Aggaeus

In 2014, Ron Zohar and his partner Jonathan set out to do something nobody had done: turn the smartphone camera into a medical device. It took years. Physics, lighting, every kind of phone. A dipstick, an app, and an algorithm that let patients test themselves at home. Then the email arrived. FDA clearance, a first in the world. That should have been the end of the story. It was the middle. In thi...

If AI makes your product easier to build, what stops someone else from building it too? Easier to start does not mean easier to win. Maya Pizov has helped build companies as an operator and backed them as an investor. Her experience includes eBay, enSilo, and seven years at Amiti Ventures. She also backed Flow Security, later acquired by CrowdStrike. In this episode of Aggaeus, Haggai Klorman-Eraq...

What happens when every brand can create unlimited content for almost nothing? Content stops being the advantage. Attention does. AI is rapidly removing the cost and friction of creating images, videos, ads, product photography, and copy. That sounds like an enormous advantage, until everyone has it. Dov Kaufmann spent eight years at Yotpo, joining when the company was still small and helping buil...

Zachary Greenberger has spent his career in connected mobility, from working on Tesla’s Model 3 to six years at Lyft, and now as CEO of Nexar and Nauto. Today, their network includes roughly 350,000 connected cameras capturing around 300 million miles of road every month. But this conversation is not really about dash cams. It is about what happens when AI leaves the screen and enters the physical...

In this episode of Aggaeus, Haggai Klorman Eraqi sits down with Gil Dibner, General Partner of Angular Ventures, for a conversation about venture capital, AI hype, non-consensus founders, fiduciary responsibility, and why the best investments often look strange before they look inevitable. Gil describes himself as geographically confused: American, Israeli, based in London, investing across Europe...

In this episode of Aggaeus, Haggai Klorman Eraqi sits down with Dvir Ginzburg, Founder & CEO of Encore AI, for a conversation about revenue-generating AI agents, enterprise sales, customer delight, and why most AI projects fail when they move from demo to delivery. Dvir started inside the world of recommendation systems, working for Meta and Microsoft. But the more he worked on them, the more...

Itamar Novick has spent 15 years investing in startups, backing more than 150 companies, including early bets connected to unicorns, decacorns, and public companies. But this conversation is not about the glamour of venture capital. It is about the traps. The mistakes that repeat. The patterns that quietly kill startups. The “good ideas” that look smart on the outside but drain years of time, mone...

Jonathan Karmi has spent more than a decade inside performance marketing, working across hundreds of clients and watching one problem get harder every year: Attention is disappearing. Today, the average social media user scrolls the height of the Eiffel Tower every day. For direct-to-consumer brands, that means the battle is no longer just about targeting, budgets, or bidding. It is about creative...

Amir Haramaty has helped build and scale companies that were later acquired by Microsoft, Salesforce, Meta, and other major players. But his story does not start in a boardroom. It starts on a bridge, deep in enemy territory, wounded while trying to defuse explosives and realizing that humans were still being asked to risk their lives for problems technology should solve. That moment shaped the re...

Most people only learn judgment after the damage is done. Then reality gives them feedback: late, expensive, and with interest. That is why serious operators and investors pay attention to Cedric Chin. Through Commoncog, Cedric has built a business education company used by hundreds of operators and investors who want to accelerate their business expertise. His work is read by people inside top co...

In this episode of Aggaeus, Haggai Klorman Eraqi sits down with Collin Stewart for a brutally honest conversation about revenue, ego, customer discovery, failed validation, and the painful difference between persistence and refusing to let go. Collin started as the sales guy surrounded by engineers building software in silence. He was the one in the phone booth. Talking to users. Talking to custom...

Eran Shir started as a theoretical physicist studying black holes. Then he helped build Israel’s Arrow missile unit. Then he crowdsourced a map of the internet. Then he sold an AI company to Yahoo. And somehow, that was all before Nexar. In this episode of Aggaeus, Haggai Klorman Eraqi sits down with Eran Shir, co-founder of Nexar, for a conversation about one of the hardest frontiers in AI: makin...

Yair Attar spent years leading nation-state incident response in the IDF before co-founding OTORIO an OT cybersecurity company built for the physical world: factories, critical infrastructure, industrial systems, and the environments where a cyberattack can shut down real operations. Then came two major exits in rapid succession. OTORIO was acquired by Armis. Not long after, Armis itself was acqui...

Guy Solomon left investment banking to buy a small business. After years at Barclays and Wells Fargo, he went deep into the world of Search Funds and Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (ETA) in Israel — a market filled with profitable, often overlooked SMEs that nobody was really institutionalizing yet. But this wasn’t a straight-line success story. Guy screened more than 8,000 companies, met wi...

In this episode, Haggai Klorman Eraqi sits down with Gadi Benjamini, Co-Founder & CEO of FireDome, an ex–Israeli intelligence operator from Unit 81 turned deep-tech founder building an autonomous, on-site wildfire defense system. This conversation starts with collapse: Gadi shutting down his first climate startup after October 7, going through the emotional crash that follows, and then finding...

Elizabeth Zalman is a 4x founder who’s raised ~$80M, built StrongDM, and now leads Sandgarden while also co-authoring "Founder vs Investor: The Honest Truth About Venture Capital from Startup to IPO" with Jerry Neumann. We talk about how she started as a scrappy eBay/consignment hustle that forced Elizabeth to build software before she ever “became a founder.” Then we go deep on her hard...

Eric Malka arrived in NYC on a Greyhound bus with no money, no education, and no green card, and then built The Art of Shaving from a single 200-sq-ft shop into a $100M+ brand acquired by Procter & Gamble. We talk about turning story + customer obsession into a premium brand from creation to exit. We unpack: • The “New York Times moment” that took sales from $10K/month to $10K/day • How to bui...

Ra’anan Cohen has lived the full founder arc: he built one company to an IPO (MobileMax), built another into a unicorn (Bringg), then wrote a brutally honest memoir that became a bestselling business book in Israel—and is now being adapted into a TV series. In this episode, Ra’anan and Haggai go into the decisions that define a founder’s life: the moment Ra’anan turned down a $10M offer to take mo...

Haggai is a paying customer of Neal Foard’s Storyfire—and this episode is the “how it actually works” playbook. After 30+ years in advertising and sales, Neal has a simple conviction: most people don’t lose deals because their product is weak—they lose because their story is forgettable. We talk about the real mechanics behind persuasion: why the best pitches feel like show business, how to turn y...

Yuval Samet helped scale Klarna from ~150 to ~2,000 people—then came back to Israel to tackle the most “quietly painful” problem in daily life: money stress. As CEO of RiseUp, he’s building financial wellbeing at scale by turning messy bank + card data into one clear picture of disposable income, plus step-by-step actions people actually follow. Yuval grew up with discussions about bank debt “as a...

Jason Wolf joins Haggai Klorman Eraqi for a rare, behind-the-scenes conversation about building (and investing) when the world is literally shaking. Jason helped scale TopTier to a $400M cash acquisition by SAP, lived through the Better Place era, and today co-leads Iron Nation—a VC fund created three days after Oct 7 to keep Israeli startups alive when term sheets were getting pulled overnight. I...

Omer Menashe has been building for nearly two decades—startups, a long-running agency, and now a venture studio designed for the AI era. In this episode, he unpacks the “lifelong entrepreneur” path: why he became a lawyer (and why he quit immediately), how early internet hacking/piracy shaped his builder DNA, and how he turned digital marketing into a repeatable growth engine—powering Clyr, 1Flo,...

Roomer didn’t just survive travel’s worst crash—it rebuilt itself inside the industry. In this episode, Gon Ben David (Co-Founder & CEO, Roomer) breaks down how Roomer went from a bold marketplace for reselling canceled hotel reservations, to partnering with giants like Kayak, to building “cancel-for-any-reason” infrastructure—then pivoting post-COVID into the creator economy, where travel dec...

David Bartholomeusz is a serial entrepreneur who’s built (and let go of) dozens of businesses—not to chase exits, but to design a life with more freedom and more play. In a conversation that starts light and quickly goes deep, David and Haggai unpack what leadership really is when you strip away ego, hustle-culture scripts, and the “CEO identity.” You’ll hear how David runs rapid, low-cost startup...

Rachel ten Brink has lived the full loop: corporate operator → YC-backed founder → GP at Red Bike Capital. She co-founded Scentbird, helped pioneer early DTC growth (before “playbooks” existed), and now backs founders at pre-seed and seed as a VC. In this episode, Rachel shares thestory behind the wins: the awkward first meetings, the bad business models, the “almost gave up” moment, and the tacti...