Liad Agmon: Insight Partners is committed to Israel

• Published date: 31 March 2024
• Author: Hila Weissberg
• Publication title: Globes (Rishon LeZion, Israel)

"In Israel we have more than 100 portfolio companies. We have invested almost $6 billion in Israel. Over the years personal friendships have been created between partners at Insight and the CEOs and he partners in Israel, and Insight has earned a great deal of money from its investments in Israel, which were excellent. This is what led Insight's founding partner Jeff Horing, two years ago to ask me to join and lead the office in Israel. During that period there was a great deal of noise being made by the foreign funds that were here - they would fly in, write ten checks and then return home and disappear. But Insight took a decision: they wanted a presence on the ground and to strengthen their commitment to the local market."

Agmon spoke to "Globes," in the "Submarine" podcast last week, here is a shortened version of what he said.

Agmon observes that no AI company has been founded in Israel on the scale of OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, and there probably won't be. On the other hand, France for example has Mistral AI, which is giving OpenAI a fight.

"But the fact that Mistral AI did succeed was because its founders came from the elite laboratories in the field of AI (Google and Meta), and they also happen to be French. Companies that broke ground in the field did so through entrepreneurs who are prodigies in their field - a singularity."

But Israeli tech has been able to demonstrate singularity in other areas, like cybersecurity for example. In AI there are companies that have succeeded in distinguishing themselves like Amnon Shashua's AI21 Labs, but not on a sufficient scale.

"We did not have an Israeli Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO and founder). This is an entrepreneur with phenomenal ability to raise money that ran the company under the radar for four years, without pressure from investors to produce revenue. And then when he launched ChatGPT at the end of 2022, he stunned the world. He is a rare entrepreneur and it's a super rare situation."

He says, "Israeli companies have not been able to grab a place in the deep infrastructure of AI and in the world of the large language models (LLM), but the good Israeli entrepreneur usually knows how to identify problems that require a solution. They then know how to develop the technology to solve it. Israeli entrepreneurs understand that there is a crazy tiger that needs to be ridden and we know how to solve problems in the real world. In enterprise software, in medicine and all sorts of areas, AI will be the engine.

"The question is whether they will succeed in developing companies that know how to preserve their competitive advantage over time. If a company develops a product that is simply a UI above a ChatGPT infrastructure what will prevent a rival from doing exactly the same thing."

When you say that Israel might have missed the boat in the field of AI, you in fact...