The Spiro Circle

When Argon Security was acquired by Aqua Security in 2021, Eylam Milner experienced a different kind of startup shock. Not the chaos of building a company, but the sudden absence of it.For years, he had operated on his own time. As the co-founder, decisions were immediate, and progress was measured in days, not quarters. But once moving into part of a larger company, movement required consensus.“We had to do some mind-shifting,” he told me. “For example, large companies don’t move like startup companies, and employees cannot move things like founders can. So I had to find a new path for me to move the product in the direction that I thought was right, and the business in the direction that we thought was right.”Milner spent three years at Aqua with co-founder and CEO Eilon Elhadad before they both left to start Echo Security. The company examines critical components of original open-source code and then rebuilds it from scratch while continuously updating it as new vulnerabilities are discovered. It has raised $50 million in its first 10 months from Notable Capital, N47, SVCI, Hyperwise Ventures, and SentinelOne S Ventures. The experience did not slow him down, but it changed what he pays attention to when building again.Kill Your DarlingsMilner brings new insight and experience to a startup as a second-time founder - something he says offers perspective as he begins to build a new product. This includes knowing when to dive deeper into a product, or accepting when it might be time to change course and remain tuned to the market. “We product engineers are all builders, right? They create stuff out of nothing, which is magical on its own, but you fall in love with it,” he said. “The more time you invest in a project, in a feature, in a milestone, the more you are in love with it and the harder it is to shift or pivot.”For young startups or first-time founders in particular, emotional attachment could become a liability as a company grows and it becomes harder to question whether it should exist at all. “You have to stay on your toes and be able to not fall in love with the thing you built and be willing to throw it away or to shift left and right to get the correct result of value proposition for your customer.”At Echo, iteration is treated as part of the process rather than a correction. “It’s about repetitive change… in order to make sure you are on the right path,” he concluded.And for that love? “I would recommend keeping it platonic.” Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

AI is forcing companies into environments where they are no longer competing against rivals, but with adversaries. In cybersecurity, where attackers adapt in real time, the competitive advantage for defenders is no longer just about efficiency, but in how companies learning and revise their assumptions. Instead of optimizing for speed alone, some of the biggest AI security companies are being built around principles closer to IDF intelligence operations that include constant simulation, adversarial thinking, after-action reviews, and learning under uncertainty.To better understand this, I spoke to Ido Geffen, Co-Founder and CEO at Novee Security. Novee is an AI-driven cybersecurity startup focused on transforming how companies find and fix security vulnerabilities. Rather than traditional penetration testing, which is manual, periodic, and slow, the company uses continuous, autonomous AI that simulates real-world attackers to proactively uncover hidden vulnerabilities and validate them in real time.Geffen described modern cyber defense as fundamentally imbalanced. Defenders must be perfect all of the time, whereas attackers only need to succeed once to penetrate a company. Its platform blends offensive cyber tradecraft with AI to close the gap between evolving threats and slower defensive testing processes.“You can be perfect in 99.9% of the time, but then you have this one hole, and you lose the game,” he explained. “And the bad guy doesn't have these constraints… they just need one shot that will work.”The new reality facing companies and cyber defense technologies means there is a shift in how to tackle these threats. Traditional enterprise software ships features, but companies like Novee continuously discover failure. This is where the mindset shifts from an engineering discipline to an intelligence discipline.Geffen, who has experience in the IDF, including time spent in Gaza’s dangerous tunnel system, explained how the differences between preparedness and adaptability were a military skill he adopted and brought to the cybersecurity sector. “One of the main things that I learned during those years is the ability of every soldier or a man in this type of unit to come up with ideas on how we can improve, what we can do differently,” he explained. “So I think this is one of the strengths of this type of unit. It’s hierarchy and all of that, but in the end, if someone comes up with a very good initiative, you can really change the way things are being done. And I think that, at least for me, it was very inspiring.”Thanks for reading The Spiro Circle! This post is public, so feel free to share it.The AI era is creating companies that operate in new environments where the problem space evolves daily - and cybersecurity companies are forced to keep up with the hackers. In those conditions, efficiency is key, and adaptability must operate alongside preparedness.The company emerged from stealth last month with a $51.5 million funding raise across Seed and Series A in just four months since its founding in May 2025 - a huge testament to its tech, talent, and market position. Backers include YL Ventures, Canaan Partners, and Oren Zeev via Zeev Ventures. As AI agents interact with complex real-world systems across finance, infrastructure, or healthcare industries, the companies building them will need to adopt strategies that resemble military intelligence: constantly testing reality, updating beliefs, and assuming uncertainty is permanent. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

I spend a lot of my time talking to investors and entrepreneurs about AI. But the adoption of this tech goes way beyond Silicon Valley or Startup Nation. A few weeks ago, I spoke with Victor Varnado, an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor, producer, and tech creator. He has worked with local improv troupes and has also appeared in Hollywood movies such as "The Adventures of Pluto Nash with Eddie Murphy.So Victor is a creative - there’s no doubt about that - but he also stretches his entrepreneurial muscles: He’s the CEO of Supreme Robot Pictures, a creative production and technology company that helped produce a miniseries for Penguin Random House calledThe Great Fantasy Debate.I wanted to speak to Victor about his approach to creativity and where technology like AI can fit into that. It feels like artists can be sensitive about the use of artificial intelligence (as a writer, I would know!), but I wanted to see how people in the comedy industry can use the technology as a tool, similar to a utility. He describes a recent brainstorming session where he considered becoming “the world’s most benign supervillain”, which sparked the kind of conversation I’ve never had on this show. “AI helped me figure that out. So now I’m going to launch a public campaign where I become a supervillain,” he explained. By using AI, he crafted a campaign centered around his new persona, King Supernuts, complete with public events like “The Worldwide Tic-Tac-Toe Championship” and a unique twist on villainy. This integration of AI into his creative workflow showed how technology can elevate artistic expression rather than replace or replicate it. He noted, “AI can help me make the images... logos... all along the way for the creative process.” I could relate. I use AI every day for things like interview transcription, research, and light editing of my articles. I shouldn’t feel threatened by its presence, but rather liberated by how it can streamline and modify my process.Victor’s career path shows how we can apply tech to a cohesive creative identity - and that AI isn’t reserved for spreadsheets or mundane tasks. By embracing technology and humor, he illustrates how the arts can evolve in the digital age. We also spoke about my attempt at stand-up comedy and whether AI can “be funny”: What it means for a technology to make someone laugh, and whether intent is a qualifier for humour. You can learn about it all in our episode. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

Obviously, it’s no surprise to people that I’m a huge fan of history. Working in news for years, I’ve always appreciated that the stories breaking each day (and the people reporting them) are contributing to what will eventually become history.“News is just history in real time”, right?I’ve long been fascinated by how social media, AI, and mass communication have reshaped the way we experience and understand those moments.Last week, I spoke to Manny Marotta. He’s the creator and curator of the Live History Project, which takes a couple of accounts on X and posts in real time what’s happening in that moment in history.There’s: 25 years ago - @25YearsAgoLive 50 years ago - @50YearsAgoLive 100 years ago - @100YearsAgoLive and 250 years ago - @250YearsAgoLiveRight now, that means we’re living through 2001, 1976, 1926, and 1776 simultaneously.It’s an interesting insight into what was happening at that moment in history on those days, but also Manny does a great job at showing us how the news was covering those events. He doesn’t editorialize. He simply presents the news as it is.Much of our conversation focused on the 2001 account. It’s no secret that there’s a century-defining event taking place later that year, and we get into it all in the episode.But more than anything, the account taps into a powerful sense of nostalgia among his 205,000 followers (this number is significantly growing after some viral posts in the last few days).No one really has nostalgia for 1776, and few people can personally remember 1926 — but 25 years ago? That many of us remember. I remember reading those headlines, following those stories as they happened, and it’s strange to realize some of what he posts now is a quarter century old.So we talk about his project and his passion for it, and we also talk about our relationship to the news and to the mass media that reported the news to us. Social media has transformed how we consume information, but by showing us exactly what audiences saw at the time, his project helps explain how we arrived at the present.It was a really interesting conversation, and I really wish that we could have spoken for hours in more depth. I’m sure we’ll speak again at some point in the future, but for now, please enjoy our introductory conversation.Preview: Companies use AI to exploit cultural nostalgia at 2026 Super Bowl Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

For the past decade, election debates in the United States and some European countries have revolved around access, accountability, and security.The discussion has become deeply politicized, especially since the 2000 American election. One side pushes expanded mail-in and remote voting, whereas others push for voter-identification laws and stricter eligibility checks. In the USA, moves are being made to introduce the SAVE America Act, which would ensure identification for voting. But the voter-ID debate is solving identity, not legitimacy — and a new industry is emerging to solve the second problem.This week, I spoke to Shai Bargil, co-founder and CEO of Sequent, a company that uses cryptography and open-source software to provide secure, transparent, and end-to-end verifiable digital election results. According to Bargil, the future of election legitimacy is based on how organizations can independently verify the outcome afterward.“People are kind of losing trust in the system today,” he told me. “It’s very hard to track how elections are being conducted. Whether it’s on paper or whether it’s digital.”Founded in 2021 by Bargil alongside CTO Eduardo Robles and Head of Research David Ruescas, Sequent has raised $3.2 million. It works with election bodies for governments, municipalities, and public institutions such as unions and universities to ensure voter privacy, ballot secrecy, fully open-source election results, and system-wide transparency for online votes. Its ambition is to do for e-voting what online banking did for finance: make it accessible, secure, and auditable.Remote Voting Turned Elections Into A Technology PlatformTensions surrounding policy and implementation are intensifying as voting habits change. Remote participation expanded dramatically across the West through absentee ballots, mail-in voting, and overseas voting programs, especially in the United States in the 2020 election. “Thirty percent of all Americans vote in federal elections by mail,” Bargil noted, with the trend only set to increase. Once voting happens outside a polling station, elections start to resemble other online systems, and so verification and trust become central issues. “If you’re voting by mail, you basically don’t identify in any way,” he said, arguing that verification must be paired with proof of accurate counting.“We need to prove above all doubts that the winner won and the loser lost,” he added. So here lies the joint-solution: that voter ID laws answer eligibility, but cryptographic verification solutions like Sequent answer legitimacy.The Philippines Became A Real-World Test CaseLast year, it helped roughly 1.2 million cast digital ballots remotely for elections in the Philippines, with the deployment functioning as a live demonstration of a model where authentication and verification are built together.Instead of trusting a vendor or election authority alone, observers can audit mathematical proof that votes were recorded and counted correctly.“You don’t really have to trust either the system or the vendor,” Bargil says.Elections Are Becoming Regulated Tech InfrastructureHistorically, election legitimacy came from process visibility: observers watching ballot boxes, physical counting, and human oversight. Digital systems can break that psychological assurance since citizens cannot “see” software and how it is gathering and counting votes, or if the vote was counted at all. The solution, Bargil argued, is about replacing visual trust with mathematical certainty. “Criticism comes because most of the systems today are pretty much black boxes.” This shifts the questions surrounding election integrity into the faith in the technology itself. The goal isn’t to prevent fraud alone, but to reduce unverifiable outcomes - a concern often raised by critics of large-scale remote voting.The Next Political Fight May Be TechnicalThese new American voter-ID laws may therefore represent only the first layer of a new civic technology stack. Identity verification will confirm who participates (like in most other countries), and Sequent’s cryptographic verification technology can confirm what actually happened.“My biggest concern… people losing trust and losing interest in elections,” Bargil concluded.In the coming decade, election disputes may shift away from courtroom arguments over ballots and toward technical arguments over proof standards — similar to cybersecurity breaches or financial audits. Much like any other area, it could cause deep civil mistrust in the institutions that are designed to protect democracy. Whether this new technology can restore trust remains an open question, but the next-generation technical battleground is already forming.The Spiro Circle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

Much of the global conversation around artificial intelligence focuses on models, interfaces, and applications. But Amir Fishelov, managing partner at Square One Labs and, before that, co-founder of SolarEdge, believes that narrative is incomplete. What’s more, it is potentially misleading about the current state of high tech, especially in Israel. “It doesn’t matter if Google will win the race or OpenAI,” Fishelov says. “They all need the same infrastructure.”I spoke to Fishelov about Square One Labs, a venture creation and investment platform that helps founders build transformative tech companies from the earliest stages. Founded in early 2024, it blends early-stage funding with operational support, providing labs, facilities, mentoring, and strategic guidance to turn big ideas into real companies.It is deliberately focused on what Fishelov calls “physical infrastructure for AI”: energy, semiconductors, robotics, and the hardware systems that make large-scale AI possible. While software continues to move quickly, he argues that the real bottlenecks sit much deeper in the stack.“Looking into AI, we figured out there’s lots of opportunity in the software space,” he says. “But there’s a huge opportunity on the actual infrastructure for AI.”The logic makes sense. Training and running advanced AI systems requires enormous amounts of energy, compute, and physical reliability. Regardless of which models dominate, the same foundational systems must exist underneath them. “All the basic software layers, all of these are critical infrastructure that any solution for AI needs,” Fishelov says.This focus is informed by experience. At SolarEdge, Fishelov helped scale energy and semiconductor systems globally, selling more than 200 million units of proprietary semiconductors. That operational background shapes Square One Labs’ investment thesis today. “We just came from these worlds,” he said. “Energy is our bread and butter. We also saw what happens in manufacturing.”Unlike consumer software, infrastructure businesses operate on long timelines and demand precision early. “Deeptech companies were hard 20 years ago,” Fishelov says. “They’re still hard today.” In these sectors, missing early accuracy can be fatal. “Not hitting a target fast can cost the company three to four years in terms of capital and runway.”That difficulty, however, is exactly what creates defensible moats. “The moat is very high,” he says. “Once they penetrate into the market and you have a differentiated solution… you can be in the game for the long run.”Fishelov points to energy as a clear example. New systems don’t just need to be cleaner—they must be cheaper and more reliable than technologies built over a century. “You’re competing with gas solutions, oil solutions, whatever, which were built here for the past 100 plus years,” he says. “Now you need to build a new solution which is more cost-competitive than that.”One Square One Labs investment in geothermal energy reflects this approach. By developing more efficient drilling methods, the company aims to deliver “cheaper energy, green energy, and available 24-7 energy,” Fishelov says—an infrastructure-level improvement that benefits any AI system layered on top.AI itself, he adds, is accelerating deep-tech development rather than replacing it. “AI can help you understand a much broader range of topics,” he says, speeding up research, simulation, and material discovery. But it doesn’t remove the need for physical systems that work reliably at scale.I enjoyed speaking to Fishelov, who emphasized that the future of AI will depend less on who writes the best model, but who builds the systems that keep it running.You can learn more in the video above. The Spiro Circle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

For years, cloud computing quietly rewired how companies build products, scale infrastructure, and manage costs. And the widespread sudden adoption of AI has accelerated it. In doing so, it exposed a far more dangerous problem than rising bills: how little most enterprises actually understand about what they’re spending and why.This week, I spoke to a company that understands how the financial stakes have changed. “We’re spending all that money on something that we’re not really sure what the ROI is,” Roi Ravhon, Co-founder and CEO of cloud cost management platform Finout, told me. What once lived in innovation budgets is now embedded directly in business fundamentals. “Now it’s part of our gross margin… It’s part of what we’re building as a service.”Founded in 2021, Finout helps enterprises monitor, allocate, and forecast cloud spending across providers, including AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Datadog, Kubernetes, and Snowflake. The company has raised $85 million to date and works with customers such as Lyft, The New York Times, SiriusXM, Wiz, and Tenable.Not only is one problem that is AI inherently expensive, but businesses are also adopting it and transforming their practices without clarity. “AI is a lot more expensive than what we thought it would be,” Ravhon explained. “We’re not really sure how predictable it’s going to be. We’re not really sure if we’re using it effectively or not. Just buying and buying and buying more AI services.”Cloud costs were already complex before AI arrived. But today, AI workloads are priced by tokens, usage, and models that can quickly change, making it even harder to ignore. The result is cost waste that hides in plain sight. “There are so many dumb ways, it’s amazing,” Ravhon says when asked how those may materialize.The dynamic is familiar, even if the scale is not. Just as individuals may lose track of unused subscriptions, businesses can accumulate cloud services that persist simply because no one is sure what would happen if they disappeared.In some cases, the scale is staggering. Ravhon recalls working with enterprises that had “tens of millions of dollars of ‘shadow IT’”, meaning services running in the cloud that no one fully understood and no one wanted to turn off. Teams hesitate to shut anything down because it might break something, or might do nothing at all.I asked if there was a tension between the engineering teams, who are incentivized to move fast and build reliably, and the finance teams, who are accountable for budgets and forecasts. Turns out there is - and in practice, engineering usually wins. “I'm an engineer, we tend to be very defensive,” Ravhon says. “Finance sets a budget, engineering depletes it.” He adds, “It’s very easy to pick the most expensive model to sleep better at night.”Ravhon, who first spotted these kinds of gaps when he was Director of Core Engineering at Logz.io, a cloud observability company, argues the conversation needs to shift away from simply cost-cutting and toward control. “Cloud is not spend, it’s an investment,” he says. “The best way to overcome this is with data.” When asked during our quickfire round what leaders should remember from the AI cost reckoning now underway, Ravhon doesn’t hesitate. His answer is a single word: “Allocate.”In the AI era, ignorance can be an existential issue if not managed from the start. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

For much of the past decade, venture capital has been moving in one direction: specialization. Funds are starting to brand themselves as ‘cyber-only’, ‘fintech-only’, or ‘defensetech-only’, each promising deeper expertise and sharper focus.But in Israel’s startup ecosystem, a counter-trend is growing that favors pattern recognition and intellectual flexibility over narrow vertical obsession. To understand this concept better, I spoke with Brian Sack, a partner at TLV Partners, an Israel-based early-stage venture capital firm.TLV Partners was founded in 2015 and specializes in early-stage investments, particularly in AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, developer tools, and cloud-native systems, as well as vertical AI across industries such as fintech, biotech, healthcare, and more. It has $1B assets under management, and has supported companies such as Next Insurance (acquired by Munich Re), Run:ai (acquired by NVIDIA), Granulate (acquired by Intel), Laminar (acquired by Rubrik), Aqua Security, Aidoc, Qodo, Port, and Quantum Machines, among others.He describes his approach as being a “disciplined generalist,” which he explains as understanding how ideas migrate across sectors. “We want to look at every new technology trend, and we want to look at all verticals across the board,” he said. “We’re just extremely curious people. So we’re always tracking up-and-coming technology trends… Over time, we’ve realized that this has a huge impact as well on our strategy as a fund.”The Spiro Circle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.As a journalist myself, I could connect this idea to my own personal attitude of being “a jack of all trades, and master of none”. I often describe my work as needing to cast a wide and shallow net over a variety of industries. But for TLV Partners, they take it a step further - their net is both wide and deep.That philosophy runs against conventional wisdom in today’s VC market, where specialization is often framed as a prerequisite for conviction. But Sack argues that early-stage investing, particularly at seed, demands the opposite: an ability to sit with ambiguity long enough to see connections others miss.“You’re almost sort of like journeying through darkness a lot of the time,” he added. “You don’t have a lot of data, and often you have to make decisions based on intuition or gut feeling. And I think growth investors are great at doing what they do and being very analytical. I prefer, and as a fund, what we like, and what we know how to do best, is to work with founders during the abstract time.”The concept of investing at this early stage was in contrast to a previous conversation I had with a growth investor, who relished in the data and proof of product-market fit. I was fascinated by the difference in approach and how that translated to working with entrepreneurs and navigating markets. “We need our founders to be a little bit crazy,” he added. “They have to have those crazy dreams and visions. I think as a firm, it’s part of our investment strategy and part of our culture, which is why I think a lot of entrepreneurs come to us for investment - because it’s something that is known in the industry that we never think of ourselves as there on the board investing to manage or make decisions on behalf of the company.”You can learn more about the fund in the conversation above.BONUS: Catch the viewpoint of Shay Grinfeld, a growth investor from Greenfield Partners: Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

In my latest episode, I speak with Hunter Stuart, founder of Big Game PR. Our discussion centered around Hunter’s journey from journalism to public relations, particularly in the context of cybersecurity. Headquartered in Chicago, Big Game PR “brings results-driven public relations and marketing services to B2B technology companies”, including those from Israel.Hunter also shared his experiences as a journalist in Israel, highlighting how living here transformed his understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.In 2017, he penned an article for JPost that outlined his journey and how his experience here changed his perception of the region and its people. He emphasized the complexity of narratives surrounding this issue and the importance of seeing both sides to foster understanding. We then turned to the evolving landscape of PR and journalism more generally, particularly in the age of social media and AI. Our world is increasingly being framed and controlled in echo chambers that set narratives into motion - and so we spoke about the impact on storytelling and public perception.Some takeaways:* The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “the mother of all narratives.”* It’s easier for people to craft a satisfying narrative in their heads about the Israeli-Arab conflict.* People are entering an echo chamber and they like what confirms their beliefs.* The rise of AI and automation has made relationships even more important.* Companies need to start owning their own channels.Preview > “Experiencing Israel” Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

There is a moment in every startup’s life when imagination eventually gives way to math.I’ve heard this story hundreds of times before. Founders are rewarded for vision and lauded as dreamers. They pitch an idea, raise a Seed round, build their first product, and iterate.As Shay Grinfeld, a General Partner at Greenfield Partners, said, companies repeat this loop “20 or 30 times” until they land on the one product when the penny drops. “‘They said ‘You know what, actually hits a nerve’,” he told me. For this episode, I spoke to Grinfeld about being an early growth investor, and what happens when companies reach their initial targets in revenue: An achievement, of course, but also the beginning of a much harder phase.Growing a Dream into Profit“That’s when we meet them,” Grinfeld says. The point where early momentum must turn into durable growth, usually around Series B and C, optimism alone is no longer enough. Growth investors arrive with a different question: can this company scale its go-to-market strategy once identifying a successful product-market fit, and will it do this faster than the cost of capital?“You have to grow at a cost that is cheaper than the cost of capital,” he told me. “Otherwise, you will not get the funding that will allow you to grow.” According to Grinfeld, what separates founders who push forward from those who sell early, he adds, is not recklessness but “bravery with confidence… and knowledge.”Greenfield Partners was founded in 2016 and invests in early to growth stages in Infrastructure, Vertical Software, and Deep Tech. It has $1 billion in total assets under management after closing a $400 million third fund in 2025. The “7 Pillars of Go-To-Market”One of its strongest areas is structured thinking around go-to-market and company building. Our conversation frequently referenced the “7 Pillars of Go-To-Market”, when Grinfeld describes growth failure as a structural issue rather than one singular mistake. “Every time you fix something, something else breaks naturally,” he says. For example, hiring ahead of the pipeline creates idle sales teams, and scaling leads without customer success can erode retention. The problem is rarely one pillar in isolation. To address this, Greenfield leans heavily into these pillars as concepts: strategy, sales operations, hiring and enablement, lead generation, partnerships, and customer success. The firm has even written playbooks available for founders to glean their insights.The most underappreciated challenge in that phase, he argued, is the gap between product-market fit and what he calls product-market sales fit. “That’s the moment that you think you can actually sell your product at a cost that is cheaper than the cost of capital,” Grinfeld says. It shows up when non-founders can sell, when the pipeline becomes repeatable, and when revenue sees a predictable pattern.“When it actually clicks,” he says, “it’s magic — because you can start compounding it.” A Signal For LeadershipIn the end, growth comes down to leadership. The founders who make it through the transition are not the ones with the loudest narratives, but the most adaptable mindsets. “Hungry, humble, smart — in that order,” Grinfeld says.You can watch the entire exchange in the video above. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

The cybersecurity world is grappling with proliferating AI-based attacks, expanding attack surfaces, and surging daily alerts riddled with false positives. With potentially thousands of warnings flooding Security Operations Centers (SOCs) that something could be amiss, the sheer volume creates endless headaches for security teams.It’s the newest cybersecurity nightmare in the AI era. “In cyber, you have this interesting angle where AI doesn’t only disrupt the ‘normal’ industry that everybody is familiar with, but it also disrupts how cyber attackers operate,” said Intezer Co-founder and CEO Itai Tevet. “There’s an arms race of AI not only on the defense side, but also on the offense side. So I think it’s a very interesting dynamic.”Intezer aims to tackle the “ staggering and unmanageable” problem of limited human capacity in cyberspace. As AI empowers bad actors to target enterprises at record scale, the problem isn’t a talent shortage per se, but that the sheer ability of technology will mean humans will never be physically able to catch up with the new threat landscape, including the 97% of false positive alerts that cause distraction and anxiety among overworked teams. The Spiro Circle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The company is part of a growing category of cybersecurity tools that use AI as an extension of human analysts to manage high alert volumes. It develops an AI-powered SOC analyst to investigate security alerts from existing tools and triage them in minutes, automatically resolving false positives and escalating only critical threats. Founded roughly a decade ago but experiencing a surge in activity in 2024/2025, it recently raised $33 million in Series C funding by Norwest Venture Partners, bringing its total to $60 million. Its clients include giants like NVIDIA, Salesforce, MGM Resorts, and others. As technology increases across all industries, AI will become essential for the survival of SOC teams amid rising threats from bad actors, nation-states, and others. According to Tevet, non-adopters could soon become obsolete. And those who embrace the technology won’t be replaced by it, but rather be elevated by it; human roles will no longer be distracted by small-scale attacks, and they will be able to graduate to more superior positions. “From a global perspective, but in my niche, I have a very clear idea of what’s going to happen,” added Tevet. “It all has to do with the nature of the SOC team job, which is going to absolutely change dramatically. Humans will supervise the AI instead of chasing tickets all day long.”You can watch the full exchange in the video above. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

In the early years of tech innovation, software development was driven by a simple cultural assumption that was born in Silicon Valley: that speed equals progress. Entrepreneurs, founders, and developers were encouraged to move fast, experiment freely, and ship continuously. Restraint, social consequences, or legality were often treated as obstacles to overcome or avoid; necessary evils at best, innovation killers at worst.My latest conversation showed me how that era is coming to its end, and that a more conservative movement is growing from the ashes of the Wild Wild West of progress that saw growth encouraged to ignore guardrails or accountability. According to Ben Bernstein, co-founder and CEO of Minimus, the software world is now entering a period of ideological correction, one that closely mirrors what happened with social media and what the LLM era is susceptible to falling into as well. “We identified the problem the first time,” Bernstein says of his first company, Twistlock. “But what was interesting is that we didn’t solve it the first time… Apparently, just identifying the problem is not good enough anymore.”His previous company, Twistlock, is a cloud-native security platform with security and compliance coverage for users, applications, data, and the cloud technology stack. It helps security teams see vulnerabilities created by cloud-native development and containers, but the team realized that visibility alone didn’t stop the explosion of risk. “There are thousands and thousands of issues in every little application,” he said.Bernstein argued that the issue isn’t malicious developers or bad code, but the excess of code that can cause security issues. “The problem isn’t malicious code,” Bernstein says. “It’s unnecessary code.”This realization has driven the philosophy behind Minimus, which builds secure, minimal container images designed to reduce attack surface by design. After Twistlock was acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2019 for approximately $410 million, Bernstein got to work on his next company: one that would set out to solve the problem identified by his first. Minimus recently announced a whopping $51 million Seed round to “kill” upto 95% of software vulnerabilities by replacing bloated containers with secure, minimal images, slashing risk and development time across the software supply chain. The round was co-led by YL Ventures and Mayfield, with participation from Bernstein, Dima Stopel, and John Morello.But Minimus is less interesting as a product than as a sign of the times: a broader shift in how the industry thinks about freedom and responsibility. In our conversation, we discussed how the past decade has become somewhat of a pendulum swing: In the early 2000s, security and IT teams held tight control, slowing development. Then came cloud, containers, and open source, and the pendulum swung hard in the opposite direction.“Developers got maybe too much freedom,” he says. “And now they see, ‘my God, these are the consequences of what I just did.’”The result is familiar to anyone who followed the arc of social media. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and recently X were optimized for engagement first, governance later. Only later did we realize that their push for scale without guardrails produced systemic harm to young people.Bernstein draws the parallel explicitly: “When you get too much freedom, it’s just too much.”What’s changed is who is asking for constraints. “It’s not even the security team asking anymore,” Bernstein notes. “It’s actually the people who want to innovate. This is because developers now spend their time chasing vulnerabilities, patching dependencies, or responding to issues that never should have existed in the first place. “We cannot allocate 50% of our time to just maintain existing software,” Bernstein explained. “Because it actually stifles our innovation.”In this sense, Minimus represents a broader reckoning on what it means to move fast. Ideologically, techies are starting to recognize that speed without structure doesn’t scale. “Velocity can lead to chaos,” Bernstein says. “And chaos is not progress. Chaos is regression.”Just as social media eventually discovered that moderation wasn’t always censorship, software is now discovering that guardrails aren’t necessarily anti-innovation. They are what make innovation sustainable. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

In the AI boom, speed is being celebrated. Funding rounds are closing quickly, teams can double in quarters, and products ship before the market has time to catch its breath. But for Niv Braun, co-founder and CEO of AI security company Noma Security, the real challenge isn’t how fast a company grows, but about it’s what breaks when it does.“One of the biggest challenges in a fast-moving and fast-growing company is how you grow the team very fast and in a way that will be aligned with the great business growth that we see,” Braun told me. “At the same time, keeping the culture.”Noma is better positioned than most to understand this problem. Founded in 2023, the company has already raised $123 million, including a $100 million Series B, and works with some of the world’s largest and most regulated enterprises. But the speed at which the company grows can be detrimental if not managed correctly. “The moment that you move in a quarter from 40 to 70 or 80 people,” Braun added, “it could completely change the dynamic of the company.”When I spoke to Braun, he described culture as being nurtured and defended through this growth, starting with the hiring process.“Sometimes we see the most amazing talents in all areas,” he explained. “But we don’t think that they’re going to be completely aligned with the Noma culture. And this is why we think that it’s not a good fit.” It’s not about ability ot background, but finding pieces that can glue together. “I don’t think that it’s because we are better than them… I just think that there are two different puzzles,” he added.The Cultural Pillars For SuccessThat discipline is built around three cultural pillars. The first is what Braun calls a winning mentality. “Winning mentality is the state of mind,” he says. “They know how, in crunch time, to do the right thing, to take the right decisions under pressure.”The second is radical ownership. “People that take a topic end to end,” Braun said, describing a culture where engineers influence marketing, sales teams shape product strategy, and silos are actively discouraged.The third is an explicitly anti-blame environment. “It’s super collaborative and anti-blaming culture,” he concluded. Without it, Braun believes proactivity collapses, feedback shuts down, and growth becomes fragile.This is particularly visible in how Noma handles failure. “On every POC that we lose,” Braun explained, “there are going to be lesson learning about it. Again, it’s not blaming, but it’s true learning together.” This environment isn’t helped by softening disappointment, either. “We don’t accept it,” he adds. “We make sure that it doesn’t happen, like never, again.”The AI era could see technology resetting or pivoting every few months, and Braun sees culture as one of the few durable advantages left. “This is the only way,” he says, “to scale together with this DNA.”Today, speed may get you noticed, and large funding rounds get you headlines. But as Noma’s growth aims to show, it’s the culture that will determine whether companies survive. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

In the mythology of company leadership, founders are expected to trade stability for scale. Long hours, constant travel, personal sacrifice. Family life is often framed as something to be balanced later, once the company is big enough to afford it.This week, I spoke to Zack Levine from Checkout.com, who tells a different story.Levine leads Checkout.com’s North American and Israel operations and moved to Israel two years ago from the United States. Today, he is preparing to return to the United States, this time to Dallas, Texas, ahead of the birth of his second child, another son.We spoke about family and how he sees it not as a constraint on leadership, but as the condition that makes leadership possible. His recent decision, he explained, was driven less by ambition than by a belief that professional performance depends on personal grounding.“If I feel good about where things are in my family life, in my personal life, my outcomes at work are way better,” he said. “Family comes first for me. Making sure that my wife and my kid are feeling good and happy. That’s the most important. And then from there, I can build the best professional version of myself.”Checkout.com is a fintech company that provides payment processing services for enterprise clients in the media, technology, and e-commerce space. The company is growing fast, with thousands of employees across more than 20 countries. Levine’s role demands constant travel between offices in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. So when it came to leaving Israel, many elements came into consideration.“I need the security and stability in my personal life in order to create the best work outcomes and for my kids to have a chance to be raised next to their grandparents,” he explained. This proximity to extended family and being in a manageable travel hub were not personal luxuries. They were operational requirements.I found this framing to run counter to how leadership decisions are often discussed. Moves are explained, especially from Israel to North America, as market access opportunities or strategic positioning. The personal lives and the support systems that allow leaders to function rarely make it into public narratives. But our discussion made them explicit.Parenthood, in particular, reshaped his understanding of leadership - something I could understand on a personal level, too. Running a company while navigating young children and distance from family forced a recalibration of priorities. It’s only natural.The lesson I gleaned from our chat is not that every founder should move closer to family, or that ambition should be softened. But it made me think about how performance can depend on the foundations behind the scenes that are rarely visible to outsiders. Offices, travel schedules, and support networks matter as much as strategy decks and growth targets.For Levine, family stability is not something he protects from work. It is what allows the work to function at all. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

This week, I spoke with Isaac Heller, the Founder and President of Trullion, an AI-powered accounting platform that automates financial workflows for accounting and audit teams.It’s a sector long-viewed as conservative and slow-moving, but one that is increasingly vulnerable to disruption. The stakes are high, not just for young professionals entering the workforce, but also for the legacy firms that have dominated the accounting industry for decades and may assume their scale makes them untouchable to change.Institutional firms like KPMG, PwC, Deloitte, and EY still loom over city skylines - but history offers a cautionary tale: dominance has a shelf life.“If you drive down the highway in Tel Aviv on the Ayalon, or you’re sitting in Times Square and you look up, the biggest buildings have EY, PWC, or Deloitte, right at the top of the pearly white tower. These are massive companies that are critical to the financial ecosystem,” Heller explained.Then he drew a comparison that cut close to home. “When I grew up in America, there were four dominant TV channels: Fox, NBC, ABC, and CBS. Then something called Netflix came along,” he said. “Now Netflix dominates.”The lesson, Heller argues, isn’t that incumbents inevitably lose. But we can see how disruption doesn’t discriminate in who it dethrones. The accounting sector, he believes, is entering a similar moment. AI could either become the Netflix of the industry, or these companies will integrate this technology to keep their names on the tower.Trullion has raised almost $34 million in funding from investors that include Stepstone Group, Aleph, Third Point Ventures, and Greycroft. The company was also voted as one of Calcalist’s Most Promising Startups in 2024.The conversation then turned to young people and how AI adoption will transform these sectors and career opportunities. According to Heller, success will always rely on having a deep, foundational understanding of technology, culture, and business.“If you’re entering into law, accounting, or engineering, there may be some cynicism about trying to learn some of the basic tasks that those industries are founded on,” he said. “However, if you learn and focus on those tasks before you get to the AI-powered stuff, you can actually be more powerful long-term.”Those who work with AI tools will be at an advantage when faced with the problem of when those technologies ultimately fail. “When you work with AI tools in the industry, and they don’t work, which happens one to five percent of the time, you actually have to go back and fix the code, right? You have to keep going deeper to understand why it didn’t execute. So if you don’t know the fundamentals, you’re only going to be stuck on the shallow layer in accounting.”In other words, AI won’t replace expertise. But it will expose who actually has it. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

The world of biotech and drug development has long relied on trial and error and statistical averages. While we often associate this approach with diseases like cancer or autoimmune disorders, it has left the immune system, one of the most important systems in the human body, among the least systematically understood in medicine.That gap is becoming harder to ignore. In the United States, funding cuts threaten to slow basic research at the very moment when the complexity of biological problems is increasing. As public support tightens, the pressure grows to build new kinds of infrastructure that can help translate scientific discovery into long-term medical progress.To understand some of these challenges more, I spoke with Noam Solomon, the co-founder and CEO of Immunai. The Israeli company has raised almost $300 million with the mission to create “the Google Maps of the immune system.”And that mission is massive - requiring time and patience on a mathematically enormous scale. Immunai aggregates and analyzes vast amounts of single-cell data to understand how the immune system behaves over time and across conditions. The work may not deliver immediate breakthroughs, but it could shape how medicine, industry, and governments make decisions in the future.Ultimately, it will create what Solomon describes not as a dataset, but as a functional map of the immune system. The distinction matters: A map allows prediction, whereas a spreadsheet does not. Solomon is unusually candid about the structural constraints shaping biotech innovation. He shares how public funding bodies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a part of the US Department of Health and Human Services, remain essential - but their incentives often reward safety over speed. Venture capital fills the gap, but this can push companies toward milestones that don’t always align with biological truth or expectation. So Immunai, he argues, sits in the tension between those worlds: trying to build long-term infrastructure in an ecosystem optimized for short-term validation.The company today has raised $297 million from earlier investors TLV Partners and Viola Ventures, as well as later players Koch Disruptive Technologies, Alexandria Venture Investments, 8VC, Piedmont, and ICON. It has also secured partnerships with top pharmaceutical and academic centers such as Teva and AstraZeneca. Solomon describes the hardest phase in biotech not as a scientific challenge, but as a structural one. Between early discovery and real clinical impact sits what he calls the Valley of Death: the phase where promising research struggles to secure funding, data, or industrial backing. It’s where academic breakthroughs lack the funding, data, or industrial backing to move forward, and where companies are forced to prove value long before biology is fully understood. In this sector specifically, “the Valley of Death takes longer, and it's bigger, and more companies die,” he explained. This is not because it’s wrong, but because the system isn’t built to support long-term understanding. Bridging that “Valley of Death,” he argues, requires infrastructure, patience, and incentives that reward learning — not just results. “We are a tool or a technology that can support biotechnology companies and biopharma companies to bring their drugs to the market faster, better, and cheaper,” Solomon explained. The broader implication is clear: as biological challenges become more complex and resources more constrained, the future of biotech may depend less on ‘breakthrough’ moments and more on whether the industry is willing to invest in understanding before certainty.You can learn more about the company and some of the long-term biotech challenges in the video above. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

This week I spoke to Noa Eshed about all things AI, marketing, podcasting, and branding. Our chat highlighted how the media landscape has transformed over the years. She noted that while print media was once king, the shift to digital has redefined how content is consumed and monetized. The emergence of social media as a primary traffic source has created challenges for traditional publications, as they now compete for attention in a crowded online space. This change emphasizes the importance of adaptability for brands and marketers.As the conversation progressed, the discussion turned to the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in shaping the future of marketing. Noa emphasized that AI has altered how brands must approach visibility, as many consumers now rely on language models for information rather than traditional search engines. This shift necessitates a change in strategy for brands to remain relevant. Engaging in platforms like Reddit can enhance a brand’s presence, as these discussions are often scanned by AI models.“Demystifying Success” through Storytelling: We also touched on the guest’s own podcast, “Real Life Superpowers,” co-hosted with Ronen Menipaz, which aims to “demystify” the narratives surrounding success. By sharing stories of individuals who have navigated unconventional paths, it challenges the notion that success is reserved for a select few.Watch a preview: AI's Impact on Media & Marketing in the LLM Era Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

Last week, I sat with Lior Dolinski, co-founder and CPO of Agora, to discuss how a team of veterans of Israel’s Unit 8200 is modernizing the traditional world of real estate investment. “It’s important to understand the real estate sector is the biggest asset class in the world,” he said. “And it’s not only the biggest asset class, but it’s also the most complex one and the most old-fashioned. It’s a business that is built on handshakes, communication, and relationship building. And the biggest technological advancement in the real estate space over the last 50 years was Excel.”Agora was founded in 2019 as a proptech/fintech SaaS platform to modernize how real estate investment firms manage capital, investors, reporting, and operations. It addresses a historically manual, “Excel-heavy” industry by automating core processes and providing a unified platform for both investment managers and their investors.Real estate is one of the largest asset classes globally, but tech adoption has been slow compared to industries like finance or software. Agora is part of a broader wave of digital transformation in proptech, where technology is pushing efficiency gains into entrenched, offline processes.Today, the company serves real estate investment firms globally, but particularly in the US, Europe, Australia, and Israel, and manages tens of billions in assets on its platform.Dolinski shared the journey from a failed blockchain idea to building an operating system that manages billions of dollars in assets. “We were fascinated by the realm of possibilities of what tech could do to real estate,” he added, thinking back to what inspired him to establish the company with co-founders Bar Mor (CEO) and Noam Kahan (CTO). “So we started with this intersection of blockchain and real estate with a totally different idea - talking about liquidity: how can we provide liquidity to real estate asset owners?”Agora has raised almost $64 million, including a $34 million Series B last year led by Qumra Capital with participation from Insight Partners and Aleph. In 2025, it was named as one of Israel’s Most Promising Startups by Calcalist, and each founder was included in Forbes’ "30 Under 30” for their innovation. We then discussed the challenges of scaling a company from Israel to the US, and the importance of maintaining a ‘Day One’ mentality in company culture, an idea inspired by Jeff Bezos. “You’re small, you’re scrappy, you’re moving fast, decisions are made super‬ fast, there’s no bureaucracy. What you have in mind is only the customer. You’re not thinking about internal challenges. You’re thinking about the challenges the customer has, and everything just happens,” he said.Dolinski then elaborated on how ‘Day Two’ mentality is the exact opposite. “Decisions are slow, with large teams… that mentality is where companies die, according to Bezos. So we’re really trying to stay in that ‘Day One’ mentality.”You can catch the entire interview above. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

In a world where AI is transforming industries, Israeli startup Verbit stands out by operating in the legal transcription space. Founded in 2017, Verbit has been at the forefront of AI-driven transcription and captioning, offering accuracy and insights.Today, Verbit’s technology is tailored for the legal sector, a field that’s famously slow to innovate and that demands precision and accountability. By leveraging AI, the company provides real-time transcription services that help legal professionals navigate complex cases by acting as a ‘second chair’ in the room. The platform, Legal Visor, can capture voice signatures and provide multilingual support, unlike generic transcription tools, and flag inconsistencies in testimonies. The technology is also being used at The Peres Center for Peace and Innovation Visitor Center, which features subtitles in four languages ​​with transcription using Verbit’s AI-based technology.The Impact of AI in Legal TranscriptionThe integration of AI in legal transcription has been a game-changer, but not without its complications. Verbit’s tools allow for real-time editing and insights, making it an invaluable asset in courtrooms and legal proceedings, but it never claims to make decisions on behalf of humans. The technology ensures that legal professionals can focus on their core responsibilities while AI handles the transcription with precision.“It doesn’t make any decisions,” explained Amsterdam. “It only transcribes in real time and provides insights like a ‘second chair’. Everything is done by the lawyer. The tool has zero aspects of replacing the lawyer or [making] any decisions for the lawyer.”As AI continues to evolve, Verbit remains committed to enhancing its offerings, ensuring that legal professionals have access to the best tools available. It’s a tool, Amsterdam claims, that beats out traditional transcription services. “Zoom doesn’t let you edit in real time. It doesn’t let you have a voice signature,” he added. “It doesn’t let you do many things that this tool allows you to do. This is a professional transcription tool. And that’s why we see the users really vote for this kind of tool. So while I have a lot of respect for what Zoom, Teams, and the rest of the platforms are doing, it’s not good for a court use case.”Beyond The CourtroomWe also spoke soon after the company announced an expansion of its dubbing offerings. Verbit Dub, in partnership with Deepdub, is designed to help content creators, broadcasters, and enterprises reach audiences worldwide — faster, at scale, and with more control than ever.For the content creators and podcasters out there, it helps them expand globally while keeping up with production schedules. “With Verbit Dub, we give creators the freedom to choose the level of AI dubbing, human refinement, and studio production they need, whether they’re tapping into new markets or delivering fully localized cinematic content, said Doug Karlovits, General Manager at Verbit. “The dubbing suite is designed for control, speed, and expanding audience reach without compromise.”Learn more about the tool in the video, and see for yourself how its Legal Visor can change the courtroom. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

When S Capital first backed Run:ai in 2018, there was no AI boom to ride. Large language models weren’t part of the mainstream vocabulary and ChatGPT was still far into the future. GPUs were powerful but inefficient, and the problem Run:ai set out to solve, orchestrating and optimizing GPU usage at scale, was largely invisible.“The word of AI was not as it is considered today,” investor Aya Peterburg recalled. “No one knew to say even ‘LLM’ or what that means.”Seen through that lens, NVIDIA’s ultimate 2024 acquisition of Run:ai was not a bet on hype, but the continuation of a strategy that began four years earlier with its purchase of Mellanox Technologies. It first embedded NVIDIA into Israel’s engineering ecosystem, anchoring its data-center, networking, and high-performance computing capabilities in the country. Run:ai and others would then extend that footprint into the software layer that determines how AI actually runs at scale.Together, the two acquisitions tell a coherent story: Israel is not just a distant satellite office for NVIDIA, but where some of its most critical infrastructure problems are solved.Run:ai identified a structural inefficiency at the heart of AI computing. Companies were paying for expensive GPUs while extracting only a fraction of their potential. As Peterburg explained, customers were “pay[ing] more money to NVIDIA… but they got back in the day only 15% of what they paid for” because GPUs running large workloads couldn’t communicate efficiently.The challenge was timing. “You couldn’t sell to startups as design partners,” Peterburg said. “You have to sell to those large organizations.” With no direct competitors and no clear market category, Run:ai had to wait for the AI world to grow into its necessity.That patience required a specific kind of investor. “We see ourselves as helping them to understand what they have in their hand,” Peterburg said. “It’s the founders who will be able to tell the story.” For her, that partnership is built outside formalities. “I never learned something new in board meetings,” she added. “We sometimes do a lot of walks on the beach… it makes you think of problems differently.”Like many companies in Israel, they faced a challenge during the war. Run:ai employees were called into reserve duty, some into active combat. Yet NVIDIA proceeded with the acquisition: a sign that its commitment to Israel is not contingent on stability, but on capability.That commitment is bearing fruit with a new 10,000-employee campus in Kiryat Tivon and plenty more expansion in the future. From Mellanox to Run:ai, NVIDIA has effectively stacked Israel into its core architecture: networking, hardware efficiency, and AI workload orchestration. For Peterburg, the lesson is clear. “As an investor, I believe that our role is being measured in the bad days,” she said. “Helping the founders find their way to a safe zone.”Run:ai’s story shows what happens when that philosophy aligns with corporate strategy. Israel is no longer just a place where companies are built. As NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang puts it, it is a “second home” where the future of global AI infrastructure is taking shape.Prefer YouTube? You can watch the same interview here: Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe