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In this episode of the Defense and Tech Podcast, host Anna Ahronheim sits down with Yoni Heilbronn, co-founder and managing partner of IL Ventures, the Tel Aviv fund backing disruptive technology for legacy industries: logistics, smart manufacturing, robotics, and supply chain.
Ask Heilbronn what world leaders are underestimating, and he doesn’t start with a weapons system. The order that held for almost 80 years after World War II is gone, he tells Ahronheim, adding that globalization went with it. A tariff, a war, or a few men in Yemen shooting at cargo ships can now reprice an entire industry in a week.
European officials will say X, Y, and Z in public, says the IL Ventures co-founder and former CMO of automotive cybersecurity pioneer Argus. Behind the scenes, the purchase orders keep arriving at Israeli companies.
He also declines to sell the hype. Is the surge into defense tech a durable need or a bubble? Yes and yes, he says.
Germany alone is putting in more than $100 billion by his count, but sales cycles are long, development cycles longer, and he doubts there are enough integrators to produce the exits venture funds are built on. Governments are the other bottleneck: tenders and purchasing departments move at a speed startups can’t survive.
Heilbronn describes hacking a car’s head unit in a Tel Aviv office and hopping straight into the manufacturer’s corporate network. He explains why data centers now belong underground, why Israeli founders should look to Mexico and Brazil rather than New York, and how one portfolio company on the Lebanese border ages whiskey in weeks. In every mess, he says, there’s an opportunity.
