Top 50 Most Promising Startups
How Israeli startups keep winning in a year of war and disruption
Calcalist’s list captures a sector scaling despite extraordinary constraints.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” Charles Dickens wrote at the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities. He could not have known that, 150 years later, the same paradox would so closely describe Israeli high-tech on the country’s 78th Independence Day.
2025 was an unprecedented year for the Startup Nation, which has firmly established that it is far more than a pipeline for startups - it is a producer of mission-critical technologies at the heart of global enterprises. If that were not the case, Google would not have paid $32 billion for Wiz, the largest acquisition in its history. Palo Alto Networks would not have executed deals of unprecedented scale, including its $25 billion acquisition of CyberArk and its listing on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.
Alongside these transactions, the sale of Armis for nearly $8 billion to ServiceNow now looks almost routine. In any other year, Armis alone would have been considered the defining deal of the year.
But behind the headlines and the flow of capital lies an Israeli reality that is anything but normal.
Had industry leaders been presented on October 6, 2023, with the events of the following two and a half years, many would likely have dismissed the scenario as implausible, and perhaps stepped away. Any entrepreneur considering a new venture might have postponed it indefinitely, waiting for geopolitical stability that never arrived.
Yet, as economists like to say, “no one has a crystal ball.” In this case, that uncertainty proved to be a strange advantage. The industry continued to move forward despite thousands of employees being called to reserve duty and the country effectively being cut off from global travel. Beyond the operational challenges of missed meetings and closed borders lies a deeper reality: the trauma of October 7, the ongoing hostage crisis, and a daily existence shaped by sirens and multi-front conflict.
And yet, this year, as in the previous two, the most difficult task in compiling Calcalist’s “50 Most Promising Startups” list was not finding companies, but choosing among a growing universe of new ventures and fast-scaling startups. The entrepreneurial drive has not diminished; if anything, it has intensified. The urgency to prove that Israeli high-tech delivers under any conditions is generating a steady stream of ideas and products that attract global attention.
Even the AI revolution, which initially appeared to have bypassed Israeli high-tech, is now strongly represented in this year’s list. As evidence, both Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic have met with the founders of Irregular, ranked first on the list, to hear their insights on the future of large language model security.
Despite this resilience, it would be a mistake to normalize the current situation. It is weakening the “Israel” brand, complicating business operations, and beginning to slow certain areas of product development. This is happening during the most disruptive technological era in history, one that presents both existential risks for software companies and extraordinary opportunities for hardware and infrastructure leaders.
One can only imagine how much higher Israeli tech could soar under stable security conditions, and with Ben Gurion Airport fully open. We hope to document that next phase of acceleration in our 2027 list.
