The Spiro Circle

Well, here it is: Episode 100 of The Spiro Circle. When I recorded the first episode 18 months ago, I had a rough idea of what this show could be. I wanted it to be a place where long-form conversations about Israeli tech, geopolitics, or society could get broader attention. Now, with a growing audience across 20 countries and partnerships with international media channels like Forbes, I am proud to see what it is becoming, and that these conversations are getting the attention they deserve. Startup Nation yearned for long-form English conversation, and I am pleased to be helping fill that missing gap. For the 100th, I brought in Nitay Milner, co-founder and CEO of Orion Security, and Emily Fontaine, Global Head of Venture Capital at IBM Ventures, to talk about why every major company should rebuild its data security strategy in this AI era. I find it fitting that our conversation on how a large corporate company saw potential in a scrappy Israeli startup was positioned as the 100th episode. Thanks to all who have joined to share their stories so far, and thank you to all those who keep tuning in.Onwards to 200. - JSThe data loss prevention industry has organized itself around a relatively stable threat model.A disgruntled employee may copy files to a USB drive. Or a phishing attack could expose credentials to an outside attacker. Maybe someone accidentally CCs the wrong person on an email with sensitive information. Solutions focused on perimeter controls or policy rules were imperfect, but understandable when the threats were often caused by humans.But that model is no longer sufficient. According to research by Cyberhaven Labs, whose 2026 AI Adoption and Risk Report analyzed data movements across 222 companies, nearly 40% of all AI interactions now involve sensitive data, with the average employee inputting proprietary information into an AI tool once every three days. Threats don’t disagree insofar as they disaggregate, accelerate, and, in some new cases, remove the human from the equation entirely.Nitay Milner, co-founder and CEO of Orion Security, offered a framework for understanding how the landscape has changed. In a recent episode with Emily Fontaine, Vice President and Global Head of Venture Capital at IBM, which backed ORION’s $32 million Series A in February 2026, he described the three categories of traditional data leakage that the DLP industry was built to address: human error, malicious insider activity, and external attackers. “[Perhaps] I accidentally did ‘Emily@IBC’ and not ‘IBM’,” he said, by way of illustration, “and sent the entire board deck to the wrong person. That happens a lot. I call it keeping honest people honest.” The second category, he noted, involves deliberate exfiltration, what he called the “Snowden” scenario. The third involved external actors penetrating an organization and quietly siphoning data over time.Milner co-founded Orion Security in 2024 with CTO Jonathan Kreiner. It aims to replace traditional DLP (data loss prevention) tools with an automated, context-driven platform. Using LLMs and specialized AI agents, the platform continuously detects and analyzes data loss indicators in real time, capturing context for content sensitivity, data lineage, user identity, behavioral intent, and environmental purpose.New anatomies, new leaks Traditional categories of DLP remain relevant, of course. But Milner identified two new vectors that are reshaping the problem. The first is data extraction into third-party AI: employees uploading sensitive documents like earnings calls, customer records, or source code to unmanaged AI platforms before those materials are cleared for external use. “Taking the earnings call, which is super sensitive data, before the earnings call report was published, and uploading it to like an unmanaged ChatGPT or Claude,” he said. “It’s very, very sensitive, and data is now in the hands of a third party that you don’t have any agreement with.”The second vector is data exfiltration not by humans at all, but by AI agents operating inside the enterprise. “AI agents doing human work inside the organization, having access to super sensitive data,” Milner explained. “Think about an AI agent email assistant that has access to your Google Drive, takes the entire customer list and sends it to the wrong person. That’s data exfiltration by AI.”The scale of this emerging risk is becoming measurable. According to a 2026 Cloud Security Alliance report, 82% of organizations already have AI agents operating in production environments, while only 17% enforce runtime access controls consistently across those deployments. A separate finding from Proofpoint’s 2025 Data Security Landscape report found that 32% of organizations identify unsupervised data access by AI agents as a critical threat.Fontaine framed the underlying problem as one of movement, not just volume. “Data is a huge asset that must be protected, more so than ever before,” she added. “It’s moving across clouds, it’s moving across applications, agents, ecosystems. It’s moving across so much more than it was ever before. And we have to make sure it’s secure, that it is governed correctly.”IBM Ventures, the strategic investment arm of IBM led by Fontaine, operates a $500 million fund focused on AI and quantum technologies — and its bet on Milner and the team reflects IBM’s belief that the arrival of large language models has fundamentally broken the assumptions on which traditional data security was built, creating entirely new leakage paths that legacy DLP tools cannot detect.A new era for DLPThat governance challenge is exactly what today’s DLP industry is no longer built to handle. Policy-based systems depend on known patterns, like a credit card number matching a regex or a file name triggering a rule. They cannot, by design, interpret context or whether a particular data movement constitutes a legitimate business action or an exfiltration event. Milner’s breakdown offers enterprises a useful starting point to identify which of the five categories (legacy or AI-era) represents the highest unaddressed exposure in a given environment, and build from there. “Understand your organization,” he concluded. “Based on this real data, get to decisions, train your employees, and help them understand how to use data safely.”[5-minute preview: Is your AI leaking company secrets? IBM & Orion Security explain] Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

For two decades, the winning formula in consumer tech was simple: maximize time on screen. Last month that formula got a multibillion-dollar price tag attached to it when Meta agreed to pay roughly $17 billion to settle a multistate lawsuit alleging Facebook and Instagram were deliberately engineered to be addictive to teenagers.Now, one Israeli investor thinks the backlash could create an opening for a very different kind of consumer product, and for a new generation of Israeli founders.Oren Charnoff is the Co-founder and a General Partner at Sticker Ventures, a Tel Aviv early-stage fund that invests exclusively in Israeli B2C startups. He sees the settlement as validation of a thesis his fund was already investing behind, based on changing consumer habits among young people. “We want to find more companies whose goal is not to increase time spent on the app,” he said. “We hope to see more ‘IRL’ things being built by Israelis.”He points to two U.S. examples he admires. The first, Tin Can, is a landline-style phone that plugs into the wall, paired with an app that lets parents approve who their kids can call; Charnoff says it’s doing roughly $80 million in annualized revenue. The second is Board, a digital game console built entirely around in-person play. “The only way that you can interact with it is with another person with you,” he said. Closer to Sticker’s own market, Charnoff cites Edikted, the Israeli-founded Gen Z fashion label, which The Wall Street Journal recently reported as achieving roughly $460 million in revenue: “They crush it on retail. They crush it for offline discovery.”Startup Nation’s advantage in the changing marketThe shift makes it perfect timing for Israel’s tech DNA to tap into adapting markets. Startup Nation has accumulated decades of expertise in adtech, gaming, fintech and cybersecurity, producing a generation of founders trained to measure, test and optimize. Add to that a new type of internet-native, young immigrant to Israel who is a product of globalization, and those skills can be unleashed on the world’s biggest GDP category: consumers.“The same quants who do anomaly detection in cyber can optimize the budget, channel and yield of consumer growth,” Charnoff said. He traces the lineage directly to Israel’s earlier tech waves. “Adtech is one of the founding mothers and fathers of B2C,” he said, pointing to the exodus of former ironSource employees now building consumer companies of their own. The craving to steer away from online apps and toward “In Real Life” extends into dating apps, both in his portfolio’s orbit and out of it. Companies are moving away from “unlimited swipes whose goal is to maximize dwell time” toward an AI concierge model that delivers one or two curated introductions a week, rather than an endless feed of profiles. According to Charnoff, 38% of Sticker Ventures’ deployed capital sits in the Health & Wellness category - framing the appeal generationally: millennials were “an experiment of unlimited internet access”, he told me, while Gen Z is driving “a huge trend to get back into IRL... experiences.”Charnoff and Sticker Ventures aren’t betting that the attention-economy giants disappear. But the “hipster move” into B2C investments is placing new bets on the next generation of consumer winners built for the time people spend away from their news feeds, not the time they spend scrolling through it.“B2C’s been a big part of Israel’s ecosystem for a long time,” he concluded, listing success stories like Waze, Oddity, Superplay, eToro, Wix, Simply, MyHeritage, and others. “We’ve always been doing this… I just think with AI, there’s a renewed interest to do it… It’s just way more attractive to be a B2C entrepreneur now.” [Preview: Why building B2C in Israel is suddenly a "hipster move"] Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

Guy Katsovich and I sat across from each other in our shared studio a few weeks ago, discussing what happens when podcasting moves from the media ecosystem into the campaign trail.Let’s set the scene: We are both former journalists, now running separate podcast operations (one in English, one in Hebrew), and talking about what happens when an interview format becomes part of an election strategy. Katsovich is the co-founder and partner at Fusion VC, a pre-seed platform and a longtime Israeli podcaster, and expects that trend to accelerate as election day approaches. “If you look at the trend, I would assume... they’ll be interviewed by more and more podcasters... the closer we get to election day,” Katsovich told me.The 2024 U.S. election showed just how powerful podcasts could become as a political campaign tool, with candidates increasingly opting for long-form conversations that offered more time and unfiltered depth - something traditional television can rarely provide.Israel’s next election, scheduled for October 27, is already generating a growing political podcast ecosystem, from dedicated election shows to established interview programs. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s campaign has leaned into a circuit of small, friendly podcast studios in recent weeks, trading hard questions for a more intimate, folksy format that lets a candidate control the narrative in ways a more adversarial Channel 12 or Channel 13 panel never would.Katsovich sees the same pattern and traces it to an obvious source: “Everybody now follows Trump’s steps and tries to interview [on] as many podcasts as they can.”His show, The Guy Katsovich Podcast, now reaches, he told me, “more than 200,000 people... every month,” almost entirely inside Israel. He’s hosted Yair Golan, Gadi Eisenkot, Bezalel Smotrich, Simcha Rothman, and with an election bearing down, he expects the guest list to grow: “I might do a roadshow for all the politicians that wanna come on the podcast.”Israel appears to be the latest country that is redistributing its political access during election cycles. Katsovich’s read is that as October nears, “those podcasts will carry more and more weight in how people make their decisions,” because a long-form sit-down is “a real opportunity to really meet and see a politician for one hour” in a way a ninety-second clip cannot replicate. But the format only works if it stays open. “All the politicians that came to my podcast didn’t ask for preparation, and there were no preconditions,” he told me, before admitting some guests want questions in advance, or want to see the cuts before publication. “This is like... kills the whole point of a podcast,” he said - and I agreed. “If you wanna really do an open conversation, this is not the format” for anyone trying to manage their message. Startup Nation’s election role But access is only half of the equation. What politicians choose to talk about matters too. When I pushed him on whether topics like tech and AI sovereignty will actually move votes — a theme this campaign has already flirted with, and one I have discussed on another podcast with ILTV — he identified a key thesis for election messaging. “If in America you vote for economy, in Israel you vote for security, and that’s it.” [Watch me on ILTV: Maayan Hoffman and I explore whether Startup Nation should weigh in on Israel's first election since October 7]Whereas the American mantra once promised that “it’s the economy, stupid”, Israel sees things a little differently. As Israelis go to the ballot box for the first national election since October 7, high-tech, cyber, and defense are all what he called “intercollided” into a single binary: are you the guy who keeps the country safe, or not?That’s the paradox sitting underneath this whole moment. Hebrew podcasting is gaining exactly the kind of reach and intimacy that could reshape how Israelis size up a candidate — and it’s happening at the same time as candidates are working out how to use that reach without actually being tested by it.[Watch a preview: Israel’s podcast boom could change the next election]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

America’s fight over data centers is becoming a mainstream political staple. Seven in ten Americans say they don’t want a data center near their home, and more people now believe these facilities harm their community than help it, according to recent polling cited by industry trackers. Opposition has more than doubled across 49 states over the past year, and in the first quarter of 2026 alone, an estimated $130 billion in data center projects were blocked or delayed by local resistance.It’s not even a culture war. The backlash against them cuts across party lines: Republicans tend to object on tax incentives and grid strain, whereas Democrats oppose on environmental and resource use. The reasons may differ, but their mutual opposition is a rare instance of bipartisan alignment in American politics.Into this landscape steps Phinergy. It’s an Israeli cleantech company whose aluminum-air backup generators have become an alternative to diesel in the AI infrastructure race, seeing early support from players in an impressive Google- and Microsoft-led innovation consortium. I spoke to its CEO Emmanuel Levy, who laid out a thesis that the “NIMBY” reflex against data centers collapses once three specific, solvable grievances are addressed. “People are caring about [them] and are afraid... whether it is pollution, whether it is noise, or it is water consumption,” Levy told me. “If you’re able to explain why a new data center can come without this price on the shared resources, you’re able to bring the debate back to where it should be.”It’s a clean, testable claim. In Colorado Springs earlier this year, a proposed data center drew objections almost identical to the ones Levy’s technology is designed to neutralize: noise and air pollution from backup diesel generators, and water consumption. The developer countered with a water-efficient, closed-loop cooling design and pledged 60 to 100 permanent jobs. But it didn’t defuse the fight. Longtime residents cited broken promises tied to a chip plant and a cryptocurrency mine previously sited on the same land, and the developer told local reporters he had never encountered this level of public opposition, despite having built a similar facility elsewhere without incident. The complaints were the same three Levy names, yet the outcome was not.Why do they need to be in our neighborhoods, anyway? Those opposed to data centers don’t want them “in their backyard” - but that’s precisely where they need to be. Whereas training AI models can in fact be anywhere, the inference stage of AI - that’s getting the answers back to the customer who inputs prompts - needs strong latency to ensure smooth communication. And those are fast becoming critical infrastructure, which means backup generators need to be precisely alongside those initial centers. “More and more services are AI-based; they need their AI to be as close as possible to the market,” Levy explained. “So that’s the reason why inference in this case is localized next to communities.” Think of it like being closer to your internet router at home: a reasonable comparison, until you realize that McKinsey forecast confirmed that by 2030 there will be an additional 140 gigawatts of power consumption by data centers. It means that the equivalent of 140 nuclear power plants will need to be set up in four years in order to manage the computing power. “You understand why there is a bottleneck,” he added.Another question arises: whose job is it to close this trust deficit? Levy describes a cooperative, three-layer division of labor: new technology needs to be “socialized” to the market, regulators need to update rules that still legally define backup power as diesel-only, and developers need to carry the message to communities and win consent. Phinergy was selected from a field of more than 70 proposals by the Net Zero Innovation Hub, a consortium formed by Google and Microsoft specifically to source alternatives to diesel backup power, with the pitch vetted privately by senior industry advisors (including a former chairman of Vertiv's technology board and a former Microsoft data center technology executive) before hyperscalers would take it seriously. "It's rarely cold calls," Levy said of how deep tech actually reaches Google and Microsoft. "Without that, it's very, very difficult for people to take you seriously." Phinergy’s pitch for cleaner data centers is the start of the battle. Removing diesel noise and emissions from their footprint retires one legitimate grievance from a list that has grown to include broken trust, property values, and a broader unease about ceding land and resources to AI infrastructure. International polling on the same backlash lists the objections in similar order: water, energy, land use, noise, air pollution. But it still needs to overcome the lingering challenge of a lack of community consent. Clean power may be necessary to end the data center fight. On the evidence so far, it isn’t sufficient.You can learn more about data centers and how Phinergy can fix the bottleneck in the entire episode. [For now, here is a preview: The NIMBY problem with AI data centers, explained] Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

I’ll admit it upfront: I’ve tried alternative meat on my own barbecue, and they’ve never been exactly a slam dunk for me. So when I sat down with the Chunk Foods founder and CEO Amos Golan for this latest episode, I wasn’t chasing a hype piece on the wonders of foodtech. I’ve written those stories before. What I wanted to know was whether the economics of fake meat had finally changed.Turns out there is a number that can make that argument: $6.83, the price of a pound of ground beef in the US as of July 2026.Beef steaks averaged $12.80 a pound back in May, up 16% year-on-year; the national cattle herd is sitting at its smallest size in 75 years. These Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers show a worrying trend for families and young people seeking affordable protein sources. Chunk offers clean-label, plant-based whole cuts that look (and cook) just like beef. And today’s price rises may be a way for the fake meat industry to undergo somewhat of a comeback.Golan has been watching this trend as closely as I have. “You don’t need to just talk about the need for the price of [fake] meat to go down,” I said to him. “You can also talk about the price of meat going up.” His answer: “Exactly.”He’d already walked me through the math before I said it. “Ground beef in the US used to cost $4 [per pound]. Now it’s $5, $5.36. A steak is $10 to $20 a pound.” That was true when we recorded this episode in June, but beef has kept climbing since, which is, for those of us doing the weekly shop, the whole point of his pitch.Chunk’s bet was never to compete with beef on ideology. People like me who genuinely like eating meat aren't suddenly going to stop because someone tells us it's better for the planet. “The experience needs to be good enough. The price needs to be good enough, ideally cheaper than meat,” he added. He was blunt that this is a demographic shift, not a moral one. “People are less altruistic, I’d say, at least externally, in how they talk about the food they consume.”Ultimately, beef isn’t getting cheaper anytime soon. Forecasts put 2026 beef price increases as high as 18%, and analysts aren’t projecting relief into 2027. Chunk doesn’t need to win me over on taste alone. It needs the gap between $6.83 and its own shelf price to keep doing the argument for it.It might be time that the alternative meat market comes back for seconds. And those at the dinner table may finally be ready for what’s on the menu. [PREVIEW: Rising beef prices are doing Chunk Foods' marketing for them]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