International VC Survey 2026
“Anybody who says they can price current geopolitical risk is lying to you and themselves”
Mark Kraynak, founding partner at Acrew Capital, joined CTech for its 2026 International VC Survey.
“I hate to be pithy about this but I believe anybody who says they can price current geopolitical risk is probably lying to you or to themselves (or both),” said Mark Kraynak, founding partner at Acrew Capital, when asked whether he’s pricing geopolitical and operational risk when evaluating Israeli companies.
“I think the global economy is likely to see a lot of challenges even if the current ceasefire in Iran holds and that will affect the entire global economy. I will say that in the face of really very intense adversity, the Israeli cybersecurity community has been incredibly resilient, so I would expect that to continue.”
CTech reached out to Acrew Capital to explore the evolving "remote" VC-founder relationship and the specific strategic markers that attract global giants to the Israeli market in 2026.
You can read the entire interview below.
ID CARD
Fund Name: Acrew Capital
Total Assets Under Management: ~$1.7B
Partners/Managers: Mark Kraynak, Theresia Gouw, Asad Khaliq, Lauren Kolodny, Aliisa Rosenthal
Notable Portfolio Companies: At-Bay, Cato Networks, Radiant Security, Reclaim Security, Silverfort, Vanta
Notable Exits: ProtectAI; From funds prior to Acrew: ForeScout, Imperva
As we move through Q1 2026, are you seeing early signs of the IPO window reopening for Israeli tech, or does M&A remain the more realistic exit path in the near term? What indicators are you watching most closely?
I don't think we're likely to see very many, maybe any, security companies IPO in 2026. But I also think that the framing of the market being "open" or not is the wrong framing.
I would argue we haven't seen a traditional security IPO since Forge Rock and SentineOne in 2021. We did see Sailpoint come back to the public markets, making it clearly not a traditional IPO. Netskope also came out… also an exception mainly because of balance sheet stress caused by late-stage debt issues that needed to be resolved. I should probably note that I have a very tiny personal position in Netskope that resulted from one of the companies I advised being acquired by them a few years ago.
From that lens, while the market was open in the sense that those two companies did IPO, we haven't seen other companies do it even when they get the scale to be big enough to IPO. Wiz would be the strident example…for sure big enough but took the M&A route. Granted this was the largest security M&A ever, so it might also be an exception, but the pattern for late-stage cyber companies has been to raise private rounds and forgo the opportunity to raise capital from the public market.
I don't think this will change until something changes in the late-stage private capital markets that makes this no longer possible. As the current situation stands there's not really any motivation to go public for the best companies. These late-stage rounds provide plenty of capital and also liquidity for founders and employees in many cases. The IPO markets only represent a new compliance burden that is not attractive to most management teams.
Post-market correction, which performance metric is actually driving conviction in Israeli companies right now? Are investors prioritizing something specific to the current cycle?
The key metric is still revenue velocity, probably best measured by annual recurring revenue. If anything is changed, it’s that the traditional velocity expectation has increased dramatically to a large extent because of the comparison to the very high velocity of some vertical AI companies.
I would note that there seems to be a more aggressive treatment of ARR by a lot of companies and the numbers are likely overstated against traditional ARR metrics. (The short version is that many companies are now tracking committed ARR (CARR) versus active ARR. And so they might be counting ARR that in some cases is years away.)
With AI shifting from copilots toward more autonomous systems, where do you see Israeli startups establishing a defensible edge today?
Expertise. As always.
There is a persistent myth that generalized models will be enough and it never has been enough. This myth also existed when the models were deterministic machine learning models. There were companies formed with the thesis that a good enough machine learning model didn't need a security expert directing its work. Those were not the winners. The winners were companies that combined machine learning expertise with deep security expertise.
I believe the same thing is going to happen with generalized foundation models. To be clear, I do think they change what's possible to achieve as a security company (as did ML) but they will be best leveraged by people with deep security expertise. This has always been where the Israeli ecosystem shined and I think it will continue to shine with this generation of AI.
For foreign investors specifically, what has been the most persistent friction point when deploying capital into Israel recently? Is it regulatory clarity, talent mobility, capital structure, or something else?
For good reason (i.e. lots of great founding teams and a strong local VC ecosystem) the competitive atmosphere on the funding side is quite intense so that's a challenge.
The result is that sometimes I think the competition is too intense and companies take too much money at too high a valuation, which ends up being a burden on them in the long run.
Israeli founders are often associated with speed and adaptability. In the current environment, does that still translate into an advantage, or are you seeing stronger outcomes from teams that skew toward operational discipline and predictability?
I disagree with the premise of the question. We have both Israeli and non-Israeli companies in our portfolio and some of our best disciplined operators are Israeli.
For example, I just invested in Reclaim Security and Barak and the team’s operational discipline is amazing. By the way, they are also very fast to execute and innovative.
On the other side of the size spectrum, one of our largest investments, Cato Networks, I would argue has one of the best operational founders in security of all time, Shlomo Kramer, as CEO.
And to pile on, At-Bay shines as one of the best run companies in the cybersecurity insurance space…which is a space that has seen some other companies struggle for a lack of operational discipline.
So I'm not worried about an environmental shift towards operational discipline being anything but positive for founders from Israel (at least as it pertains to the founders that Acrew works with from Israel).
Looking at deal flow today, where do you see the largest disconnect between perceived risk and actual opportunity in the Israeli market?
I think for cybersecurity in general but this also applies to Israel-led companies, the belief that general-purpose foundation models will simply solve security without guidance from skilled cyber security professionals is the biggest disconnect.
