1 View gallery <\/p>\n
![\"Lior](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/S160DyRLWe_0_0_3000_2000_0_x-large.jpg\" "\\"Lior")
<\/a><\/p>\n
Lior Segal (left) and Yaniv Jacobi, Managing Partners at Horizon Capital. <\/p>\n
(Photo: Horizon Capital)<\/p>\n
\u201cThat said, the biggest disruptions will come where speed, resilience, and coordination matter most: logistics and supply chain, emergency response, and real-time situational awareness. The winners will be the teams that productize it cleanly: simple UX, measurable ROI, and auditability for regulated customers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Following the turbulence of recent years and the stabilization of 2025, the Israeli tech ecosystem is entering a new era: The Next Leap<\/a>. Jacobi and Segal joined CTech to share insights for its VC Survey 2026<\/a>.<\/p>\n You can read the entire interview below.<\/p>\n Fund Name: Horizon Capital<\/p>\n Total Assets Under Management: $50M<\/p>\n Partners\/Managers: Yaniv Jacobi and Lior Segal<\/p>\n Notable Portfolio Companies: Datarails, Siteaware, Verbit, Vee, Spikerz, Aiode, Orbb<\/p>\n Notable Exits: Own (Acquired by Salesforce), Nanorep (Acquired by LogMeIn), Ondigo (Acquired by Gong), BlueRibbon (Acquired by DraftKing)<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n After a prolonged period of caution defined by war-driven uncertainty, the second half of 2025 marked a clear release of pent-up momentum. Private funding climbed back to around $15.6B, and we\u2019re seeing strong signs that strategics are no longer sitting on the sidelines – they\u2019re actively buying.<\/p>\n Looking ahead to 2026, we expect M&A to remain the dominant liquidity path. Naturally, activity will continue in Israel\u2019s flagship sectors like cyber, but a parallel trend is taking shape: many solid companies that demonstrated real growth but ran out of runway are now seeking soft landings. On the other hand, corporates and PE firms that preserve capital are on the hunt for undervalued opportunities. This creates a wave of exits with smaller ticket sizes – but high strategic value.<\/p>\n IPOs may reopen, but we see that as more realistic toward late 2026, and only for a select group of truly public-ready companies. Even then, the IPO path will compete with compelling acquisition offers (like ServiceNow\u2019s $7.75B deal for Armis) so founders will continue to weigh certainty versus timing.<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n As early-stage investors, we\u2019re seeing that the path to a Series A isn\u2019t defined by hitting a magic Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) number anymore. It\u2019s about showing healthy QoQ growth and underlying efficiency – that\u2019s what gets a partner meeting today.<\/p>\n We don\u2019t believe there\u2019s a single metric that tells the full story, but we\u2019ve always had a strong bias toward Net Revenue Retention (NRR), especially when it\u2019s paired with healthy, consistent growth.<\/p>\n NRR is the cleanest signal of real product pull: customers expand over time, pricing power compounds, and growth becomes less dependent on landing new logos. It shows whether the product becomes more essential after adoption – not just whether it can be sold once. And in frothy markets, it\u2019s the best lie detector: expansion either happens or it doesn\u2019t. With capital flowing back into the market and more institutional money entering the ecosystem, fundamentals can get blurry. NRR helps cut through that noise.<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n Truly, we don\u2019t think full autonomy will land in 2026 across most industries. Where we do expect agents to earn real trust quickly is in data-driven functions with tight feedback loops – starting with marketing and paid growth. Outcomes are measurable and fast (CPA, ROAS, creative performance, funnel conversion), so teams can set guardrails and still let agents optimize continuously.<\/p>\n Beyond marketing, we expect meaningful autonomy in other domains where the loop is similarly closed and well-scoped. QA is a good example: agents can generate tests, run suites, detect regressions, and triage failures end-to-end under clear governance. The same pattern applies to additional operational areas where success is objective, measurable, and quickly verifiable.<\/p>\n In coding, finance, and sales, we don\u2019t expect true end-to-end autonomy yet. The workflows are higher-risk, harder to fully verify, and require deeper context. That said, we do think agent capabilities will accelerate rapidly, so while full autonomy isn\u2019t here in 2026, it\u2019s getting closer than most people expect.<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n One area we think will rise in 2026 is PropTech. In 2022-2025, higher interest rates and slower transaction volumes put the global category on pause, but as the cycle starts to loosen, we\u2019re already seeing capital and adoption return – especially to products that cut real operating costs, not just \u201cdigitize the brochure.\u201d<\/p>\n The rebound is visible: in 2025, global PropTech and adjacent real-estate tech investment reached $16.7B (up ~68% YoY), a meaningful shift after the slowdown.<\/p>\n We believe 2026 will be the year when the next wave breaks through: vertical, workflow-owning systems (often agentic) that can manage property operations, building, maintenance, and energy optimization. Real estate customers don\u2019t adopt because it\u2019s cool – they adopt when ROI is undeniable.<\/p>\n The winners will be the companies tied to measurable efficiency, lower vacancies or operating costs, and faster cycles – not speculative growth narratives.<\/p>\n Finally, name 2-3 startups that, in your opinion, are likely to make a leap forward this year.<\/p>\n Vee.com (portfolio company) – Vee.com is an AI-powered platform helping nonprofits get funded quickly and easily. With AI members, Maggie, Grant, and Donna work alongside nonprofits to streamline social media management, grant discovery and writing, and donor relations.<\/p>\n Spikerz (portfolio company) – Spikerz is a social media security SaaS platform built for brands and public figures. It automatically detects and eliminates social media threats, including cyber-attacks, fake accounts, harmful comments, phishing attempts, spam, and scams.<\/p>\n Bites (portfolio company) – Bites empowers companies to train and upskill frontline teams with AI-driven, social-style content, delivered instantly through the channels they already use.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWartime innovation in Israel is extraordinary. Extreme constraints force solutions that are faster, tougher, and more operationally grounded…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":272224,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":{"0":"post-272223","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-israel","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272223\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/272224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}