Space is already a battlefield, says Israeli venture capitalist Zach Fagan
The Defense and Tech PodcastShow Notes
Quantum computing has no dominant player yet, and that, argues deep tech investor Zach Fagan, is exactly why Israel's next category-defining company may come from it.
Zach Fagan is a partner at Earth & Beyond Ventures, one of the only early-stage funds in Israel dedicated entirely to deep tech. In this conversation with Jerusalem Post defense correspondent Anna Ahronheim, he argues that the constraint on AI progress is no longer the processor: the trouble is delivering power to the chips, dissipating the heat, and moving data across the interconnect. His analogy is blunt: a GPU that can handle a thousand data points is worthless if the wire between components only moves a hundred at a time. On quantum, he is equally direct: no one has succeeded in deploying a full-stack, end-to-end quantum computer that does something genuinely useful, and unlike the SaaS era, more capital does not reliably produce better outcomes in deep tech.
Fagan also pushes back on a story Israel likes to tell about itself. Battle-tested founders are not unique to Israel; plenty of US and Ukrainian defense tech founders have deployed too. What Israel actually has, he says, is the feedback loop: the military, the reserves, the front, and the defense primes are all in the same backyard, so a founder called up mid-build returns with the next product idea. The flip side is a mismatch with American capital. Scarcity creates hyper-focus; abundance creates the ambition to build a platform. Israeli founders arrive having solved one problem exceptionally well, while US investors are looking for the next Raytheon, the next Boeing, the next defense prime that owns the whole stack.
The interview also covers electronic warfare and the spectrum as the likeliest source of Israel's next breakthrough defense company, why Europe's militarization comes with a "show me your Europe angle" condition attached, space as a live theater rather than a coming one, and why Israel should stop worrying about not owning fabs and keep owning chip design instead.
Produced and edited by Gadi Zaig and Shifra Jacobs.
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