VC Survey 2026
“Global LPs now assume Israeli founders can operate through geopolitical shocks, volatility, operational chaos, and even war”
Daniel Roditi, Co-founder and Managing Partner at Meron Capital, joined CTech for its 2026 VC Survey.
“The resilience narrative has been front and center since October 7th, and rightly so. Today, resilience is table stakes, not differentiation. Global LPs now assume Israeli founders can operate through geopolitical shocks, volatility, operational chaos, and even war,” said Daniel Roditi, Co-founder and Managing Partner at Meron Capital.
“The next chapter is not just resilience, but antifragile velocity and scale. Israel consistently produces teams and categories that are simultaneously low risk, largely insulated from global disruption, and high reward, delivering category leaders in cybersecurity, defense, AI, semiconductors, data, quantum, and health.”
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Daniel Roditi, Co-founder and Managing Partner at Meron Capital.
(Photo: Meron Capital)
Following the turbulence of recent years and the stabilization of 2025, the Israeli tech ecosystem is entering a new era: The Next Leap. Roditi joined CTech to share insights for its VC Survey 2026.
You can read the entire interview below.
Fund ID
Fund Name: Meron Capital
Total Assets Under Management: $170M
Partners/Managers: Daniel Roditi, Liron Azrielant, Gil Shai
Notable Portfolio Companies: Eon, Mesh, Quantum Machines, Immunai, Apono
Notable Exits: Laminar and Testim
The Liquidity Leap: After a period defined by cash preservation, will 2026 see the reopening of the IPO window, or will M&A remain the primary liquidity event?
2025 already proved an important point: Israeli tech does not need a wide-open IPO window to produce meaningful liquidity. Record exits like Wiz and CyberArk showed that global strategic buyers still place a premium on Israeli innovation, and that very large outcomes can be achieved without going public.
That said, IPO readiness remains a very high bar. To IPO today, a company needs true maturity: predictable growth, strong unit economics, operational efficiency, category leadership, and typically $200M+ in ARR. There are a handful of Israeli companies that could plausibly meet that threshold over time, names like Cato, Snyk, Rapyd, VAST, Deel, or Lendbuzz, but they are the exception, not the rule.
At the same time, post-IPO performance in 2025 was mixed, which dampened appetite on both sides of the table. Structurally, Israel remains a market where many companies are acquired well before reaching $100M ARR, and we expect that pattern to continue except for a few outliers.
Our view: 2026 may bring a modest uptick in IPOs, but M&A will remain the dominant, and often superior, path to liquidity for Israeli tech. It offers speed, certainty, and scale in a market that still rewards strategic fit over public-market storytelling.
The Deep Tech Leap: With the rising focus on hardware-heavy sectors (Defense, Climate, Quantum), is the Israeli VC model adapted to fund high-CAPEX ventures?
The model is adapting, rapidly, but selectively. We’re seeing larger check sizes, bigger rounds, deeper strategic and corporate participation, and significantly more foreign capital flowing into Israel. Proof points are already here: quantum companies raised roughly $500M in 2025, and defense-related startups attracted over $1B in financing.
Dedicated funds, strategic buyers, and clear M&A and IPO paths are emerging across these categories. That said, the challenge remains real. Israel still has relatively limited domestic expertise in pure hardware scaling and continues to rely heavily on foreign capital for later stages.
The model works for category leaders - but not for everyone. Capital-intensive deep tech in Israel is becoming a power-law game, where only the strongest teams with global relevance and strategic backing can truly break out.
The Efficiency Leap: In the era of AI-driven hyper-productivity, is the traditional correlation between 'Headcount Growth' and 'Company Success' permanently broken?
That correlation was already weakening well before AI. AI simply accelerates the decoupling. Headcount growth is no longer a reliable proxy for progress or success.
Going forward, revenue per employee will become a far more central metric, alongside capital efficiency and speed of iteration. The most successful companies will be those that scale impact by leveraging AI to compress time, cost, and organizational complexity.
The Next Engine: Cybersecurity has been Israel’s primary export engine for a decade. Which domain is best positioned to take the lead by 2030?
AI-driven pharma and healthcare applications are well positioned to become Israel’s next major export engine by 2030.
This is a massive global market, spanning drug discovery, clinical development, diagnostics, personalization, and care delivery. It is defined by complex, high-impact problems that were not solvable until very recently.
Many companies tried to address these challenges 8-10 years ago, but the AI stack was not ready. Over the past few years, capabilities have accelerated dramatically, and the timing is now right for real breakthroughs.
Aidoc showed that Israeli startups can build category-defining healthcare AI products with global adoption, particularly in visual diagnostics, and that was the previous generation. Today’s AI enables a much broader opportunity, from foundational biology and drug discovery to longitudinal patient intelligence, clinical development, and care delivery. Early signs of this shift are already visible in companies like Numenos, which applies modern AI to clinical development and real-world evidence.
Israeli founders are well suited for this space. Core strengths in advanced AI, data science, working with massive noisy datasets, and building mission-critical systems overlap heavily with Israel’s cybersecurity DNA. The main gap is not talent, but playbooks as the healthcare and pharma ecosystem remain less mature, with fewer experienced operators and regulatory veterans.
Moving beyond cybersecurity into foundational technology domains is critical for the next generation of Israeli tech leadership. AI-driven healthcare and pharma, defense and dual-use technologies, AI infrastructure and semiconductors, physical AI, and quantum computing are not adjacent opportunities. They are core building blocks for the future of global technology platforms.
Finally, name 2-3 startups that, in your opinion, are likely to make a leap forward this year.
Eon (portfolio company) - Eon is disrupting a long-neglected category that has historically been dominated by large incumbents and outdated solutions. Strong product-market pull and accelerating demand position them for (another) breakout year.
Limitless.CNC (portfolio company) - A standout example of physical AI. By applying advanced machine learning and generative AI to a deeply traditional, manual industry, they are building proprietary first-party data moats that compound into a durable competitive advantage.
