Ran Sarig

Our partner Raz Mangel sat down with CTech by Calcalist to share our trends for 2026, and while the conversation covered everything from deep tech to AI infrastructure, one theme cuts through it all: Israeli companies are mastering the discipline of scaling. For years, the Israeli tech narrative centered on innovation. But what's changing now, and what global LPs are increasingly excited about, is the pairing of that innovation with systematic go-to-market execution. We're seeing it firsthand: multiple Greenfield portfolio companies that were at single-digit ARR when we invested are now approaching or crossing $100M+ ARR with line of sight to $1B. This didn't happen by accident. It's the result of implementing the right operational frameworks early - what we call the Seven Pillars of Efficient Growth: Strategy, Operational Framework, People, Pipeline, Sales Process, Partnerships, and Account Management. Our G²M Excellence program exists to help companies build this GTM infrastructure from the start, avoiding costly cycles and enabling the rapid yet efficient growth required to reach sustainable scale. This year, whether it's deep tech, AI infra, or cyber, the companies that will define Israel's next decade won't just build great technology. They'll build enduring global businesses with the go-to-market muscle to match their technical depth. Read Greenfield Partners full trends and predictions for 2026 in the comments:

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I added the new Israeli Proptech startup landscape by TLV Partners to my 2025 collection on VC Cafe. There are over 200+ Israeli startups operating in the proptech sector (including a number of unicorns). The new crop of AI-first startups are penetrating every layer of the tech stack - from elevating the tenant experience and enabling predictive maintenance, to construction site monitoring and delivering AI-driven infrastructure insights. Link to the CTech by Calcalist article with the commentary below.

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Our posts about ivrit.ai are usually (surprise surprise) written in Hebrew. Today, we're making an exception to accomodate our global viewers as we share our experience with the ElevenLabs' scribe-v1 Speech-to-Text model. As most of you know, we maintain a Hebrew Transcription leaderboard on Huggingface (link in first comment). This was needed as fleurs and common-voice are low-quality datasets with regards to Hebrew. When ElevenLabs launched scribe_v1, we were eager to try it out. The initial results were a mixed bag: some benchmarks where scribe_v1 provides best-in-class results, others where it fumbles significantly. Our analysis mostly hints at issues with long-form transcriptions, where it simply "drops" large parts of the text after 1-2 minutes. We had a quick discussion about this with ElevenLabs support, but the end result is still subpar performance on Hebrew transcription, and we suspect this may be true for other low-resource languages. We think scribe_v1's technology is best-in-class, and are hoping to work together with the ElevenLabs team to fix this. So, if anyone at EL wants to chime in and make this happen (Mati Staniszewski Piotr Dabkowski :)), please reach out to us. We believe this might make scribe_v1 much better at not just Hebrew, so it might be worth your time. Our benchmarks are open, we're a non-profit, and in the last few weeks we open-sourced >5000 hours of speech with high-quality transcriptions. If anyone here has friends at EL and wants to help, please tag them! Kinneret Misgav, PhD Yoad Snapir Yanir Marmor

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“𝘏𝘪𝘨𝘩 𝘵𝘦𝘤𝘩 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘶𝘯𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘦𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘨𝘢-𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘺𝘦𝘢𝘳, 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 Wiz’s $32 𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘤𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘵 $7 𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘰𝘯 Armis 𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘭, 𝘢𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘧𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘢𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘬𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘷𝘢𝘭𝘶𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴, 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘵𝘩 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘱𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘐𝘴𝘳𝘢𝘦𝘭𝘪 𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘴𝘺𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘮.” Following a year marked by global economic uncertainty, optimism among investors in Israel’s tech sector has rebounded sharply, with 20 percent rating the industry as excellent compared with only 1 percent previously. Was a pleasure to speak with Israel Hayom ישראל היום along with other industry leaders about what lies ahead for innovation and growth in Israel in 2026 and beyond. Read the full piece here 👉 https://lnkd.in/ds7VxgmP Reut Yehuda Golan Lia Cromwell Yaniv Golan Chaim Schiff Talor Sax

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“The system is broken.” We keep chasing $100B valuations like it’s the norm. Said it last week, but it’s worth repeating, because let’s be honest… most of its paper. It’s not ARR driving these numbers. It’s hyper-funding rounds, inflated expectations, and a complete lack of liquidity. You’ve got companies that once hit $20B, now worth $600M. Others get acquired for $700M and then shut down within a year. And when you get to those inflated valuations, you're trapped: You can't exit. You’re not growing. You’re not liquid. You’re just stuck. The irony? Some of the smartest teams today are not raising massive rounds: → They're lean. → They’re keeping equity. → And they’re building actual businesses. So how are we going to get to $100B valuations off tiny teams, no revenue, and broken exits? You can’t. VCs are under pressure. LPs want liquidity. But IPOs are rare, private equity isn’t always interested, and secondaries, well, let’s be real… not a real solution for everyone. The system is overdue for change. Until then, we need to stop worshipping empty valuations. What’s one thing you would change about how we fund and value startups today? (Shout out to Ophir Reshef, Partner at the ISF Israel Secondary Fund for this insightful op-ed in Calcalist כלכליסט CTech by Calcalist) https://lnkd.in/egNMd6nG

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The deeper I dive into the most anticipated panel of the year — How AI Will Shape the Future of Code, and What Should We Do Now as Managers - the more I realize: this isn’t just another tech trend. This is a once-in-a-generation shift. AI is rewriting the rules of software development. But where are we in this revolution? Is now the time to go all in, or risk being left behind? Do we need to rethink everything — hiring, onboarding, team structure, how we measure impact, and plan work? Which tools are truly game-changing? How are other teams — in product, QA, DevOps - already using AI to move faster and smarter? What exactly is an AI engineer — a hype title, or a critical new role we should be hiring for right now? And THE question - will AI stop at being a co-pilot, or is it on track to become the pilot, replacing developers altogether? Curious to attend? Register here: https://lnkd.in/dMRDiG9u (and get an early ticket before they run out)

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Today, I had the opportunity to join the panel at the Israel Economic Conference by Bizportal & GHContent to discuss the future of Israeli tech and the role of AI, together with Hanan Brand, Eldad Tamir, and Matan Hodorov. We focused on how AI is fundamentally reshaping the way teams work. At Salesforce, AI agents are already part of our daily workflows, helping engineers, product managers and designers to move faster, think bigger, and build better products. It’s more than just adding tools; it’s a new operational model for creating products and delivering value. This shift is accelerating across the country. Even as a small market, the Israeli ecosystem is rapidly moving toward AI-driven innovation - from established players to startups, companies redefining themselves around AI adoption. Our commitment to this momentum is clear. Salesforce sees its AI R&D hub in Israel as one of its three strategic hubs globally, a position we've strengthened over the past two years through local acquisitions and ongoing investment in talent and startups via Salesforce Ventures. It was truly great to share these insights and feel the incredible drive across the ecosystem toward meaningful AI investment and impact.

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This week the world heard Google’s biggest announcements of the year at I/O. There were some incredibly exciting and innovative developments for companies and individual users, and Cloud shone with updates that are especially relevant to the Israel tech ecosystem: 𝗩𝗲𝗼 𝟯: Google's most advanced video generation model to date, which has raised the bar on both quality and control in AI video. Startups and teams in content, ads, education, and synthetic data - take note. 𝗜𝗺𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗻 𝟰: Google’s state-of-the-art image generation model has taken a big leap forward in photorealism, consistency, and controllability, all key for production use, not just playground demos. We will soon see integration into Vertex AI, giving developers and media companies production-grade image generation capabilities via Google Cloud. 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹𝘀 in Vertex AI (Meta’s LLaMA 3, Mistral, etc.) One of our most important features is our commitment to our customers to give them a choice, and this is one more example of that. Multi-model support on Vertex AI means Google Cloud is now a one-stop-shop for AI experimentation. This is an especially important element for our AI-native startups. As Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet said: “𝙒𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙨 𝙥𝙧𝙤𝙜𝙧𝙚𝙨𝙨 𝙢𝙚𝙖𝙣𝙨 𝙞𝙨 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙬𝙚’𝙧𝙚 𝙞𝙣 𝙖 𝙣𝙚𝙬 𝙥𝙝𝙖𝙨𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝘼𝙄 𝙥𝙡𝙖𝙩𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙢 𝙨𝙝𝙞𝙛𝙩. 𝙒𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙚 𝙙𝙚𝙘𝙖𝙙𝙚𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝙧𝙚𝙨𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙘𝙝 𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙣𝙤𝙬 𝙗𝙚𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙥𝙚𝙤𝙥𝙡𝙚, 𝙗𝙪𝙨𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙨𝙚𝙨 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙪𝙣𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙚𝙨 𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙬𝙤𝙧𝙡𝙙.” I’m excited to see how our customers adopt these solutions and use them to give their customers the best experiences possible. You can read more about all the announcements from Google I/O here: https://lnkd.in/dpfuYNWJ And Google Cloud specific updates here: https://lnkd.in/dF6MXpbD If you’re already working with these tools, I’d love to hear about it! #GoogleCloud #GoogleIO #CloudForIsrael #Veo3 #Imagen4 #VertexAI

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