Startup brief
Agent Workflows and Defense Hardware Divert Israeli Venture Capital
Tel Aviv founders capture enterprise agent governance and defense capital even as early-stage seed formation contracts across the ecosystem.
Startup
Rig Security raised $12M to police autonomous AI agents inside corporate networks — targeting an identity security blind spot created by automated workflows.
BackgroundCorporate identity security historically focused on authenticating human employees through passwords, hardware keys, and multi-factor authorization prompts. The explosion of automated AI agents accessing internal corporate databases created dangerous operational blind spots where machine actions remain unmonitored.
- Rig Security founder Guy Kozliner, formerly of Wiz's CTO leadership group, secured backing from CrowdStrike's Falcon Fund and Wiz co-founder Ami Luttwak.
- The platform monitors behavioral telemetry across corporate networks to detect when autonomous software agents execute anomalous data extraction calls or bypass intended privilege boundaries.
- Chief information security officers report growing alarm that employee-deployed AI coding and research bots are leaking confidential source code and proprietary enterprise assets.
- The deal highlights the enduring venture halo surrounding Wiz alumni, whose cybersecurity spinouts continue to command premium valuations from premier international cyber funds.
Startup
Israeli tech funding crossed $13B on massive AI mega-rounds — but a collapse in seed-stage checks is starving the bottom of the venture pipeline.
BackgroundIsraeli high-tech suffered acute investment contractions between 2023 and 2025 under the twin pressures of high interest rates and prolonged regional war. While global institutional capital has aggressively returned to established enterprise leaders, nascent startups face a much harsher fundraising climate.
- September alone delivered $2.5 billion across 91 rounds, dominated by mega-checks into growth-stage enterprise software and cybersecurity unicorns including Wonderful, Cyera, Island, and Upwind.
- Growth rounds claimed over 55% of all invested venture capital, while early-stage seed transactions fell to just 35.5% of total deal volume.
- Institutional venture funds are concentrating risk capital into proven balance sheets while requiring early founders to demonstrate immediate paying enterprise customers before cutting seed checks.
- Ecosystem leaders caution that an ongoing seed slump threatens to hollow out Israel's commercial tech pipeline over the coming five years unless early-stage capital formation rebounds.
Startup
Enso raised $15M to help companies optimize for ChatGPT instead of Google — turning conversational answer placement into a standalone enterprise software market.
BackgroundEnterprise marketing teams spent decades engineering web pages around conventional keyword search crawlers to capture top rankings. The sudden shift toward conversational bots like ChatGPT has broken those mechanics, leaving brands invisible unless language models explicitly cite them.
- Participating investors include venture firms NFX and Phenomen VC alongside angel backer Gil Hirsch, supporting founder Mickey Haslavsky after his previous success co-founding RapidAPI.
- Enso deploys autonomous agent workflows that run continuous micro-experiments against generative engines, uncovering which content tweaks trigger authoritative source citations.
- Early enterprise design partners include Israeli scaleups Papaya Global and MyHeritage, which are shifting digital acquisition budgets into conversational answer engines to maintain customer inbound traffic.
- Digital ad agencies warn that brands failing to index inside generative answer engines risk forfeiting organic inbound traffic as conversational queries replace standard desktop searches.
Startup
Protogo Ventures closed $125M to back combat-tested hardware — cementing defense tech as an institutional venture asset class across Israel.
BackgroundVenture firms long avoided defense technology due to strict export controls, sluggish military procurement cycles, and limited international investor appetite. Three years of multi-front regional warfare completely dismantled that reluctance, creating intense demand for tactical autonomy and battlefield-proven hardware.
- The fund was founded by a former elite IDF intelligence commander alongside seasoned venture partners, targeting autonomous drone swarms, electronic warfare, and navigation in GPS-denied environments.
- Protogo will prioritize early-stage founders whose tactical prototypes have already undergone operational battlefield trials, cutting development cycles down from years to mere weeks.
- Private defense capital provides an agile commercial runway for founders who would otherwise languish waiting for bureaucratic approvals from the Ministry of Defense.
- Foreign allied militaries are already tracking Protogo's portfolio pipeline to source combat-proven tactical technologies that can modernize their own battlefield capabilities against hostile drone threats.
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