Dror Bin said the hardest moment of his five years at the Israel Innovation Authority came on October 8, the day after the war began, when startups suddenly lost half their staff to military reserve duty, volunteering or childcare because the education system was shut down. Flights were unavailable, investors could not enter the country for due diligence, and fundraising froze. The state’s war machine didn’t just consume the battlefield. It reached straight into offices, schools and payrolls.
The State's Monopoly
Bin, the authority’s CEO, said the disruption hit entrepreneurs, CEOs and investors alike, and the authority responded with a fast-track funding channel for companies in the middle of raising money. Private investors had to contribute alongside public funds. He said the authority injected “a few hundred millions of shekels” and believed it saved “something like 250 companies,” which he called “the diamonds of this cohort of companies that will create the next waves of growth for Israeli equity.” The language is polished. The mechanism is simple: public money, private capital, and a state apparatus moving fast to keep the high-tech machine from stalling.
Bin is preparing to step down after five years at the helm, years he described as “not easy years” and “like a roller coaster.” He said he believes he has fulfilled his role and now wants “someone continue the work after me.” The work, in this case, means steering state-backed innovation through war, labor disruption and market panic while presenting the whole thing as national resilience.
Quantum Dreams, Public Money
Israel’s next technological push may come from a proposed national quantum-computing research and development center. Bin said the country needs to move now because quantum computing has accelerated in recent years. He said the goal is to create conditions in which Israeli companies can test, combine and refine technologies that could become part of the world’s most advanced systems. Not to build a single machine, he stressed, but to create “an R&D lab” where hardware and software can be tested, integrated and benchmarked.
He said some Israeli companies are already category leaders in some components of future quantum computers, and that “something like 10% of the overall private investment in quantum computing companies was made in Israel” in 2025. The proposed center would bring processors, algorithms and controllers into one shared environment, creating what he called “the full stack of a quantum computer based on Israeli technology.” The state, in other words, wants a seat at the table without paying for the whole meal.
Bin said the United States, with companies including IBM, Google, Microsoft and Amazon, has set much of the pace in quantum development, while China, Canada, Britain, Germany, Japan and Australia are also investing heavily. Israel’s path, he said, will be judged less by whether it produces an entire quantum computer on its own and more by whether its firms become part of leading systems in some categories. He said, “We want to see the entrepreneurs and the investors take the lead, and the government only invest in order to help them grow their companies.”
The Innovation Mirage
Bin also linked Israel’s high-tech future to artificial intelligence and regional cooperation. He said AI needs technology, which Israel has, but also land and energy for data centers, which Israel does not. “We are a tiny country with a limited amount of energy,” he said. “The countries around us have lots of energy and lots of land.” He suggested a model in which data centers are built in surrounding countries while technology comes from Israel, and “then we build something together.”
That sounds tidy enough from a conference stage. On the ground, it’s a reminder that the region’s rulers keep looking for ways to splice their economies together while ordinary people absorb the costs of borders, militaries and political control. Bin said the overlap of AI and quantum technologies could widen the horizon further, adding that “everything AI can do today” may look different by the end of the decade. He also said governments and regulators must be involved because “in each technology, there are many opportunities and many risks.”
He compared the moment to the Industrial Revolution, saying the steam engine first produced severe social consequences before regulation improved standards. “Those technologies are developing so fast that we cannot wait a few decades and see what happens,” he said. “Regulators should be deeply involved and try to hedge against the risks of those technologies.” The same state that moves quickly to subsidize startups now wants to be the adult in the room about risk.
Bin said quantum computing depends heavily on universities and scientific research, because the companies now growing in Israel began with scientists or groups of scientists leaving academia to develop new systems. He said, “The most important thing that you learn in the university is how to learn.” He also said he recently taught himself how to use AI to develop code and was “very happy with the result.”
He said, “People need to adjust, need to learn new skills, new capabilities. AI is going to change everything. Many people are going to lose their jobs.” He added that those who reskill can find new opportunities. On AI use, he said, “It’s very easy to use AI. If you are not scared of it and you just jump to the water and start playing with it, you see it’s quite easy to use it.” Then came the familiar managerial hymn: adapt, reskill, move on.
Bin said users must question AI output and ask, “Is that true? Is that correct? Should I ask the question in a different way?” He said that’s part of the skills people need to get the best out of AI. He also said, “It’s a disruption time,” and added, “It’s the first time ever that we are not investing in just technology. We are inventing intelligence which is going to be smarter than humans.”
The Israel Innovation Authority is also dealing with the strong Israeli shekel, which affects startups that raise capital or earn revenue in foreign currencies while paying many expenses in shekels. Bin said, “At the end of the day, a strong shekel means that the Israeli economy is very strong. And this is a good thing,” but added, “No, there are challenges. But it’s hard for me to use the term crisis.” He linked the shekel’s strength largely to high-tech investment, saying 2025 saw “more than $100 billion that poured into the Israeli ecosystem, either for early-stage funding or for M&As.”
He said a startup that raised money for 24 months could suddenly have only 18 months if costs are in shekels and the funds were raised in dollars. “So, the profit is gone. Sometimes you’ll get to the red line,” he said. The authority plans a special fund to extend startups’ operational runway. “The last thing we want to see is a whole cohort of great startups suffering from something that they had nothing to do with,” he said. The phrase could stand for a lot of things in this system.
Bin said the authority and the Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure announced a 6 million shekel program for BlueTech energy. He said Israel’s coastline is an underused national asset and that there is potential to harvest and store energy from waves, wind or even biological origins. The program seeks proposals from researchers willing to turn scientific ideas into commercial solutions. “We want to see, again, scientists coming out of their labs, proposing ideas how to leverage this asset of the country,” he said. “Those are the things that we would like to finance.”
He said he is looking for what excites him next. “This position of the CEO of the Israel Innovation Authority is probably one of the most interesting positions in Israel,” he said. “So, it will be difficult to find something more interesting than that.” The state, the startups and the labs keep moving. The people caught in the gears don’t get a press release.