State of the Israeli seed spread

What the spread is

The spread is the gap between what an investor pays to enter an Israeli seed round and what a comparable company is worth when it exits into the US market. Olivent's thesis is that this gap is wide, persistent, and available only to investors who can get into the rounds. This note tracks the published numbers behind that claim, and says plainly where they are still missing.

The homepage draws the spread as an illustration. This page is the version with axes. It is updated when the underlying reports are updated, the dataset date is printed under every chart, and every figure links to the report it came from. Where a series has not yet been pulled and reviewed, the chart says so rather than showing a placeholder.

Entry: Israeli seed pricing

The first thing the published data shows is not a discount but a difference in kind: Israeli rounds labelled "seed" are far larger than US seed rounds. Tracked Israeli seed deals in the first half of 2026 had a median of $10.1 million (26 deals, $461 million in total; $8.0 million excluding the four or five largest), against a US median seed deal of $3.0 million in the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor for the same period.

Two cautions explain most of that gap. "Seed" is labelled by the reporting source, not by a common definition, and Israeli companies tend to raise their first institutional round later, with a product and often revenue, so the round that carries the seed label is closer to a US Series A in size. IVC's own early-round series (pre-Seed through Series A combined) shows the same direction: a median of $10.5 million in 2025 and $14 million in the first half of 2026, while pre-Seed medians have sat at $0.2 million since 2023. The Israeli market is also small, so a handful of large rounds moves any median from period to period.

The number the thesis actually turns on is the entry valuation, not the round size, and that is the series still missing from this note. Neither IVC's quarterly review nor Startup Nation Central's public reports publish a seed pre-money median, and Carta's US seed valuation page could not be retrieved for verification when this note was compiled (its Q1 2026 summary reports a $24 million median post-money on a $4.1 million round). Both valuation series therefore stay empty, and the chart below says so, until a figure can be pulled from the cited page and reviewed.

Exit: US outcomes

Exit values are the harder half to measure, because most seed companies exit privately and the price is often undisclosed. This note will use disclosed acquisition values and public listings of Israeli-founded companies in the US, naming each transaction it relies on rather than aggregating undisclosed ones.

That section is populated once the entry series above are in place. Until then the thesis page carries the qualitative version: Israeli-founded companies exit to US acquirers and US public markets at US multiples, and the named examples there (Check Point, Palo Alto Networks, Wiz) are public record. IVC's Q2 2026 review notes on the exit side that events below $20 million consistently account for a high share of the count, which is the base rate any seed investor should carry alongside the headline exits.

Method and sources

Every figure on this page comes from a published report, is stored with the report's name, URL and the date it was retrieved, and is reviewed before it is shown. Nothing is modelled or interpolated. When a source revises a figure, the point is updated and the dataset date moves.

Three of the five series carry data as of this update: US seed median deal value (PitchBook-NVCA, 2025 and H1 2026), Israeli tracked seed median round (VC Cafe, H1 2025 and H1 2026) and IVC's early-round median (2025 and H1 2026). The two valuation series are empty for the reasons given above. The sources in use are listed under each chart and in the sources section below. The dataset itself lives in the site's code, so a change to a number is a reviewed change with a date attached, the same discipline applied to every guide on this site.