VC Survey 2026
“Israeli startups are extremely tethered to the US market, and we don’t see a way to build a big company from Israel without relying on the US market”
Dan Cahana, Principal on the Investment Team at Notable Capital, joined CTech for its 2026 VC Survey.
“Israeli startups are extremely tethered to the US market, and we don’t see a way to build a big company from Israel without relying on the US market,” said Dan Cahana, Principal on the Investment Team at Notable Capital, when asked whether the geopolitical lessons of recent years pushed Israeli startups to build independent, 'sovereign' tech stacks to reduce reliance on global platforms.
“In the US, we’re starting to see enterprise customers ensure their core dependencies are located on US soil, so we think Israeli startups will need to continue relying on US infrastructure to win.”
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Dan Cahana, Principal on the Investment Team at Notable Capital.
(Photo: Notable Capital)
Following the turbulence of recent years and the stabilization of 2025, the Israeli tech ecosystem is entering a new era: The Next Leap. Cahana joined CTech to share insights for its VC Survey 2026.
You can read the entire interview below.
Fund ID
Fund Name: Notable Capital
Total Assets Under Management: $5B
Partners/Managers: Glenn Solomon, Oren Yunger, Dan Cahana, Eliya Elon
Notable Portfolio Companies: Anthropic, Vercel, Torq, Orca Security, fal, Handshake, Monte Carlo, Quince, Drata, Descope, Browserbase
Notable Exits: Hashicorp, Slack, Affirm, Airbnb, Streamlit, Neon, Gem Security, Coinbase, Nozomi Networks, Square, Zendesk
The Valuation Leap: Moving past the market correction, what is the single most critical metric (e.g., EBITDA, NRR) that will drive premium valuations in 2026?
ARR growth continues to be the most important metric for startup valuations. Obviously not all ARR is equal, and retention matters more than ever, but in the age of AI investors are looking to see extremely strong product-market-fit leading to explosive growth. We are seeing the best companies reach $10M+ ARR in months instead of years, and $100M+ ARR in <2 years. The bar is shifting.
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?
We believe technical verticals like Engineering, IT, and Security are most likely to adopt AI end to end for processes that previously required junior technical talent, like Tier 1 investigations and IT ticket resolution. These categories have two critical characteristics: context is contained in existing software systems, which gives AI the relevant information to take action; and actions can be executed in code, which AI is excellent at writing.
The Efficiency Leap: In the era of AI-driven hyper-productivity, is the traditional correlation between 'Headcount Growth' and 'Company Success' permanently broken?
Yes. We’re already seeing companies achieve more with less using AI. We have one AI portfolio company with >$200M ARR and <100 employees, and <50 employees in R&D. Your sales motion will determine how much productivity you can drive–GTM teams will still scale with revenue if sales motion is top-down–but we believe every company should be seeing meaningful productivity improvements in R&D already.
The Contrarian Leap: What is one sector or trend currently ignored by the herd that you believe represents the most undervalued opportunity for the coming year?
Most of the focus in the market today is on LLMs, but we’re also very excited about the impact of generative image and video models. These models are improving extraordinarily quickly and are tremendously impactful on e-commerce, product and UI design, advertising, and even film. As early investors in fal, an inference platform for generative media, we’re already seeing the growth of the market. People primarily interact with the internet through image and video, and we expect much of that to be AI-generated in the near future. World models are coming as well, which we think will open up many new robotics and gaming opportunities. We’re excited to back Israeli founders building in these spaces.
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Finally, name 2-3 startups that, in your opinion, are likely to make a leap forward this year.
Token Security (portfolio) - AI agents are shifting the identity landscape dramatically. Token has the best solution for seeing and managing agent identities today.
Lightricks - One of the few Israeli companies really pushing the envelope in model development and commercialization, and seeing a lot of success doing so.
Torq (portfolio) - Many companies are talking about bringing AI to security operations, but few are actually delivering at enterprise scale the way Torq is. They’re becoming the trusted automation partner to scaled companies.
