April 2026

2026 has so far confirmed what we’ve all known: AI is no longer a category, it's the baseline. Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch is made up of 60% AI companies; Garry Tan noted that AI is “table stakes." Closer to home, Calcalist's 2026 Top 50 Most Promising Israeli Startups reflects the same shift: 60%+ of this year's list are startups built on AI-native platforms or AI infrastructure.

Our take: when AI capability is universally accessible, the moat shifts. Companies that will matter aren't the ones that add or wrap AI to an existing product — they're the ones building AI as a native foundation of their solution. Startups’ revenue is increasingly tied to work done and results rather than just seats. Models make trustworthy decisions, and not merely assisting. Teams are smaller than the ‘legacy’ incumbents, and compound with speed and revenue. Distribution, proprietary data, deep workflow integration, and the trust layer (security, compliance, evals) are what separate durable businesses from ones that wrap AI on a use case. The new moat isn't AI. It's everything AI can't replace.

Sodot, which built self-hosted MPC key management infrastructure, announces its acquisition by MoonPay alongside the launch of MoonPay Institutional. Sodot has become critical infrastructure for some of the largest names in crypto, securing over $50 billion in transactions and over 10 million wallets for customers that include eToro, BitGo, and Flow Traders. The acquisition is a strong validation of the bet on institutional-grade crypto infrastructure, and a signal that the move into digital assets is accelerating.

Quantum Art, a spin-off from the Weizmann Institute of Science, extends its Series A by $40M, bringing the total round to $140M. The company is building a trapped-ion quantum computer and has a clear path to commercial deployment. Its next release, dubbed ‘Perspective’, is a 1,000-qubit multi-core system. Founded by Dr. Tal David, Dr. Amit Ben Kish, and Prof. Roee Ozeri, the team is building the most scalable quantum computer in the world.

The leading Israeli media channel Calcalist publishes its 50 most promising startups list for 2026. This time, four Entrée portfolio companies made the cut: AIR at #3, Quantum Art at #10, BlinkOps at #23 and Blocks.diy at #50.
From aerospace hardware and quantum computing to agentic cyber security operations and AI work applications and agents. The common thread: 60% of this year's list is AI-native or AI infrastructure, and the companies rising fastest are the ones going deep on specific, hard problems rather than broad markets.

AIR announces operational deployment of its heavy-lift cargo eVTOL (electric Vertical Take Off and Landing), one of the largest cargo drones in the world, carrying a 550 lb payload across a 70 cubic foot cargo bay, with VTOL capability and foldable architecture built for field deployment. The equipment targets defense operations, commercial logistics, humanitarian missions, and remote resupply — a deliberate multi-market structure that scales across multiple use cases and sectors.

Lasso Security is on the Cyber 150 list by IT-Harvest, the definitive guide to the most significant companies in the cybersecurity industry and the AI Security segment. As enterprises move from AI pilots to production deployments, the security layer isn't optional infrastructure anymore, it's the unlock that makes deployment possible at all.

Zurich Insurance Group partners with Empathy, launching bereavement support to over 3 million customers across the UK - making Zurich the first major UK insurer to offer this product at scale. The milestone reflects a broader shift in the market: financial services is starting to treat end-of-life support as a core part of the customer relationship and not just as a peripheral benefit.