Looking Ahead to 2025 With Optimism and Hope

May 2025 be the year when everything changes for the better

Our thoughts are, first and foremost, with the hostages and their families. We pray they return safely home to their loved ones. And we long to see all the displaced families back in their hometowns, villages and kibbutzim.

We hope 2025 will be a year of recovery, filled with compassion, peace and prosperity, bringing an end to war.

I would not presume to summarize the past year, as we all experienced it in so many different ways. And we cannot change the past.

Rather, let us look forward, as far into the future as we can imagine.

The future is already introducing itself to us, sending us indications of what is to come. All we need to do is to pay attention and distinguish authentic signals from background noise, ensuring we don’t misread them.

In the fast-moving world of entrepreneurship, innovation and venture capital, being “on time” often means being too late. Tomorrow’s realities are setting today’s agenda, and the future is already unfolding before us – if we only have the vision to grasp it. This may be the greatest challenge of our time.

While I cannot predict the future, I would like to offer some observations that may be relevant for tomorrow’s challenges and opportunities.

The Rise of New Tech-Driven Empires

From among the growing herd of unicorns, a small group of towering “giraffes” emerged in the United States. Known as “The Magnificent Seven,” each one of them is a giant corporation valued at over $1 trillion. They arose in tech-driven sectors such as computing infrastructure, artificial intelligence and social media, and they have defined new benchmarks for both private and public companies.

Their empires have recalibrated how we look at enterprise valuation, economic and social impact, execution and management capabilities, scaling and growth rates. They have demonstrable political significance, as we saw before and during the recent US elections.

To date, these giraffes are exclusively American — there are none in Europe, none in Asia-Pacific, and certainly none in smaller countries like Israel. They serve as both a challenge and an inspiration for new and innovative startups striving to become unicorns, and then scale a thousandfold to become a giraffe.

For the new generation of Israeli entrepreneurs, giraffes are aspirational, as our ecosystem transitions from early growth stage companies to early scaling-up companies. Three main challenges keep us from scaling up fast enough: access to global markets; customer adoption; and the availability of human talent calibrated for global growth.

The AI Transformation

The introduction of ChatGPT signaled that the future was already here. Hard as I try to imagine what the world will look like in the coming years, the pace of AI development and its adoption make it difficult – even impossible – to envision. What is clear is that AI will likely transform the world faster and more profoundly than anything we’ve seen yet.

For software and service companies founded in recent years, this can present a dramatic threat of disruption or an opportunity to become a disruptor. The evolution of AI has the potential to render some solutions obsolete, while at the same time enabling extraordinary growth and scaling opportunities for others.

Some coding and development processes are already driven by imagination, without the need for manual execution, almost allowing us to simply “speak our mind” and let AI do the work. Major development efforts are also underway for other new technologies, such as quantum computing, which will accelerate the transformation of the market once commercially viable. However, AI will probably remain the most significant human and business undertaking for the foreseeable future.

The Promise of Dual-Use Technologies

Global conflicts and ongoing wars, coupled with uncertainties regarding world order following the recent elections in the United States, are driving significant growth in the defense and security technology sector. This, in turn, attracts significant investments in innovation, with national agencies and military forces adopting new technologies much faster for battlefield use. Drones and unmanned vehicles, for example, have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness and dual-use capabilities (civilian and military), which is driving accelerated cycles of development, production and deployment.

Given the nature of the defense industry, it is hard to predict how lucrative investment in the new domain of dual-use technologies will be. But we already see a growing interest from global investment players and several new category leaders that are demonstrating hyper-growth. There is no doubt that these are early significant indicators that should not be ignored.

Product-market fit drives the transition from early-stage hi-tech startup to growth stage enterprise. In certain areas, Israel – despite its small market size – has offered great opportunities to effectively achieve such milestones. That was the case, for example, in the areas of water technologies and agri-food-tech solutions, with Israel’s unique climate and location providing real-world testing grounds. Today, global markets recognize Israel’s leadership in defining market needs, development and implementation in the cyber security and defense technology sectors. Technologies adopted by the IDF and other Israeli security agencies, as well as local defense industry players, often establish product-market fit and domain leadership early on.

Aside from sustainability (water, agriculture, food and energy), defense and security, Israel is not considered an early adopter market for new technologies. This may be because our small population is generally not a high-priority target for global players or it may be a cultural characteristic. In any case, if we wish to produce category leaders, then we need to follow the example of Israeli companies in the defense and sustainability sectors in terms of adoption and implementation. This would put our tech ecosystem on a faster track to product-market fit.

Where Do We Go From Here?

The opportunities and challenges in the world of advanced science and technology call for decisive action. We must dedicate significant resources to continuously imagine the future and bring it into the present. This requires developing methodologies to look ahead and distinguish genuine trends from mere noise.

Israel must become a society that develops, integrates and adopts cutting-edge tools, earning global recognition for successfully defining product-market fit in more domains. Doing so will enable our companies to reach growth stages earlier and scale faster. In addition, we must expand our international efforts in new markets and reach customers worldwide, paving the way for rapid economic growth.

A final word

As an organization, we are beginning 2025 better equipped than ever to navigate what lies ahead. And for this, I’d like to thank you – our community of founders, dreamers, inventors, investors, partners and supporters.

This will surely be a year with many opportunities to impact the world. Together, in solidarity, let’s make a collective effort to ensure the mark we leave is a positive one.