Batch 19 is here!

October 12 - 22, 2026

Meet the startups and the founders behind them

Valar is building the most efficient infrastructure for background and long-horizon agents

Tom Amsterdam

Co-founder & CEO

Previously served as Chief Product Officer and Chief Operating Officer at Granulate through its approximately $650M acquisition by Intel. He later led METHODIQ at ODDITY through its development and launch, bringing extensive experience building and scaling infrastructure and technology businesses.

Ron Gruner

Co-founder & CTO

Former VP of R&D at Granulate, where he built the company’s runtime optimization engine from the ground up. A Unit 8200 alumnus with deep expertise in low-level systems, compute optimization, and infrastructure.

Automatic distillation platform to create task-specific SLMs for production

Chaked Sayedoff

Co-founder & CEO

Led the strategy and pre-training of Israel’s national LLM. He also leads Israel’s largest community of AI researchers and engineers, bringing deep experience in developing and scaling advanced language-model technology.

Shani Alon

Co-founder & CTO

Led cybersecurity R&D teams responsible for highly classified achievements. She brings deep experience in building advanced technical systems and leading research and engineering work in demanding security environments.

Parter is the AI platform that lets hardware teams optimize their products and move fast and risk-free from design to production, solving supply chain issues before they hit the line

Asaf Israelit

Co-founder & CEO

Spent his career scaling hardware from design and systems engineering through supply chain operations. After Unit 81 and VisionMap, acquired by Rafael, he led UVeye’s U.S. operations through the COVID-19 shortages, seeing firsthand how supply chain surprises slow hardware teams.

Omer Gilat

Co-founder & CTO

Built software for complex hardware products across embedded, systems, and production environments. After Unit 81, he developed real-time automotive LiDAR software at Innoviz and later worked on connected edge devices and their infrastructure at Prospera.

ORION Security helps enterprises prevent sensitive data leakage by using AI to understand and protect data as it moves across users, applications, and AI tools

Nitay Milner

Co-founder & CEO

Led product management teams at several security and observability startups, most recently working on data security and DSPM at a company acquired by Cisco. That experience exposed the gap between discovering sensitive data and actually protecting it from leakage, inspiring a new approach to enterprise data protection.

Jonathan Kreiner

Co-founder & CTO

Former Head of Application Security at WalkMe, where he managed a large-scale data protection program and experienced the limits of traditional DLP firsthand. Earlier, he served in Unit 8200 and helped establish the unit’s first Red Team.

Moonshot is the delivery system of space: an electromagnetic kinetic launch system for on-demand delivery of propellant, parts, and supplies to orbit

Hilla Haddad

Co-founder & CEO

An aerospace engineer who previously served as Director General of Israel’s Ministry of Innovation, Science and Technology, overseeing national R&D strategy. She also led the Israel Highways Administration and served as a Ministry of Defense project officer on the Iron Dome air-defense system.

Huskeys is the Network Edge control plane, continuously assessing, recommending improvement and orchestrating the WAFs, CDNs and edge controls you already own

Itai Gafni

Co-founder & CEO

Began his career in Unit 8200, building a strong foundation across cybersecurity, data, and AI before leading AI initiatives within the unit and later co-founding a monitoring and observability company. His experience turning complex data into actionable insights shaped his approach to making security more intelligent, effective, and aligned with the business. Named to Forbes Israel’s 30 Under 30.

Roy Weisfeld

Co-founder & CTO

Began his career in Unit 8200 and specializes in offensive security research across cloud, CDN, and WAF environments. His work turns real-world attack insights into practical network-edge defenses. Named on three pending security patents and to Forbes Israel’s 30 Under 30.

Encore AI is an enterprise agentic AI platform that turns an organization’s top performers into AI agents that drive revenue across voice, chat and web

Dvir Ginzburg

Co-founder & CEO

Holds a Ph.D. in Geometric Deep Learning and spent years researching recommendation systems at Microsoft and Facebook. Since 2022, he has helped grow Encore from a research idea into a global operation deployed across 40+ enterprises, backed by a $30M Series A led by Team8.

Train foundation models for molecular design and apply them to accelerate therapeutic discovery

Dov Gertz

Co-founder & CEO

Holds an MSc in Bioinformatics and researched novel CRISPR-family genome-editing systems. His work resulted in a U.S.-licensed patent and a peer-reviewed publication co-authored with a Nobel Prize winner.

Scale AI with confidence. Bay is the endpoint security platform built for the AI era

Yuval Zacharia

Co-founder & CEO

Previously led Security Research & AI at Hunters and spent nearly eight years in Unit 8200, serving as a Major and commanding advanced offensive cybersecurity operations.

BAND is the runtime agentic collaboration platform, where agents perform and humans manage agentic work

Arick Goomanovsky

Co-founder & CEO

Previously co-founded Ermetic, acquired by Tenable, and Sygnia, acquired by Temasek. Before that, he spent nearly two decades in the Israeli intelligence community and worked at McKinsey & Company in London. He is a Talpiot graduate and holds an MBA from INSEAD.

Vlad Luzin

Co-founder & CTO

Nearly two decades of experience in distributed systems and AI infrastructure, including leadership roles at Verint, CME Group, and Samsung. Holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science and an EMBA.

Ballerine helps financial institutions automate financial crime and compliance operations with AI agents

Noam Izhaki

Co-founder & CEO

Previously led the Marketplace product at Wix and helped scale a fintech platform later acquired by Remitly. He has spent his career building products for complex financial and operational challenges, with a strong focus on making them simpler, faster, and more useful.

Nitzan Guy

Co-founder & CPO

Before Ballerine, Nitzan spent seven years at Rewire (now Remitly Israel), a cross-border payments fintech acquired by Remitly in 2022. As the company’s first employee, he worked across product, marketing, and acquisition, and later focused on researching and building new products. He was part of building Rewire from the ground up into a company serving hundreds of thousands of customers, gaining extensive experience in fintech, payments, onboarding, risk, and compliance. He has over 15 years of experience in product and design, including approximately 11 years in fintech and payments.

Get to know SV101

The ICON program connecting Israeli founders with Silicon Valley

Explore the program