Mind the Tech NY
"There are 470 Israeli startups in New York and the number is growing every week"
"In the past year, we have continued to see more Israeli startups in New York," said Guy Franklin, founder and CEO of Israeli Mapped in NY and the Calcalist and Leumi New York conference. Elliot Robinson, Partner at Bessemer Growth: "AI is different from anything I’ve seen before"
"Over the past year, we have continued to see more Israeli startups in New York. Today, there are 470 startups from Israel and the number is increasing every week. Two weeks ago, we launched a digital club card for every Israeli who works here in tech, with the aim of connecting everyone to the community and also receiving benefits in New York," said Guy Franklin, CEO and founder of the organization Israeli Mapped in New York, which connects the local tech community, as he opened the spring event for startup founders and venture capital funds. The event, which was held in collaboration with the Meitar Law Firm, Valley Bank, and Wix, was attended by entrepreneurs, partners in venture capital funds, and the financial industry that supports the high-tech community. Noa Argamani, who joined the venture capital fund Vine Ventures, also attended the event.
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Founders Club Gathering (from right): Tomer Shani, Keren Rachmani, Yossi Hayut, Eitan Israeli, Ori Kaufman Gafter, Guy Franklin, Adi Grinapell and Elliott Robinson
(Photo: Reyan Preuss)
Elliott Robinson, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, which also invests in Anthropic, spoke with Ori Kaufman Gafter, head of international banking and technology at Valley Bank, about the ways in which the AI upheaval is changing the way we evaluate potential investments and manage existing portfolios: "I've been in venture capital for almost 20 years. I've made seven investments in Israeli entrepreneurs, including companies like Upwind and DriveNets. Today, everything is turning upside down. I've seen the transition to mobile, to SaaS, to the cloud, but artificial intelligence is different from anything I've seen before. Today, you don't need to recruit a lot of employees in the early stages, and the idea that an entrepreneur can build a company with a few employees is something we haven't seen before. You also need to ask entrepreneurs completely different questions. The user interface is also changing, which is another thing that entrepreneurs need to think about. Most of the companies I work with today don't have a product building plan for more than 90 days ahead because of the uncertainty that comes with developments of AI giants like Anthropic. In the past, it was at least a year."
Saaya Pal, a partner at Jump Capital, continued in her conversation with Adi Grinapell of Meitar New York to focus on the profound changes that the AI revolution is dictating in the way venture capital funds view startups: "There are many costs to increasing the use of AI, and organizations are starting to give it much more weight. Investors are looking for different things today. Questions of marketing and product take up more space and weight at the expense of technology, and this is a very profound change."
Eitan Israeli, VP of Business Development at the internet company Wix, said in a conversation with Franklin: "When we founded Wix, we thought about democratizing the internet, and now the era of AI has arrived and we realized that our customers need more. We started building a new product and we couldn't miss Maor Shlomo, who built Base44 on his own. We saw that he had an amazing product and it was clear to us that even though we have hundreds of engineers, we should be humble when identifying a talent like his. We both wanted to build a product quickly in order to capture market share and we can already see that it was a win-win for both parties." Israeli referred to the future of business models in the software market: "Selling user licenses will disappear from the world and software will be priced according to usage. In the more distant future, the software will have direct contact with the user's brain. Today it sounds like science fiction to us, but there are companies that are already working on it."
