When the US and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury, the opening moves were not B-2 bombers or Tomahawk missiles. Before the first strike aircraft crossed into Iranian airspace, Iran’s radars had already been blinded, its command-and-control links severed, its communications networks dismantled.
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.
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.”
