Globs asked hundreds of Israeli tech investors across more than 100 venture capital firms to identify the lesser-known private startups most likely to become household names within a year or two. The 2026 ranking, like every year, highlights young companies growing quickly, making a wide impact on consumers and enterprises, and moving toward a major acquisition or an IPO.
This year’s clear theme is artificial intelligence, but not just as a generic tool. The selected companies are those tailoring products to AI use cases, building servers and powerful computers to ease current industry bottlenecks such as memory limits, chip shortages, and high prices driven by Nvidia’s near-monopoly, or developing AI agents, the kind of “new software” Jensen Huang recently described as central to work. Three of the top companies are active in AI agents, one started with virtual customer-service reps and expanded outward, another helps firms manage agents in one place, and a third checks that coding agents do not introduce bugs or security holes.
The ranking also shows investors returning to physical-world problems, including disease diagnosis using special sensors, traffic management in major cities, and protection against terror threats inside Israel and beyond its borders. A new Innovation Authority report says Israeli hardware has higher output per worker than software, and the country’s chips and servers sector, from Apple to Amazon to Nvidia, is booming. DTC managing partner Yair Shnir said, “The companies that survive and thrive the AI wave are those that operate in this field, were born into it, or pivoted to it quickly.”
At the same time, he warned that many companies on this year’s list may be irrelevant by next year because market shifts are so fast. Vertex managing partner Yinay Oron said changing direction can save a company, even if it means abandoning years of work and tens of millions of dollars, but it requires a board willing to accept lower valuations and even layoffs when necessary.
The article points to past winners as both cautionary and encouraging examples. Drivenets, which topped the 2019 list, became far more valuable after its networking technology proved useful for AI servers, and Globs recently reported an $8.5 billion valuation, making it Israel’s second-most valuable private company. Gong, ranked in 2018, later adapted from sales analytics to serve AI companies and now says it has reached a $500 million annual run rate with 55% yearly growth. ActiveFence, ranked 10th in 2021, also pivoted to AI customers and now is estimated to generate about $40 million annually.
Not every startup survived the AI wave. Blue and White Robotics, a 2024 top-10 company focused on autonomous agricultural and security vehicles, was sold to Elbit for a few million dollars after raising about $180 million. StreamElements, from the 2021 list, has struggled and has even asked customers to raise capital to keep operating. The article also notes that some startups chose to sell, such as Wiz to Google and Armis to ServiceNow for about $9 billion, showing that sometimes the best outcome is joining a larger AI platform.
