The Spiro Circle

James Spiro
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Join me as I discuss issues relating to Israel, tech, media, and news. Sometimes with a guest, sometimes solo. www.thespirocircle.com

  1. 15h ago

    After Wiz, Cybersecurity Founders Are Thinking Bigger - #0090, Oren Yunger

    Israel’s cyber numbers from 2025 were staggering. We all know the big ones: Google acquired Wiz for $32 billion. Palo Alto Networks spent $25 billion to absorb CyberArk. ServiceNow bought Armis for $7.8 billion. When the final tally was complete, strategic mergers and acquisitions in the cybersecurity sector had reached $81 billion - more than four times the volume of the prior year, according to data compiled by Notable Capital and Morgan Stanley. For Oren Yunger, Managing Partner at Notable Capital and one of the architects of the firm’s annual Rising in Cyber report, the significance of those deals runs deeper than just their valuations. “The ceiling has kind of been shattered,” he told me. “You can build businesses that are just massive. You can do things that we, in the past, thought were unimaginable in cybersecurity,” he added. “Companies should get acquired between $200-400 million dollars — that’s the best you can do. Now we’re seeing companies that really are paving the way to the next set of companies to go and build bigger and stronger.” For much of the last decade, cybersecurity exits were measured in hundreds of millions, not the tens of billions we see today. The Wiz deal alone, which became the largest high-tech exit and business deal in Israel's history, poses a new question to a new generation of founders: If they could become a $32 billion business, what is possible for us? The M&A wave of 2025 coincided with a shift in how enterprises think about the AI era and the risks that come with it. In 2024 and early 2025, the defining question for enterprises deploying AI was whether they could build agents capable of autonomous action. Yunger now argues that that question has largely been answered and a new one has emerged. “The big question that we’re seeing is: can you put it in production, can you scale that agent, can you trust its operations?” he said. “Security is just a huge part of this question that needs to be answered at enterprise scale.” The Rising in Cyber 2026 report, which surveyed nearly 150 chief information security officers from the world’s largest companies, puts precise numbers on the gap between deployment and protection. Seventy-one percent of respondents said their organisations already have AI agents running in production environments. But only 11% described their tooling to secure those agents as mature. That gap is where Yunger sees the next wave of investment flowing, and where the next generation of large cybersecurity companies will be built. The broader cybersecurity sector is projected to reach $255 billion by 2029, up from $153 billion in 2025, according to IDC estimates. Early-stage investment is accelerating: Series B rounds grew 74% to $3.3 billion in 2025, with average deal sizes jumping 75% to $49 million. In a year when most software categories saw venture funding decline, cybersecurity’s earliest rounds were the only segment to grow year over year. The momentum has continued into 2026. CrowdStrike acquired SGNL, Palo Alto Networks purchased Koi, and Sophos acquired Arco Cyber — all in the first half of the year. The platforms that spent 2025 making transformational acquisitions are now targeting the AI-native capabilities they need to stay competitive as the threat landscape continues to evolve. Microsoft, which dominates five of the largest cybersecurity verticals, is adding capabilities faster than at any point in its history, with CrowdStrike and Palo Alto doing the same. But their acceleration has not crowded out newer startups. If anything, it has raised the stakes for founders who can identify the problems that the large platforms have not yet solved. “Security companies today are answering those questions,” Yunger said, “and the ones to follow will eventually accompany every single technology shift that is happening in the market and will continue to do so for as much as I can think of.” Yunger claims the thesis is confirmed by Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, who he said has described engineering as converging into four enduring disciplines. One of them is security engineering: a category he considers permanent regardless of how AI reshapes the rest of the technology industry. “Doesn’t matter how AI is affecting our markets, what jobs AI potentially will threaten and maybe change… Security is here to stay.” For founders building in the space today, that is both a reassurance and a challenge. The ceiling “has been shattered” and the market is expanding faster than we all predicted. Large companies are acquiring quickly, and the venture dollars are flowing earlier. What founders may be asking themselves now is if they can also build something the platforms may have no choice but to pay to absorb. And Wiz has shown them that the answer may be worth $32 billion. [Watch a preview: The Cybersecurity Ceiling Just Got Shattered] Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

  2. 5d ago

    The Impossible Math of Israel's Information War - #0089 Rachel Lester

    Israel isn't fighting one information war. It's fighting three. At least, that’s the takeaway I had when I read Digital Warrior: Inside Israel’s Battle for the Narrative After October 7 by Rachel Lester this week. Rachel served in the International Branch of the IDF Spokesperson's Unit, first on active duty, then in reserves from October 8th, 2023, editing and shaping video content for accounts with over 10 million followers across platforms. You probably saw her videos from the official IDF X account, or from her personal Instagram, @Rachel.In.Reserves Thinking back to the early days following the October 7 massacre, what struck me most was the impossible communications challenge the IDF faced. Her job, and the job of the army, was to explain multiple things to the world at once. “I think that Israel faces social media challenges that no other army and no other country in the world face,” she told me. “I think that we have the unique challenge of trying to reassure our civilians that we are safe and that the army is in control, while at the same time conveying to the world these are our enemies, this is what our enemies are doing right now… this is what our enemies just did: committed the largest attack on Israel in our history. And if we don’t fight them, then they’re gonna do it again and again, as they’ve said.” One country, three completely different messages One of the central arguments in Digital Warrior is that the IDF isn't running one narrative. It’s running three, simultaneously, to three audiences - and the messages don’t just differ in tone, they actively contradict each other. * To the local, Hebrew-speaking audience - the message is reassurance: we are strong, we’re handling it, you don’t need to worry. * To the Arabic- and Farsi-speaking world - the message is closer to a warning: we are strong, we’re watching you, and your own leaders are the ones corrupting you. * And to the international, English-speaking audience, the posture flips entirely: we are at risk, we are under attack — because that’s the only framing that earns Israel the right to defend itself in the eyes of the world. Project strength to one audience and vulnerability to another, at the same time, and you’d think it’d collapse under its own weight. Rachel told me it basically does, sometimes. The three departments work almost entirely independently of each other - there’s no room for someone to coordinate the tone across all three. “Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t,” she said. The moment she paused I considered the paradox Israel found itself in, and thought about why it didn’t apply to Hamas’ messaging strategy. So I put it to her directly: Didn’t Hamas actually pull off the version of this that Israel is still struggling with? A fear campaign aimed at the region, running alongside a sympathy campaign aimed at the West without the contradiction ever really catching up to them? “That’s an interesting point I hadn’t considered before,” she said. Western outlets, she pointed out, never really broadcast the moments when Hamas spokespeople promised “to do October 7th again and again.” That footage exists, as Rachel saw firsthand, but it just doesn’t travel the way photos of dead children (or P.O.D.C., a term she coined for the book) do. As the war dragged on, Hamas’ messaging was contained inside its Arabic-language threats, but its English-language grief campaign spread across the world. Somehow, the two rarely collided in the same feed, in front of the same audience, at the same time. This was not true for Israel, whose messaging sometimes came out slowly or inconsistently - and whose critics were quick to highlight these contradictions. This is more than a media-strategy story It would be easy to file this under another “PR problem” Israel has to overcome, and move on. But I don’t think that’s what it is. Our conversation kept circling back to how, in a war where legitimacy determines whether you’re even allowed to keep fighting, the coherence of your story and its narrative matters as much as the truth of it. That challenge is only becoming harder now that AI makes it easier to manipulate and dismiss authentic content. During our conversation, we discussed the “liar's dividend”, a term coined by legal scholars Bobby Chesney and Danielle Citron for exactly this phenomenon: real evidence getting waved away simply because fake evidence is now possible. She mentioned an instance in 2023 when journalists doubted the validity of footage released by the IDF. And earlier this year, genuine footage of Netanyahu was mistaken online for an AI fabrication. So the tech doesn't even need to be actively used against Israel. Its existence alone is often enough to doubt or undermine its digital efforts. That’s the tension I’d encourage you to sit with if you pick up Digital Warrior: not “is Israel’s PR bad,” which is the question everyone already has an opinion on, but “can any democracy actually hold three contradictory messages together in an age when information is everywhere?” Digital Warrior is out now. You can follow Rachel on Instagram here. For transparency: I have no financial relationship with this book or its sale. This recommendation is unpaid. [Preview: We discuss “How the IDF Talks to Israelis, Enemies, and the World — All at Once”] Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

  3. Jul 19

    The AI "Habitat" That Waymo Never Built - #0088, Dr. Tal Cohen

    On July 8, the head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration sent a letter to the autonomous vehicle industry saying that AV developers had shown a “clear pattern” of driverless cars blocking ambulances and fire trucks, ignoring flares and flashing lights, and in some cases driving directly into active emergency scenes. While not technically naming Waymo, it was undeniably a focal player in the robotaxi reckoning - saying there was “a functional insufficiency” among automated vehicle developers regarding “a pattern of interference with first responders”. At the same time, a different conversation has been unfolding inside the AI industry. Some of its leading figures have begun looking beyond engineering for answers. Anthropic recently launched its Faith & AI Covenant Roundtable to discuss how best to infuse morality and ethics into AI, while OpenAI's Head of Strategic Futures, Dean Ball, sparked debate after saying he had begun studying the Talmud to better understand AI policy. Dr. Tal Cohen, co-founder of Drive TLV and managing partner of Next Gear Ventures, joined me to discuss these issues. In an interview recorded just after the NHTSA letter, Cohen used Waymo as the clearest example of what he calls “The Habitat”: the missing institutional layer of trust, permissioning, and accountability that must exist around an AI system before it’s allowed to act with consequential impact in the world. “Two, three years ago, I was irrelevant, because there was no capability to talk like that,” Cohen said. But AI ability is expanding, and it is clearly starting to outpace the governance structure meant to contain it. “The capability is expanding,” he added, pointing to Waymo’s rapid deployment. “Suddenly, you have a gap between what the capability can provide and what we are lagging as a society.” Cohen’s main argument is that the industry has spent its energy on the wrong bottleneck. Public debate about AI has focused overwhelmingly on physical infrastructure constraints related to chips, energy, and data centers, or on the capabilities of the models themselves. But he told me the actual constraint is a broader and less visible vacuum around the governance that authorizes an autonomous system to act, who reviews what it did, and who has the standing to revoke its authority when it gets something wrong. “So then the question is: who’s gonna own the habitat that’s gonna authorize Waymo to go into crime scenes or not?” He argues society will hand over billions of consequential driving decisions before governments build the institutional framework capable of supervising them. In his framing, regulators, municipal transportation departments, and NHTSA itself are unlikely to build that infrastructure fast enough on their own. He expects, and believes the moment demands, some hybrid of public and private coordination to define a constitution of sorts for autonomous systems. “We’re gonna live in the centuries or decades of habitat construction,” he said. “People really don’t get it yet.” A manuscript he's been circulating, The Case for Habitat, argues this point exactly: That without a system or code in place, organizations face an uncomfortable choice. “You either put somebody in the basement, don’t let it do what it can do… or let it destroy your business,” he concluded. In Cohen's words, the capability is “shiny,” but the Habitat is “boring.” Yet history suggests that the boring is often what determines which transformative technologies succeed. [5-Mins Preview: Can Judaism solve AI alignment?] Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

    The AI "Habitat" That Waymo Never Built - #0088, Dr. Tal Cohen

  4. Jul 16

    The $125 Billion Leak AI Agents Are About To Make Worse - #0087, Ofir Tahor

    Every day, billions of dollars move through the global payments system as people buy things online. And every day, a portion of those transactions gets reversed. Not through fraud in the traditional sense, but through disputes: a cardholder tells their bank they don’t recognize a charge, or that a service wasn’t as described, and the money often comes back to them almost immediately. Multiplied across the entire e-commerce economy, that adds up to an estimated $125 billion a year. It’s a leak most consumers never think about, and most of fintech rarely discusses. In the AI era, however, as users continue to delegate AI agents to conduct financial transactions online, it is becoming the latest hurdle global payment companies need to overcome. Ofir Tahor, co-founder and CEO of Justt, has spent the past six years building a company around that gap. His explanation of the problem starts with its age. “This is a mechanism created about 60, 70 years ago,” Tahor said, describing how card networks originally designed chargebacks to protect cardholders in a world of physical stores and mail-order catalogs. A customer could go straight to their bank rather than the merchant, flag a transaction as unrecognized, and get reimbursed while the burden of proof shifted entirely onto the business to explain why it should keep the money. Tahor explained that perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the industry is how almost nothing else in e-commerce still works this way. “If you take companies like Shopify, which did a revolution in the e-commerce world, and Stripe, which did a revolution in the payment processor world, chargebacks stayed behind,” he said. Checkout, fulfillment, customer support, and fraud screening have all moved to real-time, largely automated systems. But dispute resolution remains a paperwork exercise: a merchant compiles documentation, sends it to their payment processor, which forwards it to the cardholder’s issuing bank, like Chase, Citibank, or Wells Fargo, where a human being reviews it and makes a call. “It’s still very manual-operated,” Tahor said. “It’s somehow stayed behind in comparison to many other processes within e-commerce.” The consequence is a phenomenon known as ‘friendly fraud’: cases where a legitimate transaction gets disputed anyway, whether through genuine confusion or deliberate manipulation of a system stacked in the cardholder’s favor. It’s now the second most common type of fraud globally, and as the ability for agents to buy things themselves only speeds up, Tahor doesn’t expect it to slow down. “It’s easy to report a chargeback, and it’s becoming easier,” he said. The data backs this up. Mastercard’s 2025 State of Chargebacks report, based on research from Datos Insights, forecasts global chargeback volume growing 24% from 2025 to 2028, reaching 324 million transactions annually. It’s a trajectory that was already straining a decades-old system before AI-driven commerce entered the picture at all. The argument that clamping down on friendly fraud will be a net positive for the ecosystem and, in turn, the consumer, is the origin story behind Justt’s name. “It’s from the word ‘justice’, in order to create balance in the ecosystem,” Tahor said. Even though it may sound like the company is out to protect Big Business, it is an attempt to build a system that helps merchants keep money they’re owed while still returning money to cardholders when they’re right. In that world, everyone wins because consumers aren’t left paying those costs. Justt was founded in 2020 and has since raised $100 million. It works with more than 250 global enterprise merchants and over 80,000 small businesses, and was named to Forbes’ 2026 Fintech 50 list this spring, the first chargeback-focused company to make the list. It shows that chargeback management, long treated as a back-office cost center, is being recognized as core financial infrastructure in its own right. Learn about Ofir Tahor, chargebacks, fraud, and building Justt in the preview here: 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

  5. Jul 12

    Welcome to the age of AI advertising - #0086, Tal Shoham

    Days before Tal Shoham announced that his AI monetization startup Velocity had closed a $27 million Seed round, an independent tracker put a number on something the industry had only been speculating about: ChatGPT ads were showing up in roughly 26.5% of all replies globally, and 49% of replies in the United States. For Shoham, that timing is the proof of concept for his newest company and a sign of the latest change in the AI era. “ChatGPT, of course, has added ads now, which is amazing for us and for the industry, because it’s like a north star that everybody looks at,” Shoham told me. He co-founded Velocity alongside Amir Shaked and Nimrod Zuta, all three of whom are former senior executives at ironSource and Unity. The company is building what it calls a growth infrastructure layer for AI-native applications: an ad network, a mediation and auction system, and a “conversation intelligence” layer that turns chatbot dialogue into structured, privacy-safe intent signals. Basically, it’s helping bring adverts to your favourite AI agent. The round was led by NFX and Red Dot Capital Partners, with participation from Stardom Ventures, Corner Ventures, and Transcend, alongside a roster of gaming and ad-tech angels, including former ironSource co-founder Omer Kaplan. The pitch is a straight transplant of the problem his team spent a decade solving in mobile gaming, with one crucial difference. “Ninety-five percent of the users in gaming will never pay a dime,” he said. “You really want to try to find a way of monetizing those users.” In gaming, a free user costs almost nothing. But in AI, that math is inverted: “Every free user that you have on your AI platform is actually costing you a lot of money on inference, tokens, GPUs, and so on.” That inversion is the reason that AI companies have defaulted to hard limits (two or three free prompts a day) rather than the generous free tiers that built mobile gaming and social media into mass-market platforms. He bets that an advertising layer can fund broader free access without those companies bleeding cash, and that doing so improves retention rather than damaging it. “We have more than 12 design partners live already,” he said. “This doesn’t harm retention, it doesn’t harm engagement, it doesn’t harm conversion to monetization.” But the timing that makes Velocity’s raise look prescient also drops it into the middle of an unresolved trust problem - one that OpenAI itself has been actively renegotiating in real time. ChatGPT’s original ad policy excluded placement near politics, health, and mental health topics, with a standing ban on dating, alcohol, drugs, and gambling. But a June 2026 update already suggested that current advertising categories “may expand over time” to include medical, legal, and financial advice contexts eventually. In other words, the rules of the road are being written after the road has already opened to traffic. It’s a pattern that anyone who lived through Europe’s post-hoc arrival at GDPR will recognize as headache-inducing. I pushed Shoham directly on where that leaves the user. Chat conversations are not basic search queries: they’re often confessional, emotional, and far more revealing than anything a keyword ever captured. “There’s a lot more emotion behind what people are giving these algorithms,” I said. “It’s not just tapping into data points... It’s tapping into a real human feeling.” Shoham’s answer leaned on the compliance muscle memory his team built at ironSource, navigating GDPR and a patchwork of state and platform-level privacy rules for years. “We don’t take any of the private information from the user,” he said. “If you type in something on health, something sensitive, your social security number, or whatever it is, we’re not saving that, we’re not taking that, and we’re not integrating that into the model when we’re trying to find the right ad to show you. We have an abstraction layer that actually abstracts all the sensitive information.” So, whereas search reads your keywords, social media reads your behavior, AI just reads you. Velocity’s bet is that the same compliance discipline that got ironSource through GDPR can keep that power in check… but with ChatGPT's ad rollout already outrunning its own written rules, that's a promise the whole industry is now testing in public. Preview: The Next Google Ads? Inside Velocity’s $27M Bet on AI “Intent” Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

  6. Jul 5

    Why the Independence Day media coverage felt "off" - #0085, Manny Marotta

    Manny Marotta has a theory about why America’s 250th birthday felt subdued. It isn’t purely politics, though politics is tangled up in it. It’s the structure. There are simply too many feeds now, and not enough shared ones. And the ones that do break through to the masses get read as political, whether they mean to be or not. I sat down this weekend with Manny for the second time. 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 - @25YearsAgoLive50 years ago - @50YearsAgoLive100 years ago - @100YearsAgoLiveand 250 years ago - @250YearsAgoLive Right now, that means we’re living through 2001, 1976, 1926, and 1776 simultaneously. He pointed me back to America’s bicentennial in 1976, which he says was one of the only major stories of that year, competing for attention with little more than an Olympic Games. This year, Independence Day landed alongside a World Cup on American soil, an ongoing Iran conflict, a White House renovation project, and an MMA match. It also took place with a media landscape noticeably divided along party lines and contrasting levels of patriotism between political ideologies. “Now we have so many different news cycles, so many different news sources that people are following,” he told me. “It’s just oversaturation.” His 250-years-ago account picked up roughly 300,000 followers and 20 million views in the days around the holiday, almost entirely because a political audience decided it mattered. That’s where the story gets complicated. Manny insists the account isn’t doing anything ideological - he just posts digitized letters and meeting minutes from the Library of Congress that are available to everyone, without commentary. And yet that neutrality is precisely what got it adopted as, he describes, a patriotic rallying point by people ‘on the right’. “A neutral or positive view of not just the American Revolution but American history in general has become, in recent years, sort of right-wing coded,” he explained. “So if you are even reporting in an academic sense what happened, a lot of people do tend to see that as right-wing.” Meanwhile, news outlets covering the holiday split along familiar lines: CNN described the mood as shaping up to be “a big blah.” The New York Times ran an op-ed blaming the Trump administration for deflating the day, then was forced to revise its own headline. The Washington Post called it “an unfortunate metaphor on national divisions.” Disney, by contrast, ran wall-to-wall patriotic programming, and outlets like The Free Press leaned into celebratory content. But Manny didn’t spare the current administration either, telling me the patriotic messaging he’d seen recently during a trip to Washington, DC, centered more on a single political figure than the anniversary itself: “The only America 250 content that I saw were giant banners with Donald Trump’s face on them... nothing about the anniversary itself, more about the person who happens to be president.” His hope, he said, is “to create maybe a simulation of the monoculture that we had in the past,” which is academically sourced, uncaptioned, and a return to the apolitical. So he is trying to hold a neutral center by republishing old letters, in a country where an audience conditioned by fragmentation has decided that the center no longer exists. But a Jefferson draft, posted without a caption, still lands as a statement to somebody. This is my second conversation with Manny Marotta. Watch the first, from February, about the Live History Project’s 2001 account, here. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

    Why the Independence Day media coverage felt "off" - #0085, Manny Marotta

  7. Jul 3

    The Cyber Risk Triage is Collapsing - #0084, Shimon Tolts

    Jira tickets used to sit open for years. A medium-severity vulnerability, flagged by a routine scan, could be assigned to an engineer who had bigger fires to fight. It had largely been that way for years: patch the criticals, manage the highs, let the mediums age. When it came to CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), a publicly available list of known cybersecurity flaws in software and hardware, nobody was going to weaponize one rated 5.4. But in today’s world, that’s no longer true. “In 2020, [if] there was a CVE reported and a security hole, it would take more than a year until there was a public exploit,” said Shimon Tolts, CEO and co-founder of Tel Aviv-based cloud security startup Copperhelm. “Nowadays, with Claude and OpenAI and other players, the time has shrunk from one year to one day. So now you treat every CVE, every security issue that you have, as immediately exploitable.” The data confirms what Tolts describes. The mean time between a vulnerability being discovered and its exploitation has dropped from nearly a year in 2021 to just over a day in 2026, with industry projections suggesting the window will shrink to one hour by 2027. Rapid7’s 2026 Global Threat Landscape Report found that what once unfolded over weeks now materializes in days (and in some cases, minutes), with the median time between vulnerability publication and inclusion on CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog falling from 8.5 days to five. The implications invalidate an entire category of enterprise risk management. For decades, security teams built their workflows around severity scores. The National Vulnerability Database, operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), classified every disclosed flaw as ‘critical’, ‘high’, ‘medium', or ‘low’ - and organizations built their response hierarchies accordingly. Fix the criticals immediately, schedule the highs, and then defer the rest. That model is now under institutional strain: CVE submissions surged 263% between 2020 and 2025, and starting April 15, 2026, NIST announced it would only prioritize enrichment for a narrow subset of vulnerabilities, such as those already on CISA’s exploited list, those affecting federal systems, or those covered by Executive Order 14028. This would leave the majority of newly disclosed flaws without severity scores. “You’ll no longer be able to use the old risk management methodology of saying ‘I’m only going to fix criticals’,” Tolts explained. “Because you’re not going to have a severity anymore.” The shift has a compounding effect. AI models are not only accelerating exploitation timelines, but they are also discovering vulnerabilities at a rate that human analysts cannot process. NIST enriched nearly 42,000 CVEs in 2025, 45% more than any prior year, and forecasts from the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams projected a record 50,000 additional CVEs to be reported in 2026 (these figures do not yet account for the accelerating contribution of AI-powered vulnerability discovery tools like Claude Mythos and GPT-5.4-Cyber). Every day, the cyber world is facing more vulnerabilities, faster exploitation, and fewer severity scores to guide triage. But security teams are still largely operating through manual workflows designed for a different era. Copperhelm’s answer is autonomous investigation and remediation, already backed by a $7 million seed round led by TLV Partners and deployed in Fortune 500 environments. The platform uses a proprietary “Context Lake” to structure cloud data across environments, enabling AI agents to continuously monitor infrastructure, investigate threats, and execute real-time remediation without manual handoffs. Tolts describes the practical effect in terms his customers already understand: one client arrived with 10 million open vulnerabilities and two home-made severity categories above “critical” — labels they had invented themselves because the official scale had run out of runway. “Your window of response has shrunk, and you need to autonomously take care of it,” Tolts said. “It’s no longer the case where you can just open a Jira ticket and wait for some engineer to fix it in one year or one month, because now you’re gonna get exploited very, very fast.” Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

  8. Jun 29

    How the Market Finally Caught Up to Teramount - #0083, Hesham Taha, Lior Handelsman

    In the early days of Teramount, investors kept asking CEO Hesham Taha the same question. He had a platform that could connect chip to chip using light instead of electrons, considered a technical feat he and co-founder Avi Israel had spent years developing. But the problem, he recalled, was everything else. “We thought it was a great idea, see how easy we can connect the light to the chip. Everyone will use that,” Taha said. “But it turns out to be exactly the opposite in the first few years after our inception.” The problem for Taha and Israel was that for nearly a decade, Teramount was trying to solve a problem the semiconductor industry didn't know it would have. The market didn’t yet exist, nor did the supply chain. “The most critical point and the big barrier at the beginning of this journey was, ‘What is the product? What is the use case?’ This is what every investor kept asking us, and we failed to give a good answer.” Years passed, and that question, once unanswerable, just got answered. In April, Molex announced the acquisition of Teramount for approximately $430 million, roughly 7-8 times the $58 million that the Jerusalem-based startup had raised across its lifetime. The exit is a case study in what might be called ‘The Patience Trade’: bet on a technology before the world knows it needs it, endure years of uncertainty, and trust that the market eventually catches up. In Teramount’s case, it took two pivots, one global AI infrastructure boom, and a seed investor willing to see something others couldn’t: Lior Handelsman. Today, Handelsman is a Managing Partner at Grove Ventures, and before that, was a co-founder of SolarEdge - so he himself is no stranger to building technologies into markets that don’t yet exist. When he first encountered Teramount, his instinct was to pass. “There was no market even when I met them at the beginning of 2021,” he said. “And I was pretty much willing to tell them, ‘Look, guys, very nice, but I can’t see the market’.” Handelsman ended up reaching out to senior contacts at NVIDIA, Broadcom, Cisco, and Intel — companies that would eventually need exactly what Teramount was building. “When I told them, they said, ‘That’s a big problem. Connecting fiber to chip? That’s a big problem. We are all going to need that in four to five years’.” Grove led the seed round in 2021, and the next few years compressed faster than anyone predicted. The 2022 generative AI explosion turbocharged demand for the kind of optical connectivity Teramount had spent years perfecting. Co-packaged optics — the integration of optical engines directly with compute chips to reduce power consumption and latency — moved from a niche conference topic to an urgent industry priority. And so Teramount, having spent years building the ecosystem relationships and supply chain partnerships that most competitors hadn’t started, was suddenly indispensable. Taha points to two moments that changed Teramount’s trajectory. The first was 2017, when co-packaged optics began to emerge as a defined technology category. The second was 2024, when AI infrastructure demand made optical connectivity not just desirable but necessary. “This was the major and significant pivot in our journey,” he said. Strategic investors followed the technical validation. AMD, Samsung, and Hitachi all joined Teramount as the company’s direction became increasingly legible to the industry. Handelsman describes the combination of financial investors alongside strategic ones as the signal that a company has crossed a critical threshold: “That’s like a sweet spot. A financial investor is leading the round, saying that there is still upside, and strategic investors, who can all be customers.” For Taha, the Molex acquisition was less a finish line than a pragmatic decision about speed. “We had a great technology, we have a great product, but we need to move fast to match the market speed,” he concluded. Molex, a proven interconnect manufacturer with global production capabilities, offered the industrial scale that the Jerusalem-based startup could not self-assemble quickly enough. The patience trade paid off. The lesson it offers is about endurance, and about finding investors willing to hold the same long view as the founders they back. 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

    How the Market Finally Caught Up to Teramount - #0083, Hesham Taha, Lior Handelsman
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Join me as I discuss issues relating to Israel, tech, media, and news. Sometimes with a guest, sometimes solo. www.thespirocircle.com

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  • Creator
    James Spiro
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    91
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    Explicit
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    © James Spiro
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