pointed to when he invoked smelting as a career path. They are no longer a punchline. In fact, the jobs we were told to avoid are becoming the most resilient.

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“We see a rise in blue-collar jobs,” Lahat said. “These are the things that AI won’t change. There’s a need for blue-collar jobs, whether it’s plumbing, construction, or electricity, and all of these titles suddenly see an increase in demand, which leads to an increase in the paycheck.”

What Tailor Brands is doing, in part, is giving these workers the business infrastructure to capitalize on that demand. A tradesperson who previously operated cash jobs informally through word of mouth and no formal entity can now formalize their practice and grow a legitimate business. The platform is designed to take the bureaucracy out of the equation entirely, so the gardener or the plumber or the wedding photographer can focus on the work rather than the paperwork.

The Generation Entering Now

The cohort now entering the workforce has had, to put it mildly, a strange preparation. First, they were in high school during the pandemic, learning remotely or socializing through screens. This meant developing an entire set of professional instincts in conditions that bore no resemblance to any labor market that preceded them.

Today, they are entering the workforce in an AI disruption cycle that is accelerating faster than any analyst predicted.

Lahat is direct about the challenge this presents. “Every day you open the news, and you see that Meta lays off 30,000 people and Amazon fires 15,000 people,” he said. “The people they are firing are from all departments: the developers, the back end, the analysts. And every morning you read the new Google or Anthropic update, and you’re like: who’s going to get it now?”

For a 20-year-old choosing a direction, this is not an abstract concern. The career ladders that earlier generations climbed are visibly disintegrating. Job-hopping, which became normalized among us millennials as a form of career acceleration, now looks almost quaint compared to the structural volatility that sits underneath it.

Today, young people are wondering if joining a company, in the traditional sense, is even the right move.

Tailor Brands’ own data reflects this shift. The share of users on their platform who hold four or five separate LLCs has grown from roughly 5-8% four years ago to nearly 30-40% today. These are not serial entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley but people building portfolio careers out of necessity and pragmatism — they are so-called “weekend warriors” who operate a Monday-to-Friday job alongside a second weekend gig, each with its own entity to hedge against the collapse of any single income source.

The Skills That Survive

This trend is fascinating to me - both as a journalist and as a father. Both Lahat and I have young children, so I asked him, setting aside his role as a founder and industry observer, what he plans to actually teach his kids.

“The best tools I can give my kids, the advice, is how to self-learn,” he said. “That’s 100%. There isn’t a university, there isn’t a course, there isn’t a YouTube yet because version one was yesterday and today version two is already up, and it’s different.”

But Lahat’s definition of curiosity has a second layer that is less obviously teachable, and perhaps more important. He spoke about the ability to talk to another person to generate ideas in conversation, collaborate, and convey trust in a room. It is something I learned when I spoke with founders and presented at a conference. But these are skills that the pandemic disrupted badly in those now entering professional life, and that AI is doing nothing to restore.

The American Dream Is Not Dead. It’s Just Honest Now.

The American record for new business formation has been broken in back-to-back years. February 2026 saw formations running 12% ahead of the same month a year prior, even as hiring slows and layoffs accelerate. The pattern Registered Agents Inc. identifies in its monthly tracking report is a behavioral shift that has been underway for five years and shows no sign of reversing.

“The concept of starting a business and being responsible for my own destiny… It’s extremely rooted in the American culture,” Lahat concluded. The American Dream is not disappearing, but it is being renegotiated. The version that required a degree, a corporate ladder, and 30 years of institutional loyalty is giving way to something arguably more honest about what the economy has always rewarded: people who know what they are good at, who can convey that to another person, and who have the discipline to build something around it.

Galloway told young people to follow their talent. The data from Tailor Brands shows people are doing it. Follow your talent, formalize it, and don’t wait for someone else to permit you to start.

[5-minute preview: Why Blue-Collar Jobs Are Beating Tech Careers in 2026]

Most people saving for retirement think about one number: The balance. Whether it went up or down, or roughly what trajectory it needs to follow before they stop working.

But what almost nobody thinks about is the infrastructure sitting between their savings and that number. The systems that calculate the value of their fund every day, process every transaction, reconcile every position, and produce the reporting that tells them how they’re doing.

That infrastructure is invisible by design. It is also, as I recently learned during an interview with FundGuard co-founder and CEO Lior Yogev, badly out of date.

“More than 100 million people in the US alone save for retirement through mutual funds,” he told me during a recent episode of The Spiro Circle, in collaboration with Forbes Israel. The company builds core technology for the asset management industry and was selected for the Forbes Next Billion Dollar Startups list.

He is describing a 401(k).

There is a direct connection between back-office technology and retail investor outcomes, even if it’s never labeled as such. Running a mutual fund is not cheap. Analysts, offices, compliance teams, legal… the operational costs are substantial. Those costs are ultimately priced into the fees charged to investors, typically expressed as an expense ratio. The lower the cost of running the fund, the lower the fee can be, and the more of the return the investor keeps.

Legacy fund administration systems inflate those costs by design because they were built in an era when human processing was the only option for tasks that software should now handle automatically. And the software to do that exists.

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If technology can shave even 0.1 or 0.2 percentage points from a fund’s operational costs by removing much of the human labor cost (the kind of reduction that automated infrastructure makes possible), it can translate, compounded over a working lifetime, to between $50,000 and $100,000 more per person in retirement. “While you’re not getting super rich by having another $100,000 in retirement, for most people, that is a huge, huge difference,” Yogev said.

The difference between retiring comfortably and retiring with constraint, for millions of people, is a technological one! And yet it has a known solution for a known obstacle: inertia.

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Every week brought a new model, a new product launch announced on X, and a new reason to reconsider assumptions that felt settled only months before. For startups trying to keep up, the experience has been less like riding a wave and more like trying to read a map while the terrain keeps shifting beneath you.

It was something I discussed on another episode of The Spiro Circle only a few weeks ago. But this time, according to Tom Findling, Co-founder and CEO of Conifers, the disorientation was merely a prologue for what’s to come.

“The last two years were a promo to what’s going on,” he said. “I think starting in 2026, you really see the maturity, both on the model side and the agent side, to come and really disrupt the enterprise.”

If the explosion of GPT-4, autonomous agents, Claude’s product launches, and multimodal models were just the opening act, what exactly is coming next?

The Convergence Moment

Findling claims the answer is in a convergence that is only now becoming visible. For most of the AI boom so far, the two core components of enterprise deployment (the models themselves and the agent frameworks built around them) were developing on separate tracks. Models were getting smarter, and agents were getting more capable - but the combination wasn’t yet reliable enough to deploy seriously inside a large organization. “I think we got to the point that agents got to a certain level of maturity when you can deploy them in the enterprise, you can monitor them, you can scale them, and the models themselves have become extremely smart.”

SOC teams face alert volumes that no human workforce can realistically process. Analyst shortages are chronic, and Findling estimates that fewer than one percent of applicants for analyst roles can actually do the job. Previous attempts to close the gap were built on rule-based logic that couldn’t adapt to the context-dependent, environment-specific nature of real incident investigation. “We tried for the last decade to solve that problem,” Findling said. “Unfortunately, it didn’t go that well. That’s why we still have business.”

CognitiveSOC, Conifers’ flagship platform, ingests thousands of daily security alerts, uses AI reasoning to investigate incidents autonomously, and delivers measurable outcomes. The company reports up to an 87% reduction in investigation time compared to human analysts working manually.

To date, the company has raised $25 million from SYN Ventures, Picus Capital, and Washington Harbour Partners, whose investment is aimed at expanding into government and critical infrastructure markets. The momentum reflects a growing conviction that agentic AI (systems that can act, not just respond) is the architecture that finally makes the math work.

“If you don’t fix it, it will break.”

Which brings the sharpest business lesson of the moment into focus: The philosophy of adoption. The adage that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is no longer relevant in a sector that is moving and evolving in weeks, not years. “If you don’t stay current, you become obsolete. Even for two quarters, if you haven’t looked at the latest and greatest, the new models, your product is already far behind.”

In our conversation, I highlight this inversion: It isn’t that change is “good” and stability is “bad”, but rather that the calculus of risk has entirely flipped. Waiting used to protect you from premature commitment, but now it exposes you to competitive irrelevance. The companies treating AI adoption as something to revisit once the dust settles are already making a strategic error that they may not be able to unwind.

A lot of our conversation focused on how these two years have seen such incredible transformations. He admitted he could not have predicted back then what he would be building today. Finally, Findling expects to look back on 2026 in two years’ time with the same sense of uncertainty.

The prologue is complete - but no one knows exactly what they’re about to watch.

[5-minute preview: Why “If It Ain’t Broke” No Longer Applies in AI]

The FundGuard CEO and co-founder has spent the better part of the year in client meetings, and the conversation at every stop has been a variation of the same thing. “Everybody is now thinking, how do we remodel how we’ve worked over the last 30 years?”

The forcing function is agentic AI and the shift toward autonomous systems capable of taking action across complex workflows without human instruction at each step. In asset management, the implications are massive. Compliance flags that require manual review could be triaged, contextualized, and escalated automatically. Portfolio data that currently arrives in overnight batch files could flow in real time to the decision-makers who need it.

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FundGuard’s platform replaces legacy fund accounting systems with cloud-native infrastructure that handles everything from NAV calculations to portfolio accounting to operational automation, in real time rather than overnight batches. The company has raised more than $150 million, counts Citi and State Street among its investors, and now operates across six cities, including Tel Aviv, New York, and London.

The company’s thesis is that large banks and asset managers were using archaic core systems that were expensive, slow, and error-prone. The way this industry has operated “since the 1970s and 1980s” starts to look unprepared for the variety, complexity, and volume that he describes as spiraling out of control. “They can clearly envision the future that’s going to be totally different than the way that they’ve been working the last two or three decades,” Yogev explained.

The first obstacle is the infrastructure itself. The core systems still running much of the asset management industry were built in the 1970s and 1980s and updated minimally since. It is still a conservative and traditional space: large, singular, slow to change. They also process data in overnight runs rather than continuous streams. In Yogev’s framing, this is not an inconvenience to be worked around. “Legacy systems, because they’re [so] monolithic and batch-based, just don’t carry the weight and can’t really interact with the infrastructure that’s being built in the world.”

This creates a sequencing problem that the industry is only beginning to confront honestly. Agentic AI requires live data, modular architecture, and cloud-native infrastructure. Almost everything being built to power the AI revolution assumes these things exist. At most large financial institutions, they do not. The result is an enormous appetite for what AI promises, but paired with the structural inability to capture it.

The second obstacle is governance. Yogev described financial institutions as simultaneously the most excited and the most restrictive audience he encounters. “Most large financial institutions are going to ask you to turn off or disable the use of models, at least at this stage, and not even use their data in an anonymous way.” The concerns relate to data leakage, penetration points for bad actors, and regulatory exposure.

He draws a parallel to the cloud and to institutions' concerns about putting client data anywhere outside their own servers. It felt reckless, legally exposed, and competitively dangerous— until it didn’t. “Just like with the cloud, it took a few more years to be fully embraced by financial institutions. It’s going to be the same with AI,” he predicted. “Everybody is looking at what we’re delivering and gets very excited. And they go with us because they know that we’re futureproof.”

Yogev does not believe the AI transition will move as slowly as cloud, but warns: “If you don’t do it, you’re essentially going to die.”

Institutions that have already modernized their core infrastructure by moving to cloud-native platforms, and in other ways, will be positioned to deploy agentic capabilities more quickly. But those still running batch-based legacy systems will eventually face a two-front problem: they will need to rebuild the infrastructure and close the AI gap, while competing against those who solved the first problem years ago.

The $200 trillion asset management industry has spent 30 years optimizing around the constraints of its technology. It is now up to institutions whether they can reverse that relationship before someone else does it for them.

[Preview: How better tech could add $100K to YOUR retirement]

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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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"]