The CEO of the Israel Innovation Authority, Dror Bin, expressed great optimism about the future of Israeli high-tech despite significant global and domestic challenges, asserting the industry has demonstrated extraordinary resilience by consistently breaking boundaries and growing after every past crisis.
Bin highlighted that the next major wave of innovation is deep-tech, focusing on real-world domains like defense, food, and health, noting that Israel is already the world’s second-largest hub for deep-tech fundraising, a sector the Authority is actively promoting with new incentives.
The sector’s strength is evidenced by 2025 being a record year for exits at $71 billion, with high-tech now accounting for 57% of Israel’s total exports, and a 60% surge in funding applications from entrepreneurs even amidst recent conflicts.
However, Bin also pointed to worrying indicators, including a drop in the number of new startups and a sharp decline in capital raised by venture capital funds – only $1.3 billion in 2024 compared to $6.1 billion in 2022 – along with an over-concentration of investment in cybersecurity and enterprise software that he hopes to diversify.
Looking forward, he emphasized the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology, stressing the nation’s strong position in these areas and the need for continued investment to ensure high-tech drives the entire Israeli economy.
Examples of Israeli deeptech companies, across different sectors, are:
Hailo – AI Processor for Edge Devices
Hailo is focused on enabling smart edge technologies to reach their full potential. Its solutions bridge the gap between existing and future AI technologies, providing the compute capacity needed to power these applications.
Classiq Technologies – Quantum Computing Software
Classiq is the leading quantum software company, providing the technology that makes it practical for enterprises and researchers to access and harness quantum computing. Classiq’s platform transforms high-level functional models into optimized, hardware-ready quantum circuits automatically. This enables teams to develop algorithms faster, optimize them for cost and performance, and make quantum applications usable sooner, without deep hardware expertise.
Supermeat – Clean Chicken Meat
SuperMeat is dedicated to providing the world with the highest-quality chicken meat grown directly from cells in a sustainable and animal-friendly process. SuperMeat collaborates with production experts from the pharmaceutical industry to create meat products that are sustainable, cost-efficient, animal-friendly, and delicious.
XtraLit – Direct Lithium Extraction from Aqueous Sources
XtraLit develops a lithium extraction technology that enables efficient processing of brine resources with both high and low lithium concentrations. The solution combines high selectivity and capacity to improve yield and reduce costs compared to conventional methods, offering a scalable and sustainable approach for lithium production. Applicable across diverse geographies, including the Middle East and North America, XtraLit’s technology supports the growing demand for lithium in battery manufacturing and renewable energy applications by unlocking previously uneconomical brine sources.
MetalBear – Development Tools for Backend Engineers
MetalBear is an open-core company focused on creating tools for modern backend engineers. The company’s primary product, Mirrord.dev, is a development tool that allows developers to run local code in the context of their Kubernetes cluster without requiring deployment. By introducing a new workflow, MetalBear enhances the development feedback loop, improving code quality and reducing time to market by addressing bottlenecks in shared staging environments.
Pinecone – Database for Vector-based Applications
Pinecone builds infrastructure to enable AI applications in the cloud. The company’s vector database supports large-scale production deployments of real-time applications such as personalization, semantic text search, image retrieval, data fusion, deduplication, recommendation, and anomaly detection.
Whether you’re interested in AI-optimisation processing, energy efficiency, future of food, engineering tools, or edge devices, reach out to Jeremy Ungar at the Israel Trade and Economic Commission in Australia for a market report. Jeremy.Ungar@israeltrade.gov.il
H/T: https://www.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/article-879138
israeltrade.org.au 