VC Survey 2026
“AI agents are not replacing human judgment. They are replacing latency, manual execution, and coordination costs”
Eyal Redler, managing partner at The Garage, joined CTech for its 2026 VC Survey.
“Autonomous AI agents are now being adopted across virtually every industry. The defining shift is not who adopted first, but the fact that even the most conservative and regulated organizations are now moving in this direction,” said Eyal Redler, managing partner at The Garage.
“Financial institutions serve as the strongest proof point. Historically slow to adopt new technologies, they are increasingly deploying autonomous agents because cost pressure, talent constraints, and rising customer expectations leave no viable alternative.”
“Adoption is unfolding in clear layers: internal use; external use for data and information; and external use for actions. Across all layers, agents are not replacing human judgment. They are replacing latency, manual execution, and coordination costs, while humans remain responsible for oversight and exceptions,” he added.
Following the turbulence of recent years and the stabilization of 2025, the Israeli tech ecosystem is entering a new era: The Next Leap. Redler joined CTech to share insights for its VC Survey 2026.
You can read the entire interview below.
Fund ID
Fund Name: The Garage
Total Assets Under Management: $100M
Partners/Managers: Omer Nagar, Eyal Redler, Shay Dan
Notable Portfolio Companies: Sedric, Insait, Crowded, ZenZap, Gain, Atlas Invest
Notable Exits: No exits to date (Fund I)
The Efficiency Leap: In the era of AI-driven hyper-productivity, is the traditional correlation between 'Headcount Growth' and 'Company Success' permanently broken?
The correlation between headcount growth and company success is changing, not disappearing. AI-driven productivity is clearly enabling teams to do significantly more with fewer human hours. We are seeing material gains in R&D velocity, automation of repetitive work, and faster iteration cycles.
However, this does not always translate into smaller companies, particularly in enterprise-tech. In this category, companies often reach similar overall sizes as before, but achieve far greater output and advance much faster. AI allows enterprise teams to accelerate R&D while reallocating capacity toward customer success, sales, product management, and business development, all of which remain critical when selling into large, complex organizations.
In contrast, for companies serving SMBs or consumer markets, AI does enable genuinely leaner organizations, especially in the early stages. Simpler sales cycles, lighter support requirements, and more standardized products allow these companies to scale meaningful revenue with significantly smaller teams.
The result is not necessarily leaner companies across the board, but faster-moving and more commercially effective organizations, where growth is driven by execution quality and capital efficiency rather than sheer headcount expansion.
The Sovereign Leap: Have the geopolitical lessons of recent years pushed Israeli startups to build independent, 'sovereign' tech stacks to reduce reliance on global platforms?
Selective sovereignty is emerging, but not yet in early-stage startups. While geopolitical and regulatory developments have clearly increased awareness around technological dependence, we are not yet seeing this translate meaningfully at the early-stage startup level.
Most early-stage Israeli startups still prioritize speed, product iteration, and go-to-market execution over sovereignty considerations. Building fully independent or even selectively sovereign stacks is expensive, complex, and often misaligned with the constraints of young companies.
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?
Several of the most attractive opportunities today sit in sectors that are widely overlooked, often due to outdated assumptions about monetization or perceived complexity.
One such area is 501(c) organizations and nonprofits. Many investors dismiss this space under the assumption that there is “no money in NGOs.” In practice, while these organizations do not always operate with large internal budgets, they often sit at the center of very large financial flows, including grants, donations, government funding, and programmatic spending. These flows require tracking, reporting, governance, and control, yet technology adoption remains limited and fragmented.
Another deeply underappreciated domain is procurement. Procurement remains one of the most human-capital-intensive functions in large organizations, still heavily dependent on manual processes, email-driven workflows, and legacy systems. It sits at the intersection of finance, operations, and compliance, making it mission-critical and ripe for automation, yet it receives far less attention than customer-facing functions.
Finally, legacy core system maintenance and modernization represents a massive and often ignored opportunity. While innovation happens at the edges, core systems in banks, insurers, and large enterprises remain decades old. Solutions that can extend, modernize, or gradually replace these cores without forcing full rip-and-replace projects offer clear ROI, strong defensibility, and long-term customer relationships.
Finally, what are 2-3 startups that, in your opinion, are likely to make a leap forward in 2026?
Insait (The Garage portfolio) - Insait enables financial institutions to effectively clone their best professionals by embedding agentic AI into complex, regulated workflows. This allows banks and insurers to automate customer-facing, revenue-generating processes while maintaining policy control, auditability, and measurable ROI. As organizations move from AI experimentation to production deployment, the ability to scale proven expertise across the organization has become critical, positioning Insait to expand rapidly.
Crowded (The Garage portfolio) - Crowded is a financial management and banking platform tailored for nonprofit organizations, associations, and membership groups, consolidating payments, expense tracking, compliance, fundraising, and banking into a single digital-first system. As regulatory and compliance requirements for nonprofits become increasingly complex, and as these organizations manage growing financial flows with limited operational capacity, fragmented tools are no longer viable. Crowded addresses this inflection point by providing unified, compliance-ready financial infrastructure that is becoming essential rather than optional.
ZenZap (The Garage portfolio) - ZenZap is a next-generation internal communication platform that enables companies to communicate, collaborate, and coordinate work in a way that aligns with modern human behavior while meeting organizational requirements for effectiveness, compliance, and data governance. As the workforce becomes younger and more distributed, the gap between how employees naturally communicate and what organizations require in terms of control, regulation, and data privacy continues to widen. ZenZap sits directly in this gap, offering a modern communication experience without forcing companies to compromise on compliance or governance.
