I’ve written extensively about Europe and its tech sector for many years.

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.

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.

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.

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The joint US-Israeli operation against Iran — the most significant military collaboration between the two countries in modern history — validated a thesis that Protego Ventures had been building since October 7, 2023.

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.

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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]

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Every time Anthropic drops a product update on X, a startup somewhere dies.

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"]

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When fans walk into Wembley Stadium or Wimbledon, they see the show - but what they don’t see is everything underneath it: An ‘invisible’ workforce working hard in unison, powering the global experience economy to make sure the event is running seamlessly.

“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.”

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]

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When Gal Elbaz decided to hack Instagram, he didn’t need much convincing.

“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.”

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]

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When Bria AI CEO Yair Adato talks about AI, he sounds more like an economist watching a familiar crisis unfold in slow motion, as opposed to the typical startup founder I have spoken to over the years.

“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.”

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.”

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”

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Everyone is talking about AI. And Generative AI adoption, especially, has practically become a corporate mandate - everywhere you look, it is being deployed.

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.

“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.

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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.”

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.

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Those who follow my show know that I speak to many cybersecurity founders.

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.

“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.

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The airports may be closed, but that isn’t stopping the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) from soaring.

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.

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.

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.

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