“Israel has historically had a phenomenal pipeline. But it looks different today, and not necessarily in a good way. Applying technology is a little harder for Israeli companies to think about,” said Jeff Horing, Co-Founder and Managing Director of global venture capital firm Insight Partners.
Horing has invested in more than 250 companies worldwide and over 150 in Israel, including success stories like Monday.com, Wix, JFrog, and Wiz. With Insight Partners now the largest investor in Israeli high-tech, his advice to the room at Startup Nation Central’s MNC Summit 2025 was that Israel’s future performance in high tech will depend less on its inventions and more on its execution.
In the early 2000s, he said, founders and investors often clashed over control and direction. “We could fight for weeks about who to hire,” he recalled. “It was just a different approach, a bit more confrontational.”
Today, that tension has largely given way to partnership. Founders are more collaborative and ambitious, Horing said, aiming to build global, independent companies rather than sell early.
“The first generation of entrepreneurship in Israel was about quick exits,” he said. “But around 2010, founders started saying, ‘No, I’m going to run for the gold.’ That created a very different type of exit environment.”
“A lot of you are phenomenal inventors of new technology or pushing the envelope on new technology,” Horing said as he spoke with Startup Nation Central CEO Avi Hasson in Tel Aviv. “In the area of cyber, it was second nature to you to think about the application of cyber in the real world.”
However, he continued, what Israel’s startups often lack is proximity to large-scale corporate users, like those found in the U.S. or Europe, creating a gap that limits understanding of real commercial challenges. “Israel has historically not had as tight a link to practitioners as other markets,” Horing said.
Thus, he continued, “You have to work doubly hard to make sure you get yourselves out there to understand what real-world problems look like. Because if you all try to solve the same intuitive problem, there’ll be a lot of ‘me-too’ business plans.”
“The value,” he added, “is understanding how to apply technology to a business problem.”
That gap is one that Insight Partners now hopes to help close. “We’ll have some answers maybe in the next two months to think about how we can help the ecosystem here get closer to some of the problems that we see in the U.S. that are unsolved,” Horing revealed. “I’d love to help move a little bit more aggressively how founders think about business problems that are really sticky and transformative for big companies.”
Horing noted that the companies most likely to thrive will be those that truly understand their customers, highlighting a metric he believes is undervalued by most Israeli startups: gross retention. “How much of your business is predictable from year to year from your existing customers, versus how much do we have to do in terms of getting new customers,” he explained.
“If anybody’s out there starting a business, and that number is less than 90%, I would rethink what you’re doing,” he said. “It may not be felt today. It will be felt in the future.”
When the fireside discussion turned to whether software risks becoming a commodity amid the rise of chips, hardware, and other deep-tech fields, Horing refuted the claim. “We’re not too concerned about software losing its magic,” he said.
Ultimately, Horing conceptualizes the AI revolution as an extension of software: a force multiplier rather than its successor. “AI is a form of software,” he said. “AI is just a phenomenal tool to solve new business problems. It could be five times the size of what cloud was, which was five times the size of what client-server was.”