Lazy Digest #2: One Wednesday, $1.2B and 620 Jobs

Two Israeli software companies made news on Wednesday, July 22.

The first has never disclosed a dollar of revenue and is now worth $1.2 billion. The second has been public since 2021 and cut a fifth of its staff.

That’s Glow and monday.com, same day, same country, roughly the same industry. Last week I wrote that Israeli tech is two markets on the same street. This week they shared a calendar entry.

Welcome to Lazy Digest #2 — Israeli tech, one week, researched with AI and filtered by a human who reads the primary sources. Estimates are labeled as estimates. Corrections get made out loud (there’s one below). Let’s go.

The Wednesday

Glow — $180M at a $1.2B valuation. Founded in 2025, split between Tel Aviv and Palo Alto, roughly 100 people, and out of stealth as a unicorn before publishing a revenue number. The pitch is endpoint security rebuilt around prevention rather than detection: AI agents that map every device, decide what software is allowed to live there, and remove what isn’t.

The team explains the round better than the product does. CEO Roi Tiger spent nine years at Meta as VP of engineering — he got there because Meta bought Onavo, the company he co-founded, in 2013. CTO Omer Singer ran cybersecurity strategy at Snowflake, 8200 before that. VP R&D Ophir Arie came from Claroty, Talpiot and 8200. COO Emily Heath was CISO at United Airlines and DocuSign and sat on Wiz’s board through the $32 billion Google acquisition.

Sequoia, Cyberstarts, Greenoaks and Redpoint led, with Index, Swish, Lux, Operator Collective and Holly participating. Glow’s own number for why now: regular AI use on corporate devices went from 15% to 45% in a year. Tiger’s framing to Calcalist is blunter — it’s a $40 billion market with CrowdStrike and SentinelOne sitting on it.

One accounting note worth your attention: TechCrunch and SecurityWeek describe the $180M as a single Series A, while CTech reports it as three rounds inside about a year — a $20M seed, a $60M Series A at a $400M valuation, and the current $100M. Both versions circulated the same week. The second one tells you more: this company tripled its valuation twice before most of the market knew its name.

monday.com — 620 jobs. Roughly 20% of the global workforce, about 350 of them in Israel. Co-founders Roy Mann and Eran Zinman called it the most painful decision since founding the company, and were specific that it isn’t cost-cutting and isn’t AI replacing people — it’s a restructure around a platform where humans and agents work together. Management layers get flattened. Restructuring charges: $45–55 million.

Then read the rest of the filing. Alongside the cuts, monday.com raised its full-year operating margin outlook to 15% from 13% and kept its 19–20% revenue growth target. The stock, down about half this year and roughly 75% off its peak, barely moved — closing around $73.

620 people lost their jobs and the market shrugged. That’s not a scandal, it’s the whole point: the market had already priced in that this company would have to do this. The announcement was just paperwork catching up to the expectation.

The Correction

Last week I ran “Neo Security — $50M+, total above $75M, product officially: trust us.”

The official launch landed on July 20 and it’s bigger than the pre-announcement reporting: Neo — no “Security” in the name — came out with $100 million total, a $75M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer plus a previously undisclosed $25M seed from 2025. Craft Ventures and Merlin Ventures participated. Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport is in as an angel.

The product is now on the record too. Neo calls itself an “Agentic Software Control” company: a real-time layer that inventories and governs AI agents, AI-enabled apps, browsers and identities across an enterprise. Founders are the SentinelOne trio — Nick Warner (CEO, president and COO through SentinelOne’s 2021 IPO), Shlomi Salem, Eran Shirazi. Boston HQ, Tel Aviv development center.

Bessemer’s investment note leans on one Gartner projection: agentic capabilities go from under 5% of enterprise applications in 2025 to 40% by the end of 2026. Whether or not that number survives contact with reality, it’s the number the category is being funded against.

Treat last week’s Neo figures as superseded. That’s how this works.

Cyber Ate 34% of Everything

Context for the two raises above: Israeli cybersecurity pulled $2.57 billion in H1 2026 — about 34% of all capital into Israeli tech — per the IVC-LeumiTech review.

Now the caveat, and it comes from CTech’s own analysis rather than from me: Oak, Neo and Glow all emerged inside an eight-day window in July, but those rounds were almost certainly closed months earlier. What you’re watching is PR calendars synchronizing, not a wave of money arriving in July. Useful to remember before anyone builds a thesis on “the July cyber surge.”

The Zafran episode is the week’s most instructive story and nobody will put it on a slide. On July 20, CTech reported that Cisco was in talks to buy Zafran Security at $150–200 million — below the valuation of its late-2025 round — citing slowing growth around $20M ARR and the departure of co-founder and CPO Snir Havdala to Nvidia.

By July 22, Zafran had a different story: no sale, Cisco Investments made a strategic investment via a SAFE, total funding now past $140 million. CEO Sanaz Yashar told Globes the company isn’t for sale and that the round it’s raising could value it as high as $1 billion. Cisco joins Sequoia, Cyberstarts, Menlo, PSP Growth, Vintage and Amex Ventures on the cap table.

Both things can be true — a company can be fielding a discount offer and closing a strategic check in the same month. Yashar’s own story is the kind Israeli tech doesn’t manufacture: born in Tehran, immigrated after high school, 8200 officer, then a lead researcher at Mandiant. The character Tamar Rabinyan in Tehran is partly based on her.

But here’s the part founders should actually take: the gap between an elite founding team and sustained commercial traction is widening, and in crowded categories the strategic investment is becoming the polite version of a soft landing. Pedigree raises the round. It doesn’t close the deals.

The Other Ledger

monday.com wasn’t alone, it was just the biggest.

Israel’s tech unemployment hit a peacetime record: 16,300 high-tech job seekers in May 2026, per an Israel Employment Service study reported by CTech — against a monthly average of around 7,700 back in 2019. The projection is roughly 16,800 by year-end. About 59% of them, some 9,600 people, are software professionals. The exact group the AI story is written about.

Globes called it a bloodbath in the software sector and named monday.com, Wix and Fiverr in the same paragraph. Wix cut 20% back in May, citing AI competition and a strong shekel. TechCrunch, quoting Layoffs.fyi, puts 2026’s global tech cuts past 122,000 roles.

Read that next to the cyber section and the shape of the year is clear. Capital is not leaving Israeli tech. It’s relocating inside it — out of the companies that sell software seats, into the companies that sell control over what the agents do.

Everything That Isn’t Cyber

Good week for the rest of the ecosystem, and the best story in it has nothing to do with AI agents.

ASIO Technologies — $15M, first outside money in 23 years. Founded in 2003 in Kfar Saba by brothers Tomer and Yaniv Malchi. Bootstrapped and profitable for most of its life. Around 70 employees. Systems deployed across every branch of the IDF and with US customers including USSOCOM. And in July it took its first-ever round — $15M co-led by Protego Ventures (Lital Leshem, Lee Moser) and Miami’s Aliya Capital Partners — alongside a reported deal with Anduril worth tens of millions to supply NOCTA, its vision-based navigation system that works when GPS doesn’t.

Twenty-three years of saying no, then a yes in the same news cycle as a deal with Palmer Luckey’s company. Worth noting the Anduril piece was a Calcalist exclusive with no joint statement from either party — the funding is confirmed, the contract value is reported.

Zoom out and ASIO fits a bigger number: defense and dual-use companies took nearly 30% of the $8.4 billion invested in Israeli tech in H1 2026, and startups working with the Defense Ministry raised close to $3 billion in six months — triple what they raised in all of 2025.

Plantopia — $9M to grow cheese protein in oats. Led by Schreiber Foods, one of the world’s largest private dairy processors, with Siddhi Capital, plus Yotvata, Arkin and the Fresh Start incubator. Total past $16M. The company — formerly Pigmentum, built on Hebrew University research — grows all four casein proteins inside sprouted oats, no livestock, no bioreactors. Casein is what makes cheese stretch and melt, and it’s the thing plant-based cheese has never gotten right. A production facility at Kibbutz Sdot Yam starts this quarter. When your lead investor is the incumbent whose product you’re replacing, that’s a signal.

Cordant — $8M seed. Four former Rapyd executives building a real-time operations “command center” for banks, fintechs and payment providers running on fragmented infrastructure. Co-led by Motive Partners and Oak HC/FT, with Bitso and Paxos joining as both investors and design partners. NYC-based, expanding teams in South Florida and Tel Aviv.

Dondy → Circeus. The quiet exit of the week. Dondy was bootstrapped, built by childhood friends Tamir Or and Or Schreiber with Inbal Katz, and became the #1-ranked WhatsApp app on the Shopify App Store — 70,000+ businesses, $100M+ in annual merchant orders, over a million customer conversations a year. London’s Circeus bought it into its Shop Circle division. Terms undisclosed; TheMarker’s Ofir Dor estimates a few million dollars.

A few million after zero outside funding is a real outcome for three founders. It’s also the number that makes the point I keep making: not every good company is a unicorn, and the exit that pays your team is worth more than the round that flatters your deck.

Also reported in the week’s roundups, dates less firmly pinned: Elio Labs out of stealth with $21M for sensors built for the AI era, founded by ex-Meta engineers Nadav Grossinger and Nitay Romano; and TytoCare closing a $25M+ growth round with Adam Pellegrini stepping in as CEO.

Ecosystem: A Kibbutz on 26th Street

Israeli startups now have a permanent address in Manhattan. Hakibbutz NYC opened in Chelsea — about 18,000 square feet on 26th Street — as a joint project between Hakibbutz (Amir Wolner) and Israeli Mapped in NY (Guy Franklin). Privately funded, no money from Israel, the US or the city.

The number underneath it: roughly 470 Israeli startups now operate in New York. When Franklin started counting, there were 56. About 50 arrived in the last twelve months alone. Zafran — yes, that Zafran — is among the first tenants.

It opened under a mayor who supports BDS and revoked the city’s anti-BDS executive order on his first day in office. The hub opened anyway, with private money, in the most expensive borough in America. Draw your own conclusion; mine is that capital and proximity to customers beat politics more often than politics likes to admit.

Two more for the founders’ column:

J-Ventures closed a $36M third fund, 44% above target, lifting AUM to about $110M. The model is unusual — roughly 600 members, executives from Nvidia, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Intel and OpenAI, with individual commitments capped at $500,000. Nearly 50 companies backed (Descope, Finout, Bria AI, BeeHero, CopilotKit), 10 exits. Reported July 12, circulated widely this week.

The Israel Innovation Authority raised its Startup Fund ceilings effective July 15: pre-seed max from NIS 1.5M to 2M, seed max from NIS 5M to 6M, and the eligible seed round size from NIS 25M to 30M. Small print, real money, and directly relevant if you’re raising in H2.

What I’d Do With This Week

If you’re raising in cyber: the category is paying premium valuations before revenue disclosure — Glow at $1.2B, Neo at $100M, both pre-benchmark. That window is open and it is being watched. Glow gets pressure-tested at Black Hat in a few weeks. The first of these companies to miss publicly will re-price the rest of them.

If you’re an operator at a public software company: monday.com is the template now. Growing revenue, improving margins, and cutting 20% of staff are no longer contradictory events — they’re the same announcement. Stop reading layoffs as a distress signal and start reading them as a re-composition. Then decide which side of the composition you’re on.

If you’re bootstrapped and tired of feeling invisible: ASIO went 23 years without outside capital and closed a defense deal with Anduril. Dondy took zero and sold to a London holding company. Neither will trend on X. Both are better outcomes than most of the decks I read this month.

If you’re a founder outside cyber: Plantopia’s lead investor is a dairy giant. Cordant’s investors are also its design partners. In a week where cyber took a third of everything, the non-cyber deals that closed all had the same feature — the money came from someone who will actually use the product. That’s not a consolation prize. In this market it’s a shortcut.

See you next week. Same lazy hands, same working head.

With 💜, Alex Sherman

Research assisted by AI, every claim read and filtered by a human. Primary sources: CTech / Calcalist, Globes, the Israel Employment Service, IVC-LeumiTech, and official company releases — including Glow, Neo and Dondy. Deal values for Dondy/Circeus, the ASIO–Anduril contract and Cisco’s investment in Zafran are press estimates or single-source reports, not disclosed figures. Elio Labs and TytoCare are dated via weekly roundups rather than individually date-stamped reporting. Neo’s figures supersede those published in Lazy Digest #1.