VC Survey 2026
“Everyone is obsessed with the AI Brain, but there’s a massive undervalued opportunity in the AI Body”
Grove Ventures managing partner Renana Ashkenazi joined CTech for its 2026 VC Survey.
Renana Ashkenazi, managing partner at Grove Ventures.
(Video: Orel Cohen)
“Everyone is obsessed with the 'AI Brain' - the models. But there’s a massive undervalued opportunity in the 'AI Body' - compute and energy infrastructure,” said Renana Ashkenazi, managing partner at Grove Ventures.
Asked to pinpoint an undervalued opportunity in the tech industry for the coming year, she highlighted the need for a new approach to power infrastructure.
“The 2026 AI economy and its electrical requirements can’t run on a 1990s power grid. And we are starting to see global Tier-1 money moving in that direction (Andreessen Horowitz's 'American Dynamism' fund, Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Coatue),” she said. “Startups that are solving the power bottleneck are the ones to look out for.”
Following the turbulence of recent years and the stabilization of 2025, the Israeli tech ecosystem is entering a new era: The Next Leap. Ashkenazi joined CTech to share insights for its VC Survey 2026
You can read the entire interview below.
ID Card:
Name of Fund: Grove Ventures
Total Assets Under Management (AUM): $520 million
Partners/Managers: Dov Moran, Lotan Levkowitz, Lior Handelsman, Renana Ashkenazy, Liat Koren
Notable Portfolio Companies (Active): ActiveFence, Wiliot, Navina, Quantum Source, OneLayer, Teramount, Opmed, LAVA, NoTraffic, Majestic Labs AI
Notable Exits: NeuroBlade, CommonGround, RapidAPI, Mirato, Spry
The Liquidity Leap: After a period defined by cash preservation, will 2026 see the reopening of the IPO window for Israeli tech, or will M&A remain the sole viable liquidity event?
The IPO window is open-ish, but the bar is incredibly high. If $100M Annual Recurring Revenue used to be enough to consider an IPO, today you need $300M$ ARR and Generally Accepted Accounting Principles profitability. In 2025, we started seeing selected activity (mostly large, profitable, or near-profitable companies), and I’d cautiously predict the trend will continue in 2026, but only as long as we continue to see sustained lower rates.
As far as the Israeli market goes, with Wiz, Armis, CyberArk out of the game, there are only a few Israeli companies that are left with the relevant scale, so many will probably still choose the strategic M&A path.
The Valuation Leap: Moving past the market correction, what is the single most critical metric that will drive premium valuations in 2026?
The metric changes depending on your stage (for early stage, you want to show usage intensity, for growth, that’s obviously not enough), but generally I would say efficient growth: growth that creates lasting enterprise value without relying on an increased cash burn to sustain it.
After the market correction, investors are not only considering speed but quality of speed - it’s not just about how fast you’re growing, but about how expensive is that growth, and does it compound. Obviously, AI adds a new twist because we now ask questions we didn’t have to ask before - Are model and inference costs stable and do margins improve with scale, or deteriorate?
The Agentic Leap: As we transition from 'Copilots' to autonomous 'Agents,' which specific vertical will be the first to fully trust AI with independent decision-making?
Independent decision-making will be where we can tolerate mistakes in judgment - areas where ROI is immediate, decisions are frequent, but bounded and reversible (the downside can be controlled). That could be logistics and supply chain operations, fleet and warehouse orchestration (you can always reroute, rebalance, reprioritize, re-pick). It could be in DevTools. But it probably won’t be consumer-facing, and it will definitely not be mission critical or healthcare (at least not in clinical decision-making). Healthcare will absolutely use agents, but it will trust them first in admin and orchestration (scheduling, intake, billing, prior auth, chasing missing data), not in unsupervised clinical decisions.
The Dual-Use Leap: Which civilian industry will see the biggest disruption from adapting battle-tested defense technologies?
The most trivial is Construction Tech. Construction sites are basically a war zone in slow motion: unpredictable environments, safety-critical decisions, fragmented tools, huge cost of delay, suffering from labor shortages. We already see founders taking drone swarms used for perimeter defense and selling them for real-time construction site inspection.
Finally, what are 2-3 startups that, in your opinion, are likely to make a leap forward in 2026?
ActiveFence (Portfolio company) - As GenAI adoption accelerates, companies need confidence that AI and agentic systems can be deployed, scaled, and operated safely as they evolve- something ActiveFence uniquely delivers by combining advanced AI with deep threat intelligence to provide real-time guardrails, continuous red teaming, and global-scale protection for over 3 billion users, top foundation models, and the world’s largest enterprises.
Teramount (Portfolio company) - AI is pushing data centers to a breaking point where not just with compute connectivity and bandwidth are becoming a limiting factor. Teramount’s fiber-to-chip optical interconnect can unlock higher performance and lower power at scale, making it a critical enabler for the next generation of AI infrastructure.
Helios (Non-Portfolio) - Helios is emerging as a leader in green steel innovation, with the potential to help decarbonize a trillion-dollar industry by replacing carbon-intensive processes with a fundamentally cleaner approach. They’re positioned to turn an ambitious vision into industrial reality - on Earth today, and eventually beyond it.
