IsraelTech's Blog

Sharon Isaaci spent decades in military intelligence before crossing into the private sector, first as an executive at Signia, Israel's leading incident response company, and now as co-founder and CEO of Tonic Security. The through-line connecting all of it is a problem he kept watching play out the same way: organizations getting breached not because attackers were unusually sophisticated, but because a known vulnerability had been sitting in a queue, detected but never fixed.

Captain Eli got his name from the sea. He spent years as a skipper before discovering Elon Musk's work, deciding it was the mission he wanted to be part of, and spending two years trying to land a job at Tesla Israel. He got it, stayed for about a year, and now does Hebrew localisation for X and Grok. He also sold Yoel Israel his first Tesla, which is how this conversation started.

A week after Port raised $100 million at an $800 million valuation, Zohar Einy sat down with IsraelTech at Google for Startups Tel Aviv to talk through what the company is actually building, why AI agents are making engineering organizations more chaotic before they make them better, and what it will take for Israel to build category-defining companies outside of cybersecurity.

Refael Franco has spent his career at the intersection of intelligence and cybersecurity, first as part of the Shin Bet, then as one of the founding members of the Israel National Cyber Directorate, where he eventually led national cybersecurity operations. In 2020, he ran the national response to an Iranian cyberattack on Israel's water infrastructure. After October 7th, he opened a civilian war room and helped locate more than 66 missing and kidnapped people using his team's cyber and intelligence capabilities.

Microsegmentation has been a known best practice in cybersecurity for years. The problem is that it was almost exclusively available to large enterprises with the budget, the personnel, and the years required to implement it manually. Zero Networks is changing that by making the same protection automated, agentless, and fast enough that a CSO can deploy it in under 40 hours across an entire year of operation.

Eldad Tamir has spent decades on both sides of a divide most people in finance never cross. He was an early participant in one of Israel's first venture funds, and later ran Tamir Fishman, one of Israel's largest investment houses. He understands how the asset management world actually works, including who it serves well and who it quietly ignores. That background is what shaped Finq, his current company, which uses AI to bring institutional-grade wealth management services to everyday investors.

When Eyal Bino named his fund 97212 Ventures, the logic was straightforward. 972 is Israel's country code. 212 is New York City's area code. He has spent 20 years living between the two, and the fund is essentially a bet that the overlap between those two worlds is where some of the most interesting early-stage technology is being built right now.

Eran Savir has been on both sides of the table. As a three-time founder with two acquisitions under his belt, he spent years pitching investors, dealing with ghosting, vague rejections, and the slow grind of building something from nothing. Now, as the Founder and Managing Partner of Savyon Ventures, a seed-stage fund investing in AI, digital, and commerce companies, he applies that experience directly to how he invests, and how he treats the founders who come to him.

Boaz Touitou from Impala explains why compute has become the biggest bottleneck in AI, and how scaling infrastructure could shape the next era of artificial intelligence.