Quantum Computing in Israel: The Investable Map

Tal David has a PhD in quantum physics from Ben-Gurion University in ultra-cold atoms, and he built a career moving between research, industry and government before founding a company at all. He led a quantum-sensing group at Israel Aerospace Industries, then headed the Israel National Quantum Initiative from December 2019 to February 2022, a joint effort of the Council for Higher Education, the Ministry of Defense and the Israel Innovation Authority with a budget north of $400M. Few people design a national quantum strategy and then go build a company inside the market they just shaped. Tal did both, co-founding Quantum Art with Weizmann Institute scientists to build trapped-ion machines. The company’s Series A extended to $140M in April, and he’s now personally accountable for a 1,000-qubit system by 2027.

Nir Minerbi is a physicist and a graduate of Talpiot, the Israeli military’s most selective program for developing technologists who go on to run national-scale projects. Before Classiq, he led advanced R&D programs with no existing playbook, then spent time at cybersecurity company KayHut wrestling with technical constraints that don’t forgive shortcuts. That grounding is why he’s the one who answers the uncomfortable question everyone else avoids: what are customers actually buying while quantum hardware is still years from mature? His answer raised the largest quantum software round ever recorded, $110M, with follow-on money from SoftBank, AMD Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures and IonQ, all betting on Nir’s read of the stack.

Yaki Baranes began his career as an officer in the Israeli Navy, commanding his own vessel. After Technion, he spent about 15 years advising companies and governments on strategy and execution. He then joined an investor group with one core thesis: Israeli deep-tech startups could scale globally and list directly on Nasdaq. After several successful IPOs, he took that track record and founded Quantum X Labs in 2025. He’s one of the only people in this space who’s actually walked a quantum company through a US listing, not just talked about the path to one. Former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen now serves as president of the company’s scientific advisory board.

Guy Raz brings a record of over two decades of experience in deep tech as a founder and executive. A physics Ph.D. and Talpiot program alumni, his experience covers a wide range of domains and technologies. Alongside co-founders, Prof. Nir Davidson and Prof. Ofer Firstenberg from Weizmann and Prof. Yoav Sagi from the Technion, the team brings world-class expertise and executing in neutral-atoms quantum computing. The company emerged from stealth in April 2026 with the goal of building highly scalable quantum computers with millions of qubits.

Daniel Kurganov has spent more than fifteen years across energy, sustainability, sales and engineering, a range that lets him talk fluently to physicists and investors in the same meeting. He’s a serial founder, having also built LGDeal, and brings a hands-on style he calls “gentle leadership,” not the usual register for a hardware CEO. Nobody puts diamond substrates on a conference poster, and that’s exactly why his story stands out: he spotted the unglamorous layer everyone else skipped, the ultra-pure single-crystal diamond every nitrogen-vacancy sensor depends on, and built FTDiam to own it. Under him the company went from zero to its first million dollars in booked revenue inside a single year.

Joab Rosenberg found quantum computing through military intelligence, not the other way around. A retired colonel and former commander of the IDF’s elite Talpiot program, he later served as deputy head analyst of Military Intelligence, overseeing roughly a thousand analysts, and after October 7th led a large reservist team working with Palantir to help locate hostages. He trained as a physicist, discovered quantum mechanics through Bell’s theorem back in the 1990s, and was told at the time that entanglement “wasn’t really physics,” which pushed him into philosophy of physics instead. He built a career in government and then founded and ran Ment.io, an AI decision-making company, before returning to the Weizmann Institute in 2022 for a master’s in quantum optics and quantum computation. He now leads the quantum vertical at Deep33, the fund that launched with $200M for quantum and hard-tech infrastructure in January of 2026.