Views: 58
Israeli tech raised $7.93B in disclosed capital across 128 tracked rounds in the first half of 2026 (Jan 1–Jun 23), up 92% year-over-year from $4.13B across 101 rounds in the same window in 2025. Deal count is up too, but only 27%. Do the math and the average check size jumped from roughly $41M to roughly $62M.
That headline is real, but it will mislead you if you’re a pre-seed or seed founder. The average check is being pulled upward by a small number of $100M+ rounds, 42 of them in the full 18-month dataset, just 11.5% of all deals, yet 57% of every disclosed dollar. For founders trying to read the room ahead of a raise, the more useful signal is one level down, in the Seed and Series A data, and that picture is more nuanced than the macro number suggests.
Seed rounds: the cheque got bigger, the volume didn’t explode
We tracked 26 Seed deals in H1 2026 totaling $461M. The median Seed round was $10.1M. up from $8.0M in the same Jan–Jun window in 2025 (and $9.0M across all of 2025).
Don’t anchor on that median, though. The 2026 Seed category splits into two distinct groups:
Founder-brand Seed rounds. Factify ($63M), ZyG , the new AI e-commerce venture from ironSource’s founders ($58M), and Cylake, Palo Alto Networks founder Nir Zuk’s new cybersecurity startup ($45M), sit well above everything else. These are repeat or celebrity founders raising what are effectively pre-launch growth rounds on reputation alone. A fourth deal, Novee’s $51.5M round, was structured as combined Seed-and-Series-A funding, a sign that the line between those two stages is blurring at the top of the market. Together, these four rounds make up over $217M of the $461M Seed total, on just 4 of the 26 deals.
Everyone else. Strip those four (plus Voltify’s $30M, the next-largest) out, and the remaining 21 Seed deals in H1 2026 ranged from $4.4M to $24M, with a median of $8.0M and a middle-50% range of $7M–$12M.
If you’re a first-time founder without a marquee exit behind you, $7–12M is the realistic Seed target — not the $10.1M headline median, which a handful of outsized rounds are dragging upward.
Where the money is going
Three sectors accounted for 69% of all H1 2026 Seed deals:
| Sector | Seed deals (H1 2026) | Median round |
|---|---|---|
| Cybersecurity | 10 | $9.0M |
| AI / Enterprise AI | 6 | $13.5M |
| AI Infrastructure / DevOps | 2 | $21.0M |
| Defense / Space | 2 | $10.3M |
| Consumer / Media / Gaming | 2 | $35.0M* |
| Fintech / Insurtech | 1 | $7.0M |
| Proptech / Construction | 1 | $6.5M |
| Quantum | 1 | $24.0M |
| Health / Bio | 1 | $4.4M |
*Skewed by ZyG’s $58M founder-brand round — with only 2 data points, treat this median cautiously.
That concentration isn’t a coincidence, it reflects where Israeli talent density and investor conviction currently overlap. Outside cyber, AI and AI infra, Seed deal flow in H1 2026 was genuinely thin. That doesn’t mean proptech, agritech or consumer startups can’t raise — it means you’re swimming against the current and need to work harder to find the specific investor whose thesis matches yours, rather than expecting inbound interest.
For a slightly wider lens, including 2025, I made this infographic capturing all disclosed rounds to tell the story:
The Series A bar has moved up
If you’re building toward a Series A, know what the 2026 market actually expects:
- Median Series A in H1 2026: $24.5M (vs. $20.0M across all of 2025, $19.0M in the same H1 2025 window)
- Range: $12M–$140M
- Cybersecurity dominance holds at this stage too: 15 of the 34 Series A deals we tracked in H1 2026 were cyber; across the full 18-month dataset, cyber accounts for 32 of 83 Series A rounds tracked (39%)
The step-up from a realistic $7–12M Seed to a $24.5M median Series A is roughly 2–3x on check size, and several H1 2026 Series A recipients raised their Seed less than 18 months earlier, suggesting the timeline between rounds is compressing for AI-native companies that can show traction fast.
Don’t over-read the April dip
Q1 2026 was strong, 79 deals across January through March. Deal flow then dropped sharply in April (9 deals) before recovering in May (18) and June (22).
It’s tempting to call this a seasonal pattern and tell founders to avoid April. The data doesn’t quite support that. In 2025, April was actually one of the strongest months (20 deals), that year’s slowdown hit in May instead (8 deals, the single quietest month of the whole 18-month dataset). The dip moved by a month between years.
The honest takeaway: expect one quiet month somewhere in the April–May window most years, but don’t bank your raise timeline on “April bad, March/September good.” A single slow month two quarters before you close doesn’t predict your specific round, and reading too much into any one month is more likely to spook you than help you.
Stealth still works — when the pedigree is real
Q-Factor (quantum, $24M, backed by Intel Capital) and Viewz (fintech, $7M) both explicitly emerged from stealth in H1 2026 with minimal public footprint before their raise. Cylake took a different path — Nir Zuk launched it publicly on his name and track record alone, no stealth period needed. Both routes worked. What they share is that domain pedigree substituted for the public momentum a less-known founder typically has to manufacture before a raise.
What this means for you right now
Cyber, AI and AI infrastructure aren’t oversaturated, they’re simply the sectors with the deepest Israeli LP/GP conviction right now. If you can credibly position in one of them, that’s a real tailwind, not a crowded field to avoid.
Set your Seed target at $7–12M, not the $10.1M headline median, that number is being pulled up by a handful of founder-brand rounds that aren’t a realistic comp for a first institutional raise.
The Series A bar has genuinely moved to a $24.5M median. Investors are expecting more traction before that check, so build your Seed-stage milestones around a convincing Series A narrative, not just a shipped product.
Don’t structure your raise timeline around avoiding a specific month. Expect one quiet spring month most years and don’t read too much into it either way.
Pedigree and a tight, credible team can stand in for a long public fundraising process, but it has to be real pedigree, not a polished narrative.
A note on what this data doesn’t capture
This analysis covers publicly tracked rounds only. Pre-seed rounds under roughly $3M, angel checks and family-office deals are largely invisible in this dataset, the real volume of very early-stage activity in Israel is higher than these numbers suggest. That’s actually good news if you’re pre-seed: not every round needs to be a tracked, headline-worthy deal to count.
He is a former General Partner at Google Ventures (GV) in Europe, former head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe, and founding head of Campus London, Google’s first startup hub. Eze writes on Israeli tech, venture capital, artificial intelligence, and founder strategy.
He is also the founder of Techbikers, a nonprofit that brings together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read.