The Spiro Circle

There’s a new security risk out there, and it’s come to be known as The Shadow AI Problem.

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.

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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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This isn’t the first time I’ve covered Israel’s foodtech sector. Back in 2022, reporting for CTech, I mapped the ecosystem at a moment of tension, when investment was holding up better than in any other tech vertical, but the skeptics remained.

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.

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.

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Datarails CRO Aviv Canaani has an unusual vantage point. He runs the full revenue engine of the financial planning and analysis platform for Microsoft Excel users — sales, marketing, partnerships — from New Jersey, while his marketing team operates out of Israel.

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.”

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]

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Every few years, a new American administration arrives in the Middle East convinced it can start fresh. Trump’s team was no different. They came to the problem with a clean slate and nothing but the confidence of a New York real estate mogul. They produced two documents across both his terms: the January 2020 plan and the October 2025 twenty-point Gaza framework.

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.

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.”]

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As conflict dynamics shift across the Middle East, from disrupted shipping lanes to drone warfare, a new question is emerging: who controls the software behind autonomous systems?

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.

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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.

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]

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I know better than anyone that there’s a version of Startup Nation that the world is perfectly happy to celebrate. The record exits, the Wiz acquisition - $15.6 billion raised in 2025, with exits totalling $74 billion. Those stories write themselves. I know that because I spent five years doing it, too.

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.

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There is a record being broken in America right now, and almost nobody is talking about it.

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.

“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]

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The last two years in AI have been disorienting.

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]

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Lior Yogev says he’s barely been home in three months.

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.

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.”

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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]

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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.

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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.”

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

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