Welcome Home

Editor’s Note

My first memory of Israel is a border officer behind bulletproof glass looking at my passport, smiling, and saying, “Welcome home,” as I arrived with a Taglit group to discover what was supposed to be my homeland.

Born in the Baltics, raised in Russia - I’m not used to being welcomed. Especially sincerely. Especially for no apparent reason.

But there was a reason. This turned out to be my only home - a place built not around bloodlines but around connection: to create, to support, to live. A system designed so people who have nowhere else can still build something meaningful. And that is the first reason I decided to contribute to covering the Israeli startup scene.

The second reason came on October 7.

When the massacre happened, I was shocked not only by the brutality - but by how ignorant the world is about Israel and its people. About the technologies invented and deployed by my fellow citizens. From the safety of distant campuses, comfortable students were cheering death through platforms built by Israeli engineers, calling to cancel Israel using the very technology we created - technology born out of survival, not conquest. Built to protect life. Built for good.

Shocked. Angry. Clear-minded.

So we’re here.

And to understand why Israeli startups look the way they do, you first have to understand what they were built for.

Why Israel Builds What It Builds

Israel did not build its technology ecosystem to win markets.
It built it to survive.

Long before there were startups, there were problems that could not be ignored: how to defend borders that are always under threat? How to protect infrastructure that cannot fail? How to keep hospitals, banks, power grids, and communications working when everything else is unstable? Those constraints forced the country to build something rare - a culture of engineering for worst-case scenarios.

When you live inside permanent uncertainty, you don’t design for ideal conditions. You design for collapse, attack, and failure. You build redundancy. You build security. You build systems that can make decisions in real time. Over decades, those survival systems became world-class infrastructure: cybersecurity, communications, data processing, artificial intelligence, medical technology.

Only later did those tools become startups.

• Waze was born in a place where roads can change overnight.
• Mobileye was built where a single accident is too costly to accept.
• Israeli cybersecurity exists because digital attacks are not theoretical - they are constant.

Constraint created infrastructure.

Infrastructure became products.

Beneath all of this is another layer:

Israel is not a country of comfortable natives. It is a country built by people who arrived with nothing but skills - engineers from the Soviet Union, doctors from Iran, entrepreneurs from Europe, families from everywhere. People who knew that stability is temporary and that the only real asset is what you can build.

That mindset produces founders who move fast, take risks, and don’t wait for permission. It produces engineers who think in systems. And it creates a startup culture that looks a survival lab that accidentally became one of the most powerful innovation engines on Earth.

This is why Israeli technology looks the way it does:
Built to work when everything else fails.

The Technology Everyone Uses (But Never Credits)

Here’s the funny part: millions of people who have never set foot in Israel are using Israeli technology every single day without knowing it.

Driving somewhere? Mobileye is quietly helping your car avoid a collision.

Running late? Waze is rerouting you around chaos.

Texting a friend? The Signal protocol is encrypting your messages.

Working from a beach on some gig? Fiverr is moving your money across borders.

This isn’t some niche ecosystem - it’s infrastructure. The kind that disappears when it works, and only gets noticed when it breaks.

Even the hardware running all of this has Israeli fingerprints. Large parts of Intel’s most advanced chips are designed in Israel. Amazon’s cloud relies on processors built by an Israeli startup it acquired. The USB flash drive - yes, that thing you’ve lost ten of - was invented by an Israeli engineer.

You don’t have to love Israel to be using Israeli technology.

You already are.

That’s what makes this ecosystem so interesting. It doesn’t try to be loud. It just shows up inside the tools you already depend on.

The Lie the World Believes

There is a strange gap between how much the world uses Israeli technology and how little it understands the place it comes from.

In global media, Israel mostly appears as a headline: a conflict, a crisis, a controversy. It is flattened into a single story that fits into news cycles and social feeds. What disappears in that compression is everything that doesn’t produce outrage - engineers, founders, scientists, people quietly building systems that keep hospitals running, money moving, and data safe.

This is not really about bias. It’s about incentives.

News organizations are built to follow drama, not infrastructure. Social platforms reward emotion, not complexity. A rocket makes a better image than a line of code, even if the code ends up saving more lives. So the world learns to argue about Israel, but never to understand what it actually produces.

The result is a kind of collective blind spot. Israeli startups become visible only when they are big enough to be acquired, controversial enough to be debated, or profitable enough to be impossible to ignore. Everything before that: the years of experimentation, failure, and invention - stays off the map.

Innovation is quiet. It doesn’t fight for attention on social media. It doesn’t trend on X/Twitter. It doesn’t demand applause. It just happens, day after day, in labs, garages, small offices, and military units repurposed for civilian creation.

Sherman exists in that gap. Not to argue or persuade, but to document the truth: what is actually being built here, by whom, and why it matters.

What You’ll Find Here

Everyone covers the huge M&A’s, funding or failures. Sherman is to add. Not repeat.

We will focus on:

• People first: the people actually inventing or building technology, the people investing in it. The stories behind the path of creation.
• Products & systems: from early prototypes to global infrastructure, in plain language.
• Mechanics behind: why startups succeed, why some fail, and how capital flows in this ecosystem.
• Tech dive: the technologies backing the ventures.
• Context: how innovation grows out of constraints, history, and culture.

You won’t find clickbait. You won’t find recycled press releases. You won’t find hot takes telling you what to think.

Instead, you’ll see the engine running: the people, the technologies, the ideas.

And you’ll understand why Israeli startups look the way they do, and why the world silently relies on them every day.

Sherman is here to map it, piece by piece, so anyone curious enough can follow along.

Welcome Home 💜