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00:00John, we've covered a lot of sort of the near term, what's happening on the ground. But from your perspective, could you kinda give me the kind of bigger picture on what this does for venture back deals in the tech Israeli system over a matter of months or years? Going forward, will this have a lasting effect? Well, if you actually take that sort of frame of reference and you look several years down the road, there be no question that we'll be bigger, stronger, more money invested. Israel has developed, as you know, and I've been covering this incredible tech investment ecosystem. It's hard to find any significant venture players who aren't active in terms of backing Israeli companies. You know, Israel has this huge delegation of companies traded in New York. Today, 100 unicorns are operational in Israel. Ourcrowd is perhaps the largest Democratic venture platform investing globally, but investing from Israel. So clearly over the next couple of weeks and months, depending upon how long these hostilities last, we're going to be facing challenges. But unfortunately, we have a lot of experience doing this and successfully. If you look at the past performance, every time we've gone through this unfortunate episodes and such as a war, it's hard to call it an episode we have. We emerge at the end of the process stronger, bigger. And I think that based on just listening to some of your guests today, Israel's strengths in a high and deep tech is going to bring lots of capital and lots of return to venture investors in the Israeli market. John, I appreciate the sort of unique structure of that crowd, how investors can get access to private startups. 427 direct portfolio companies. And then there are fund companies as well. Has there been a need for cash injection this week because of what's happened to continue to be operational? It's not no, it's not like that kind of either send me money this week or in trouble. As you know, there's been a, you know, quite market retraction in the amount of venture money committed by funds into venture backed startups worldwide. It's been 50, 60, 70% down year to year, depending upon which area Israel shares that downturn. So the problem we're facing is that, you know, we are already in a capital constrained environment where companies are cutting their costs, letting people go, you know, trying very, very hard to make sure that they can, you know, get to break even or close and then make sure they can continue to develop their businesses. Then this comes along and this is not great in terms of a capital raising environment, but we're stepping it up. Okay. We're going to be, you know, launching many new deals and bringing more capital in. And we're heartened by what we've seen as the response of the global venture community to the Israeli tech community during the last several days. It's incredible. There's a site called Tech Condemning terror, where there are simply this huge list of people who are supporting Israel and making actual commitments into the non-profit sector to help families that have been stricken by this or people who are in need. And, you know, leading funds like insider general catalyst, big companies, an Israeli company like Mobileye are making in some cases multi-million dollar commitments to support Israel. So we hope that that won't just be on the nonprofit side, but there'll be an outpouring of support in terms of making investments what's traditionally been a great place to invest venture capital. John, just very quickly, based on what you just said, it is worth noting that Hamas has been designated a terrorist organization by the US and the European Union. I want to end on asking what's unique about Israel's tech talent. I note that in video was due to hold its air summit Sunday, Monday of next week in Tel Aviv and canceled for obvious reasons. But from the perspective, what is it that Israel has that other countries or regions don't? We have resilience, right? In other words, today we're facing a crisis. But there are crises all over the world in the Ukraine and, you know, Asia. There's a food crisis, a climate crisis. But we are skilled at navigating through difficult times. And we don't take no for an answer. We're pretty, you know, aggressive people. We're sweet and we're loyal. We work really hard. And in terms of the I area in particular, we have remarkable companies who are not only developing generative AI or broad platforms, but we have companies that are also developing incredible expertise in these vertical areas. This is one such you just spoke about in terms of AI for shopping. And I'm going to call Sebastian. What's really interesting. Deals that we can talk about, but the reality is that we are going to we already are leaders in A.I. and Sam was just here from Open A.I., but we are going to go beyond A.I. into all the areas where Israel is strong, whether it's cybersecurity, where $0.40 of every dollar is invested in Israel worldwide, whether it's agtech or food tech, where Israel more money was invested in alternative protein than the entire European Union. Okay, so in Israel alone in the cloud, in sports tech, in mobility, and I think that this will continue to grow. We're going to get through this war successfully, as we have for the last 75 years, and we look forward to working with our global partners.

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OurCrowd's Medved: Israel Has Strong Tech Ecosystem

Jonathan Medved is the founder and CEO of the online global venture investment platform OurCrowd. He joins Ed Ludlow to discuss the outlook for Israel's tech scene and the response of the global VC community to the Israel-Hamas war. He speaks on "Bloomberg Technology." (Source: Bloomberg)

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