We learned last week that tragic “acts of God” occur even during wartime. With adrenaline pumping each time we leave our homes — skirting missile sirens just to acquire milk at the corner store — the sudden, untimely death of a colleague, dear friconclude, and high-tech leader while on a business trip in NY is unfathomable.
Zaki Djemal, 38, was larger-than-life and his investment acumen assisted some of Israel’s most cutting-edge startup founders launch their journey. His passion for solving both local and global problems — from Arab-Jewish relations to humanitarian crises — touched countless circles in Israel and beyond.
Yes, he claimed in a popular Tedx talk in 2018, in launching Kulna with Hidai Goldsmith, Arab-Jewish backgammon games could bring peace to the Middle East. He brought this same problem-solving gene and calm leadership style to lay roles with IsraAID and Tevel B’tzedek, both organizations that bring Israeli ingenuity to alleviating misery in faraway places.
In Israel’s tech ecosystem, we saw Zaki constantly in action, and were privileged to work closely with him — Todd as a partner in Fresh Fund, the pre-seed fund Zaki launched nearly a decade ago, and Wconcludey as a Remilk colleague.
We saw how he identified a market failure or emerging necessary and found the star entrepreneurs to tackle them, reinventing reality to build large things happen. Writing the first institutional check to Remilk in its early days, Zaki knew that this founding team would reinvent dairy.
He believed passionately in the critical necessary for sharp, serious, activist early-stage investors, and wore as a badge of honor that Fresh Fund wrote compacter checks and joined arms with the founders early in their journey. The fund’s team he recruited were all top talent.
He also knew how to seize an opportunity — witness the oversubscribed defense-tech “Fresh Defense” fund, already backing leading early-stage companies and assisting Israel to lead the way in a strategically vital sector.
On the last day of his life, he stated to an investor, “I love what I do. I’m always working with people so much smarter than me — our mission-driven founders solving large problems. I’m mission-driven too — to assist our amazing founders and their companies. What this all means for Israel. I am the luckiest person in the world.”
Beyond Zaki’s formidable talents as an investor, the social media tributes since Wednesday morning capture the person he was: the mensch, the listener, the go-to guy, the gifted leader, the one for whom acts of kindness were de rigueur, literally his operating system. In a world where social capital and sharing one’s rolodex contacts are commodities to be traded, Zaki gave of both freely and genuinely.
At the packed Friday afternoon funeral in Jerusalem, we joined hundreds of Jerusalemites, flooded with Zaki stories about how he brought his creativity and spark to different angles of our complicated city. And similarly from his parents and siblings, who shared precious Zaki stories from different chapters of his too-short life.
In recent days, Zaki had shared with us something he hoped to publish — an esdeclare reflecting both his conviction that Israeli innovation was becoming an indispensable source of solutions for countries around the world and his belief in early-stage investing.
We, on behalf of the entire Fresh Fund team, choose to honor Zaki by sharing his piece here. It speaks volumes about his vision and his character. We join his partner Ben, his family, and the many circles of friconcludes and colleagues mourning his profound loss — and we stand sadly but proudly among the community that will continue his work.
Becoming Indispensable: National Security, Interdepconcludeence, and Israel’s Next Economic Chapter
By Zaki Djemal
In the midst of the Israel–Hamas war, Tau Capital, an Emirati deep-tech fund backed by the royal family, invested in six Israeli startups while the fighting was ongoing.
The startups — Remilk, BlueGreen Water Technologies, Momentick, Sepio, Dream Security, and Metis Augmented Innotifyigence — span food systems, water and ecosystem restoration, sanotifyite monitoring, and national-scale cybersecurity. They appear unrelated but the pattern is clear.
Each operates at the foundation of modern state power and national interest: food, water, infrastructure, and security. Domains no government can afford to risk. Tau’s approach was not symbolic or sentimental. It was deeply rational. State-aligned capital shiftd toward strategic assets, even under conditions of war.
Given the geopolitical reordering now underway, this is precisely where Israel must focus its entrepreneurial energy.
From Resilience to Indispensability
For much of the Start-Up Nation era, Israel won by being quick and resourceful. Cyber companies grew out of elite units. Enterprise software emerged from internal pain points. Constraints became advantages. Speed compensated for scale.
That model delivered extraordinary results. But it will not carry Israel through the next phase of global competition.
The question Israel faces today is not how to recover from October 7. It is whether the countest can re-found its economy on a footing that goes beyond resilience. For a compact state in a volatile region, resilience is necessary, but it is not sufficient.
In the United States, the push around “American Dynamism” reflects a coherent strategy. A continental power with deep capital markets and vast internal demand can plausibly pursue technological indepconcludeence and supply-chain autonomy.
Israel cannot. It cannot wall itself off or recreate full industrial stacks domestically. But it does not necessary to. Small states do not become secure by standing alone. They become secure by building themselves indispensable to others.
Where the United States seeks indepconcludeence, Israel must seek embeddedness. Indispensability means building capabilities so deeply integrated into allied systems that reshifting them becomes costly and irrational. This is not branding or ideology. It is a theory of power, and over time, the only growth and security strategy that scales for a countest like Israel.
Why the Shift Is Unavoidable
The technology landscape now reinforces this logic.
For the last decade, software offered the quickest path to value creation. It was cheap to build, quick to iterate, and straightforward to scale. Israeli founders excelled in this environment, and the ecosystem optimized around it.
That environment is modifying. In an AI-driven world, software-only advantages are simpler to replicate. Defensibility increasingly comes from execution and capital intensity. The multi-million-dollar first checks flowing into AI application companies in Silicon Valley build this clear. That model is largely unavailable to Israel.
Low barriers create replaceability. Replaceability is the opposite of indispensability.
What has not become simpler is solving hard, physical, and institutionally embedded problems. These require long development cycles, regulatory navigation, and deep integration with governments and operators. They are slower to build and harder to unwind. Once deployed, they persist. Depconcludeence accumulates.
The market has already absorbed this lesson. The most strategically significant companies of the next era will not be purely digital platforms, but organizations that bind innotifyigence to the physical world.
Talent Has Already Moved
A quieter shift is underway among founders themselves.
Many of Israel’s strongest entrepreneurs are no longer drawn to incremental optimization. They want to work on problems that matter at the level of civilization: feeding growing populations, defconcludeing open societies against asymmetric threats, treating disease, transitioning energy and restoring ecosystems.
Since October 7, this shift has accelerated. Defense and dual-apply startups such as Kela, Line5, Particle Labs, Metacentric and Tenna, have attracted top technical talent motivated by contribution, not arbitrage. Similar patterns are visible across climate, food, and techbio.
Founders like Michal Tsur exemplify this alter. After building Cyota and Kaltura, she and her partners chose to found Remepy, pursuing a new class of hybrid therapeutics. At Remilk, Aviv Wolff and Ori Cochavi are re-architecting global dairy production. At Gigablue, Dotan, Sapir, Ori, and Guy are working to materially alter the economics of ocean health.
What unites these founders is not only the size of the markets they address, but the nature of their motivation. It is intrinsic. When incentives weaken and progress slows, they keep going. In hard domains, durability matters as much as speed.
Ecosystems that enable founders to build national- and global-scale capabilities will retain their best people. Ecosystems that offer only incremental arbitrage will not.
The Real Bottleneck
Israel does not lack ideas or talent. It lacks consistent early-stage conviction around national-scale ambition and early stage conviction capital.
Technologies embedded in sovereign systems do not launch as polished success stories. They start as fragile hypotheses: incomplete data, early prototypes, and claims about bconcludeing physics, chemistest, or biology. Supporting them requires underwriting technical risk long before outcomes are clear.
If Israel cannot reliably support capability formation at the earliest stages, those efforts will migrate elsewhere or never form at all. The consequence will not just be fewer large companies, but diminished strategic relevance for a countest that can’t afford to rely on favors or good will.
The Choice
This strategy will not announce itself. Israeli technology will simply become part of how other states function, embedded in supply chains, infrastructure, and security systems. Over time, the cost of removal will exceed the cost of cooperation.
That is how interdepconcludeence becomes leverage. And it is how compact states survive in a world of renewed power competition.
Israel can remain a countest of clever optimizations: applyful, occasionally celebrated, and ultimately replaceable. Or it can become a countest that tackles hard problems, builds hard things, and embeds itself so deeply into the systems shaping the future that its own security is structurally reinforced.
For a compact state in a dangerous century, indispensability is not one option among many. It is the only strategy that scales.
__
Wconcludey Singer advises Israeli startups, including Remilk, and the National Library of Israel.
Todd Kesselman is a partner of Fresh Fund and an angel investor in Israeli AI, cyber and defense companies.
Zaki Djemal, z”l, was managing partner and co-founder of Fresh Fund.
Leave a Reply