← What's Your Number?
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A
Foreign.
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B
You are listening to an art media podcast.
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A
All right, Yale, what's your number?
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B
My number is $150 million. That's the headline value of Metasight. It's an Israeli liquid biopsy startup and it's been acquired by Garden Health, which is a publicly traded U.S. company on NASDAQ. It has a market cap of approximately $14 billion. So we're always happy to chat M&As but actually the story here isn't just about an exit size, it's the structure. Metasite raised only $20 million. Not a lot for health tech. Spun out of academic research from the Technion, Israel's MIT if you will. It was been backed by health venture fund Amoon and now becomes Garden's first R and D center outside of the US So I like the storytelling here. It's science to startup, startup to global platform and doesn't hollow out the local footprint. Yonatan, what's yours?
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A
So mine is 8.6 billion. It's a staggering number. This is the defense contract signed between India and Israel since January 1, 2026. This is as legendary Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is coming to Israel for historic visit. He's going to speak at the Knesset, at the Parliament as he seeks, and I'm quoting, to broaden the partnership into a multifaceted and strategic one. As you know, I believe that Israel's future is an alliance from India all the way to Ethiopia. It very exciting to see the leader of one and a half billion people deciding to make a stop in Israel in a historic visit. And 8.6 billion is just the beginning.
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B
So I'm going to take this w if you don't mind because I think the India Israel numbers are just going to go up and to the right and so we'll be talking much more about that relationship as it develops with the historical visit. This week. It is 6pm here in Tel Aviv.
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A
It is indeed. This time we're both here together in the episode. Today we're going to have an incredible interviewee, an entrepreneur from Israel who's been by the way, a friend throughout my years at Healthy I.O. and has helped me a lot. This is Ami Daniel, founder, co founder, I should say, and CEO of the world's pioneering maritime intelligence company Windward. An incredible journey from being hit by a Hezbollah missile as he was on a naval vessel across the borders of Lebanon almost 20 years ago through an IPO in London and now back being delisted and really being recognized worldwide as the leading platform in the space yes,
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B
and with such a crazy heightened tensions geopolitically, I'm really curious to hear what he has to say about the seas, as they're maybe one of the most mean, if not the main arena for geopolitics these days. But first, as usual, we're going to take a look at some of the week's pressing news, AKA our big short. And of course, the latest update on the Windex, the what's your Number? Index that tracks the performance of publicly traded Israeli based or founded companies.
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All right, before we go to the Windex, a small request. We started what's yous Number about seven months ago and we've been really blown away with the response and growth of the audience. But for us to level up, we need your input.
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So we want to ask you to just take a couple of minutes of your time to fill out a survey so we can learn what you think about what we've been doing and what you'd like us to do more of in the future. What topics do you care most about? What kind of conversations are you interested in? This survey is important for us as we plan the next stage of what's yous Number?
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And if helping us shape the future of our show isn't enough, anyone who completes the survey can opt in to win a special gift from Jerusalem. So please click the link in the show notes and let us know your thoughts.
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B
All right, let's move on to the Windex. Yonatan, how's it looking?
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A
All right, no jokes. I think what we're seeing here is the dependence of the Israeli publicly traded companies. Are Israeli founded on software and cloud? The SaaS apocalypse is real. It's entering its third week in Wall street and the impact on Israeli companies is enormous. Overall, the windex is down 3.38%. It is red from the beginning of the year and that's actually at a week when S and P and NASDAQ have both risen 1.31 and 2.19. Accordingly, the BVP NASDAQ Emerging Cloud Index that also covers some Israeli companies is now down 20% year to date. This dynamic, you know, if it persists, I think we're going to see some adaptation in the Israeli job market and in the industry. We're already seeing the short term effect. And this is interesting from last week, more enrollees into electric engineering and machine engineering in the Israeli research universities. A 40% spike going away from computer science.
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B
Yeah, definitely a shift that you're describing. And Israel has gone through this before, maybe globally as well. And so you can see it as like a microcosm of this. You know, we went from comms to security, from consumer to enterprise.
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C
Yeah.
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B
And the real question is whether we're going to make this transition deliberately or is it going to just happen naturally. I can say from a personal standpoint, maybe Israel was over indexed in SaaS in the past decade. Right. SaaS is super capital efficient, it's globally scalable, it's talent friendly. And now we're kind of being hit with reality.
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C
Yeah.
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A
And you know, I'll start with the reds on the Windex this time because I think it's important per what you said. We saw Anthropic introduce a sort of real time cyber vulnerability agent on Friday. And the response in the traditional cyber companies, the leading of which is Palo Alto Networks, which is, you know, about a third of the windex losing almost 10% since that announcement. Even cybersecurity is now kind of stepping into this vulnerability space. I agree with you. This time it is a bit more serious. But you know, as we've been seeing in the last three to four weeks, Israeli CEOs are very open about how they're going to tackle this. I think we're going to see resilience in the industry. I love where Israel is in terms of the opening of the scene, if you will, because even if there is a Cambrian explosion of sort, it's better to have all this talent and the know how to adapt as opposed to just not having any software and AI capacity like I would say 95% of the markets out there today globally.
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B
Full disclosure that I work at a cybersecurity company, so I want to be very careful with how I react the sentiment around any cyber company after the market reacted the way it did with Palo as one of them. But not only all the big cyber companies, not only Israeli ones, CrowdStrike and so forth, also reacted very dramatically and it almost felt hysteria because when you do kind of like parse between the data, you understand that not all cyber is created equal. And there's a very specific part of cyber that is going to be impacted by the direction that Claude took. But it's not the end game for definitely not Palo, definitely not CrowdStrike and others and showing kind of almost a hysterical reaction from the market. But yes, I am talking as a cyber executive, so I'm putting that out there.
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A
I think it goes beyond.
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C
Right.
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A
So is the market over indexing on AI? Is it a good buy opportunity? Definitely an interesting time and maybe to close on the positives the greens of the index. Leading the greens is actually Zim, the Israeli shipping company co founded by none other than David Ben Gurion 1945. We're going to talk to AMI about what he thinks about the deal. The company has been bought by Hapag Lloyd, the German shipping shipping giant which is partly owned 25 by Qatar and Saudi Arabia. So the deal is pending regulatory approvals but the premium on the price in the market was more than 50%. So it's a very nice deal for everybody involved, the shareholders. Let's hope it gets through. But a lot of considerations of national security following this deal. Let's move on to the big shorts.
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B
Our big short this week starts very hush hush, very quietly, which is usually how the most interesting stories do begin. And it's about Palmer Lucky, the founder of Anduril Industries who slipped into Israel, I'll have you know, for what was very much not a sightseeing tour, no press, no fanfare, just a series of closed door meetings he had kind of speed dated with around 10 Israeli defense startups. The secret visit was organized by the Defense Ministry and backed by Lux Capital. Yonatan, I know you've spoken on this podcast before with Josh Wolf of Lux, and he's also one of Anduril's earliest believers. And Palmer met with companies like Smart Tutor and Keller. And these are not science fiction demos. They're actually ready made systems ready to go, autonomous systems, drone control, even tech designed to prevent a friendly fire. And here's the context that I think really matters. Anduril is reportedly raising at a $60 billion valuation. So this means that either global defense money is flooding back into Israel post October 7, or is he shopping around or is he building a supply chain? I'm trying to kind of figure out what the motive behind this visit was and why was it so secret.
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A
So yeah, a lot to unpack here. First of all, Josh Wolf, who was on the show took sort of responsibility for the visit online on Twitter on X saying, yeah, I organized this. And Josh came on the pod early on in the days when the war was still, I would say, raging, and said, you know, I believe in Israeli defense tech. We actually have some of our LPs asking us to build an SPV focused on Israeli defense tech specifically. So, you know, these are some of Israel's champions out there in the VC space when it comes to defense. So the other angle here is Paul Muluckey himself. Remember, this is the guy who literally built in his garage Oculus, the sort of VR pioneer that was sold to Facebook and then he walked away from a very generous, let's put it this way, option package he got from Facebook. He just couldn't handle the corporate and started building Anduril. I will say I'm fascinated by him. There's a whole chapter about him about power Unlucky in my upcoming book because there's something to the way in which he innovates that strikes me as a very modern way of creating tech. And the third thing is how did he end up in defense tech? He created a cool atmosphere around defense tech and was scolded by Silicon Valley as being like the guy that builds weapons, the guy who was associated with Donald Trump during the Biden administration and so on and so forth. The ingenuity of what he does is that he builds a modern in defense company that can rely on, you know, existing fail fast type dynamics. For instance, he's very famous recently saying we are building everything we're building such that if we need to scale up, we can go to Ford Automotive or to General Motors or others and leverage their non bespoke, more generic production lines to make America, you know, kind of build its scale. A fascinating human being. And I think the cherry here is that in his secret visit he spent a lot of time with Prime Minister Netanyahu. That's at least according to some of the people involved. And so Israel's next gen defense tech really attaches to Palmer Laki. In his last interview on sort of Broad Thoughts about the World, he called himself an avid Zionist. So shout out to Palmer Laki on the big short.
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B
Absolutely. And now someone else who's visiting Israel.
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A
Less of a hush hush visit. Narendra Modi is visiting. The Prime Minister of India will be landing here with a senior business delegation. He will be speaking at the Knesset. I want to quote for Yael what he said on Twitter, which I think is phenomenal. He said it a few hours ago. Thank you, my friend, Prime Minister Netanyahu. I fully agree with you on the bond between India and Israel as well. And this is important as the diverse nature of our bilateral relations. India deeply values the enduring friendship with Israel built on trust, innovation and a shared commitment to peace and progress. Looking forward to the discussions and so on. Three words are important here, Yael. Diverse. Modi is basically telling us and the world we no longer see Israel as a defense partner. We want to create a more diverse and unique relationship here. Innovation, broadly, that's the second word. And progress. I truly believe India is the eastern anchor of our regional posture and Kudos to Prime Minister Netanyahu who back in 2018 when Narendra Modi was considered the child in the periphery of global leaders, the person who was walking against the line of the IMF and the World bank and creating some radical shifts to India. I think Narendra Modi remembers that Israel believed in his leadership back in the day when the world was sort of turning its back to him.
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B
Yeah. And historically India has always been a good partner under Modi's make in India program and so forth that Israel has now have to adapt back. Right. It's not only having access to the Indian market, it's actually manufacturing inside India. Every Israeli defense player now operates Indian subsidiaries, joint ventures or production lines. So it's really aligning Israeli tech with Indian industrial sovereignty. India is not just a buyer now, it's really a supplier. And I think that's kind of like the change that Modi also brought to this partnership.
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A
Yeah. And if you kind of look at 30,000ft at the American national security strategy and the Pentagon's national security strategy, you see both of them kind of calling for that unique space for India within the US China dynamic. And I think Narendra Modi understands that very well. We saw him just in the last six weeks carving out that independent niche for India, buying submarines from Germany, hosting President Macron last week and buying Rafale combat aircraft instead of Boeing or you know, F16s, F15s. So really kind of carving out that posture. India is in the process of $42 billion cost of a new navy. And I think the tail end of it is that it's war with Pakistan. Last year, Operation Sindor saw a lot of the Israeli weapon systems being used and a lot of trust that lasted a decade culminated at that point. And that calls for the upgrade that calls for a whole new level of a special relationship. To me, it is a formative and very consequential visit for the future of Israel, its economy and its posture in the wider region.
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B
And now to today's long play. Our guest today is Ami Daniel, co founder and CEO of Windward, one of the world's most innovative maritime intelligence platforms. Before he was building AI to map global shipping risk, Ami was a naval officer in the Israeli navy. And during one deployment, a Chinese made missile struck a vessel operating in his theater. An incident that exposed just how blind even modern navies and governments can be at sea. That gap between what's happening on the ocean and what decision makers actually know became the starting point for Windward. Now a global leader in maritime intelligence, trusted by governments, financial institutions, and the world's largest shipping players. Ami, welcome to the show.
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C
Thank you.
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B
Let's start by understanding first the problem. When we think about air traffic, we have so much public information scanning what's going on in our sky. Why is the sea different?
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C
The sea is different because it's big. And actually the radars, when you look at the airplanes, they're tilted up so they can see much more. So when you turn a radar down to look at the ocean, you look until the range of the horizon. So by definition, you just don't see what's beyond the horizon. 20, 30, 40 nautical miles. And as 70% of the world is oceans, you just can't see everything. There's a lot of place to hide. And to be honest, it's also not human life. Air traffic, by and large is associated with passengers. Ships, by and large are associated with cargo. 90% of what you're using is transported by sea simply because of unit economics. It's the cheapest way to get things from point A to point B. Way cheaper than aircraft, we think 50 to 100 times cheaper than aircraft. So I think everything that we use, or most of the things we use, are transported by sea, which is, by the way, oil, fuel, steel to build our buildings, everything in containers. So, you know, furniture and chairs and computers and everything, and iPhones. So all this transport by sea, it's a lot of volume. And that volume is not associated with a single person, company or country. It goes from everywhere to everywhere. That's actually an outcome of globalization. If you will think of chips, they're made in Taiwan, right? Tmsc, and then transported worldwide or to the US or whatever that is. So it's really hard. It's a lot of ships, it's a lot of cargoes, and it's a lot of osha. And there's no one authority by law that figures that out, which, that's what I think the opportunity is. If you think about it, put aside the US for a second. Everybody else almost only cares about what's associated with them. Europe is worried about the Baltic Sea and Russia. Israel is maybe worried about Iran. We are building an organization that cares about all of it. Think about the intelligence authority of the oceans. My team and me care about every single ship, every single cargo, every single movement, every single person. So the problem the company is solving is being able to get the right intelligence, which is actionable and on time on ships and shipping and the people and the cargo is transported around the world. That Takes multiple satellites, multiple sources, transmissions, everything we can get our hand on. We put it together into one blender and we build profiles. Who does what, where, when, ships, cargoes, companies, ports. And then once you build that database, you can refine that into insight. You can ask the right questions. And I think you can also feed agentic systems to ask questions for their specific roles, whether it's an insurance company, it's a shipping company, it's a trading entity, it's a government, it's intelligence agency. The thing is, all the same ships and all the same people and all the same cargoes, just different perspectives. Asking about these assets.
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B
This is obviously a very big problem, but it fascinated you from a relatively early age. When I introd you to the show, I talked about a specific something that happened to you while you were in
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C
the Navy 20 years ago this year. 20 years ago.
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B
So Mazal Tov on that anniversary, tell us about that.
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C
Yeah, well, you know, July 14, 2006, 8:42pm, just about ship off Lebanon. So it's a very special story because from the almost seven years in the ocean, it was the only time we did what's called the Kidush Kabbalah Shabbat, which is a ceremony on Friday evening to welcome the Shabbat, which is obviously the holy days for Jews. And because we did that, that Kabalacho Baham kiddush, the vast majority of the crew was on the forward part of the ship, not the aft of the vessel called INS Khanit, Israeli navy ship Hanit, which means spear in English. And we were just about 12 miles off Lebanon, just northwest of Lebanon, with three, probably three missiles were fired by Hezbollah, by the way. They broadcasted it live on tv. So my then girlfriend, now wife Adi, she went down to dinner with her family 8pm and watched my ship burn on TV, which is insane. They fired three missiles. One probably fell to the ocean. The second one hit us and killed four people. I think we're very lucky because the vast majority of the team was in the Kabarachabach. They're not in the aft or the four part of the ship. So a lot of people were safe. And the third missile hit a general cargo vessel taking cements to Egypt and sank it very close to dying. That day was a big deep understanding that it's a big ocean and there's a lot of ships. And you know, to be driven this long by this mission because now it's very popular maritime intelligence. But that was like 20 years ago and we started company 15 years ago. You need a reason and for me, that's a big driver of that deep reason.
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A
Yeah, I think, you know, Ami, beyond being an incredible entrepreneur and a super resilient person leading a company 15 years, I think the main thing. And Ami, if you can elaborate a bit on that, Ami was always anti Iyeb es seder. Things will be fine. This sort of Israeli approach of like, you know, just go with the flow, start the company, figure it out. I'm not sure how intimately it is related to the event at sea, or it's your personality or it's Matan, your co founder's personality. Both of you together in the naval academy. Could you tell us a bit about that? I mean, for me, I learned that from you in the early days. It impacted me greatly. So curious to hear your thoughts, sort of looking back.
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C
Sure. I think it actually does emanate from that event because when, pardon my French, when shit hit the fan, I would say there were two types of people on board. There were the ones who fell apart and then the ones who kind of stepped up. And the reason is, I think those of us who were better prepared both mentally, professionally, physically, could step up to that moment. And I think that's a lot of preparation. So even today I met two customers. I always make sure a, we do a prepping for every customer, we send every customer pre read 24 hours before I meet every customer, they get my presentation. Every single customer. There's like 12 this week. And there's always a debrief, a hot wash, that is always a follow up. And I think that the answer is if you watch, make sure you watch basketball people. Everybody knows LeBron. The difference between LeBron and everybody else is LeBron shows up every single game. And the difference between being a superstar, being really, really good and being like, okay is having one good game or five good games one season and showing up every single day. And that's prep, that's I think, dedication, that's persistence, and it's also, I think, getting that standard of operation across all your team.
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A
So you start the company with Matan and then you guys pivot, right?
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C
I don't know if pivot is the right word. I think the fundamental mission we built a company which is to bring visibility to the oceans. What we envisioned from day one was the ability to look at all the ships all the time and figure out what they're going to do. However, when you build a company, first of all, the tech wasn't there. So today we use hundreds of satellite assets. We tip them, we cue them, you Know, we tap into different technologies to figure out who's on board and what they're doing and what they're carrying. It's almost like a sci fi movie. And oftentimes our intelligence is even better than what agencies have because the commercial, generally speaking, the commercial and open source world have in many cases has preceded and progressed above the quote unquote military world, especially in global stuff. So number one, I think the tech really, really progress. The satellite assets, they're built or even APIs. Today we tip queue hundreds of satellites every day with APIs, they didn't exist. Number two, the market is there now. It wasn't there back then. You see, never before President Trump, we saw the President of the United States of America talk about shipping and ships and Venezuela and Iran. Everybody's aware and we're fortunate to support more than a couple of dozen of agencies in the US and also many dozens worldwide in Europe and obviously Israel and apac. So I don't think the market was there.
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A
But Ami walk us through the market. When I met Pivot, you could sell the data to port authorities, you could sell it to customs, you could sell it to trading, or maybe now that the platforms are there, you can sell it to everybody.
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C
There's this whole discussion about when you build a company, do you go niche, do you go broad? So we actually start with governments. That was the first use case. So we started with piracy and we ended up talking to shipping companies. They didn't want to really solve piracy because they could just add a surcharge of about 40 bucks per container. And if you have 10,000 containers, 40 bucks is a lot. So why solve that? Just charge more money and deal with it. And then we really got into the maritime domain awareness business. Illegal phishing, finding bad guys. I think really that was the first market however, because as opposed to now, defense tech wasn't really a popular thing. Nobody wanted to do defense tech. It was that thing you needed to say no, we could do defense tech and something else, I guarantee, I swear to God. So we had to find more use cases. By the way, the use case we failed big time was trading. Because Israel is a great hotbed for intelligence. Obviously it's a great hotbed for tech. You need domain expertise and we have still have domain expertise as like Navy and intelligence. We didn't have the expertise of trading and oil trading and gas trading and so forth. It's really important you go after the use case to make sure you have at least access to people who have the expertise. If you don't have it yourself. Otherwise it's pretty hard.
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B
I'm going to take you back to intel agencies eventually. That is a big customer or a big industry of customers for you. It's a bit surprising because you would, I guess, imagine that intel agencies do have their own robust resources to track C traffic. I'd like to know first what makes them such a good market? Is there any conflict of interest here? If you work with one agency, does it prevent you from working with other agencies?
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C
Sure. So first of all, answer the second question. We work with the west, period, full stop, okay? That's how we solve all our conflict of interest. We don't do business with anybody who we feel from a value perspective does not share the same set of values. So I think the usual suspects would be the usual suspects. Okay? That's number one. That's how we solve the conflict of interest. We don't do business in China, we don't do business with Russia. That's it. Easy. Okay? Obviously not anybody sanctioned. So that's one answer. It's legal plus values to your first question. So navies are built to fight, you know, to capture things. They're not built to do global maritime intelligence and everything. You tell them like, go catch this vessel, go shoot here. And they do that. That's what they do. Once your scope of problem is global enough, local, it's not a capacity that they would solve. If you think about it for a second, what other problem in life do they have to solve for global capacity? They don't have it right. Borders. You look at the borders, people, you look at your citizens, maybe people of interest of others. You don't look at all the people in the world all the time. Air traffic, you don't look at all the air traffic. You look at the air traffic of specific cargoes. Shipping is the only thing you need to do on a global scale. So that's why I don't think they've built it broadly. Saying, number two, it's also not of domain expertise. This is a vertical AI play in vertical AI, you need to bake a lot of domain expertise. And they asked Niami, listen, why isn't Google or Amazon coming into this business? So my answer is we're partnering with Amazon because they can't go vertical on all verticals. They go vertical on their big verticals, right? It's like logistics, the marketplace. They're going after Starlink with Amazon, I think the name is Leo with Kuiper. But they can't go after maritime. So we're a Partner and we're building on top of aws. So I think that's my answer. It's really hard at this point in time. I feel like we've built enough capacity, the main expertise, data technology to compete with and provide value to the West. I think at a global scale. And I think again, we have proof points on a weekly basis from our customers that this is I think military grade, mission grade intelligence in the world. If we had not persevered, if we had not like, you know, kept our burn low or went public in London or, you know, did all these things, we would not have been here. And maybe, you know, the intent wasn't as satisfying.
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B
So what's next and will we see Windward going public once again? Is there a plan?
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C
Maybe.
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B
Great answer.
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C
No, I gotta say, you know, going public isn't that shiny at this point. If you see public stocks, generally speaking, to go public you need to be much bigger. My full expectation is you'll see a lot more pe, dry powder, a lot more M and A than you would see people going public. I think we have a 12 to 24 months window to really go all in. Talk to me in 12 months. But I think absolutely, there's like shipping and use every day and these decision makers and teams need these tools on a day to day basis. Now I talk about agentic because I think the agentic revolution. We should talk about that for a second. I think.
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B
Go ahead, tell us.
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C
I was wrong about one big thing in the company. I thought that data would be a commodity and insight would be scarcity. It ended up exactly the opposite. Insight is now a commodity and data has become a scarcity and I think customers are very worried about that. So I think that data asset in the Gentex world, where you can scale the analysis and the domain expertise like you couldn't scale before, I think it could be a winning combination.
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B
I want to take us to right here and right now as the guy with the eyeballs on the Ocean, he said 9 billion eyeballs last year. And with the guy with eyeballs on the ocean. We're in the middle of a very dramatically tense moment in geopolitics. Help us get a sense of where things are going. Let's start with Iran. What have you been seeing?
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C
I think first of all, it's all connected and I think thinking of Iran as a separate isolated case is just not understanding the picture. Here's the real picture. The world became really separated since Russia got into Ukraine four years ago. The Western world has sanctioned Russia. The big Push of that sanction is oil. Russia produces about 10 million barrels a day out of about 80. 10 million barrels a day. So let's say the oil price, let's say 60. It's 60 times 10 million a day, right? It's 600 million bucks a day of revenue. That's the numbers, plus 1 million barrels of fuel products. And that's what the Western world went after. And if you read the regulation, which obviously, right, it says to limit the revenues of the Russian oil machine, what that created, Yael, is a bifurcation of the global trade, of the system. It created that dark fleet, which is right now about 1,400 tankers out of about, let's call it 10,000. So about 15% of the world fleet. The transit for Russian oil, it touched Venezuela because Venezuela, Russia, Iran, Cuba, all basically were the same axis. By the way, they're all heavily sanctioned. And most of their oil, not all of their oil, most of the oil went to China, which is its naval capacity building and shipbuilding. If you talk about a ratio of one to three about 20 years ago between US ships and Chinese vessels, I think you're getting to one to 100. At this pace, if the US doesn't change something fast, they're going to have a one to a hundred eventually because the US doesn't build a lot of ships. And the China boom, they're building a lot. So that creates a lot of separation. They think President Trump and the US Are changing it. Iran in that, in that sense is a critical part of that axis. They generate about two and a half million barrels a day. Most of them go to China. So by the US Blocking Venezuela, it stops also cheap oil exports to China. By going after Iran, it stops cheap oil exports to China, okay, because they're discounted. And now we're seeing Russia also supporting Iran, not surprisingly, because it's all connected. They just sold a big deal of weapons to Iran and so forth. So I think that's the big context. And now we can talk specifically about Iran, if you want to.
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B
Kind of like factoring in, as you said, you know, how the US Is playing out this game, especially with the President Donald Trump. How does that show up in your data?
- [30:30]
C
So, first of all, I just looked at the data today, actually. I think everybody's preparing for that moment just to understand what's happening there. You have the Straits of Hormuz, which broadly is about 20% of the world's oil exports, and specifically Saudi Arabia and the UAE and Qatar and Iraq. So most of the Gulf is exporting via the Straits of Hormuz, which has broadly been the casus Delhi, I would say for the western world. There has been even in the Iran Iraq war in 80s cause the tank wars the most similar comparable to what we're seeing today with the US apprehending Venezuelan tankers and so forth in Europe trying to apprehend Russian vessels. So Iran is threatening to close the Straits of Hormuz. I don't know if they will or if they won't. What we are seeing is all the shipping world is trying to pull back a bit from exports. So you would see ships not going in the Gulf but waiting outside across Oman you would see a lot of more ships turn off transmissions. You would see the speed of transiting through the trans go by 50, 60%, you know, risking safety, a lot of safety hazards. It's not that easy going there through there with a 300 meter tanker at 16 knots or 15 knots. And I think we're seeing a lot of contracts being sold as fast as possible before going to the market before any hostilities start at the discount. I think it's a bit of a discount right now to get the cargoes out, but their freight rates to get in are higher. If you think about Ukraine and Russia in the beginning there was a lot of premium to go and pick up cargoes for Ukraine. So I think we're seeing that right now. There's a lot of premium to go and pick up cargoes from the Gulf out because people are saying, well I might get stuck in, my ship might get looped in, you need to pay your sailors more. So everybody's kind of pushing, pushing, pushing on the one hand, on the other hand trying to spend as little as possible time in the Gulf. For example, I've looked today at the data and I've seen that ship to ship transfers, the ability to transfer cargoes between ships are down about 60% in the Gulf in the last week or so. So we're seeing a lot of trends around that.
- [32:28]
A
If you can take us through a broader lens, Horn of Africa, Suez, Egyptian Navy, Turkish Navy. Also kind of on the military and semi military stuff, we saw Turkey as part of its Mavi strategy, kind of go through now, explore oil off the coast of Mogadishu. Is that on your radar?
- [32:49]
C
So I think first of all Turkey is becoming a big player and I think that should not be underestimated. They're becoming a big player across the eastern Mediterranean and they're becoming a big player across East Africa. That's something we have not seen before. Specifically, we're seeing a lot of interest in Turkey around oil rigs, oil exploration, gas exploration, specifically in the eastern Mediterranean. I've heard a bit about eastern Africa, the Horn of Africa. I haven't heard a lot about it, but we are seeing a lot of it in the eastern Mediterranean. I don't see Cyprus as a big actor in the Horn of Africa. I think it's beyond their sphere of influence. I appreciate somebody might have said it, but you need a lot of capacity to do these things.
- [33:25]
A
So we're seeing Egypt and Turkey going all the way to Somalia, Mogadishu. There's a oil discovery there. They're going to dig, they're going to find. The Turks are going to get 95% of the proceeds, per recent media reports. Curious. Your thoughts on the Hapag Lloyd acquisition of Zim alongside Fimi and so on. Do you feel comfortable about the resolution of those 12 ships staying with Fimi? Is it a risky thing for Israel to do knowing that 90 plus percent of everything coming in and out goes through?
- [33:55]
C
Yeah. First of all, kudos to the employees of Zim is a very old enterprise. There was a lot of consolidation in container lines and it was a lot of competition and there were a lot of very tough years, man. And they went through that and they built a very big business and sold, I think, 4.2 billion or something, which is a big premium also. Almost 100% premium, if I remember.
- [34:14]
A
55. 55%? Yeah, yeah. One billion extra.
- [34:17]
C
55, yeah. So I think it's a big premium. And it's them and it's Glickman and Dudu Abel and all the team there which has been navigating it in rough season. Well done to them. Again, all friends and colleagues. At the end of the day, what Israel needs is. Is consistency of delivery of goods. Every time something happens with Israel, the first thing that happens is marine insurance just skyrockets a thousand percent. I guarantee you it's going to happen again.
- [34:45]
A
1,000%. Figuratively, or that's the number. 1,000%.
- [34:47]
C
No, no, that's a number. That's a number. That's a number. Oh, wow.
- [34:50]
A
Okay. That's my number, Yale. That's my number.
- [34:53]
C
So it happened in the Second Lebanon War in 2006. It happened a couple of years ago, by the way. It also happened in Ukraine and Russia. So basically the Israeli government is saying, no problem. You get the insurance, somebody will pay. And basically the consumer needs to pay because at the end of the day, the traders, they lift the price of cargo, they lift the price of freight to cover that insurance. The problem is not everybody can get that insurance. Not everybody wants to provide this insurance. Insurance is in hindsight and so on and so forth. And then what happens at the end of the day on a plan is people give a call to the global players and say, hey man, do me a favor, we really need this. In the last war, Israel almost ran out of fuel. I think it's well known that when one of the missiles hit Bazam, which is basically the refinery in Haifa, Israel almost ran out of fuel. It had to import a lot of fuel into Israel equally. This can happen with everything containers. I think we should understand, number one, Israel has to have its own national capacity to import enough goods. And secondly, I don't think we can assume that Hapagloid will deliver goods. Haps. In this deal, a quarter of the
- [35:50]
A
company is owned by Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
- [35:52]
C
Yeah, I do know that, obviously.
- [35:54]
A
Yeah, you're not concerned.
- [35:55]
C
My view is once you sold the majority of them to whoever, doesn't matter if it's Qatar, doesn't matter, don't depend on them in times of war. My view is done. Okay, done. Because it's a commercial entity, doesn't matter who owns it, okay? It's boxes, it's, it's metal, it's ships and boxes and deliveries. In my humble opinion, the state of Israel should make sure no matter what, come hell or high water, it has enough provision, enough shipping capacity to provide for a long war where nobody else except Zim and Israeli related people will come to deliver. And I think that should be the scenario. Has that been done? I don't know.
- [36:31]
A
I mean this context, is there a sort of climate change opportunity? At the time we used to talk about clients in the sort of hedge fund space, in the commodity trading space. You know, you guys know ahead of everybody else. If there is some change in the
- [36:45]
C
open seas, I think the Arctic is becoming a big thing. I think what you're hearing about Greenland is an outcome of the Arctic, not the other way around. The Arctic route is opening up and who's going to own it? Is it Russia? Is it China? Is the US Remember right now the Russia exports, they need to go to the Baltic and the Baltic, you need to go through Denmark and Denmark just stopped another Sanction related vessel. Two days ago it was a box ship, but still. Okay, just two days ago and all these cable cuttings. The latest EU sanctions regulation, I think it was 20th package, if I remember correctly from last week, says there is a complete ban on every maritime service, maritime tugs, maritime insurance, you know, any, any, any maritime service to Russia. They think they're progressing towards a whole export ban. The UK and others has said that they're not going to let Russia or any dark fleet vessel, which is not safe, go to the Baltics. So they were going towards a full export ban. That's why the Arctic is important at the end of day's geography. If you can't go to the Baltic, maybe Russia can go to the Arctic. They have a big Arctic coastline. Or maybe China can get oil there where the west cannot intervene. So climate change in the sense of the Arctic, absolutely is a big geopolitical thing that the scope of influence and the scope of interest, I think, is growing on it.
- [37:59]
B
Ami, just to wrap up, you've been through quite a roller coaster in the past 10 years. Lots of learnings and lots of, and you admitted yourself things that you were mistaken on and you've now understood. What do you think your biggest lesson or advice to ambitious founders today would be?
- [38:16]
C
Yeah, first of all, my biggest advice is family, maybe surprising. I think if you don't have a family, you don't have a partner, you don't have love, you don't have an anchor, you just can't go through this in any other way. I think, and I think I'm very fortunate to have my wife and my kids, my family, to be part, I'm not saying even supported. I think they're part of the journey. I think supporting is thinking they're extrinsic. I think they're intrinsic. I think they're part of this journey. Prioritize that you'll be able to do everything else. I think that's one thing. I think the second thing is I'm not sure there's one way. Sometimes you're a bit ahead of time, sometimes you're a bit late to find that right path. And that right path. Sometimes the right investors, sometimes it's not the quick cut investors. Maybe it's sooner, maybe it's later. Just make sure you're doing it for the right reasons. For me, the right reasons is purpose. It's not money. I want to make an impact. I want to matter. I don't want to make money, meaning somebody in something in the world changing something, making a difference, like our data and our technology make every single day now, you know, I think that's worth something.
- [39:12]
A
Amit, thank you very much.
- [39:13]
C
Thank you, guys.
- [39:19]
A
All right. AMI's energy, even on, on a podcast, is addictive. You can feel the guy's passion. I really see his creation and the ability of the company to now kind of stand tall as one of the top two, top three companies in the space and growing fast again in private hands is remarkable. I think the words of the week, right, let's go. We're talking AI. We understood that it's really kind of creating a whole process of adaptation worldwide and specifically in Israel. And so that drives our conversations both geopolitically and economically. The saspocalypse, the SAS Magetta and jobs, employment and so on. But as always, one of the key drivers and accelerators of tech is the US Department of War. This makes it super interesting to see what the department's internal documents from a few weeks ago indicate as its focus going forward. Last week, a January 9 internal document guidance surfaced and its title is Memorandum for Senior Pentagon Leadership Subject. Yeah, listen to this. Artificial Intelligence Strategy for the Department of War. Super interesting document. I invite everybody, Google it and read it. It's out there. And the notion there is, how does the Pentagon become AI first? How do you deploy $1 trillion with all those capital raises in the, in the private market? When you think about the US defense budget at 1 trillion, here is the sentence, the words the week I take from that document. And this is what Secretary Hegseth guides internally at the Pentagon. To this end, I expect our CDAO to act as a wartime cdao. The CDO is the office responsible for AI within the Pentagon. So the Pentagon as of a couple of weeks ago, has cut up, put its CDA office at war footing. That is a very dramatic development, extremely dramatic.
- [41:06]
B
And if there's anyone else in that area that still sees AI as some kind of hype, this is kind of inked into history as now operational infrastructure and not, this is not any kind of digital transformation innovation. You know, AI used to be like that innovation down the hallway in the basement that nobody, nobody knows what's going on. This is kind of black on white that, you know, this needs to be treated with the seriousness of infrastructure and not with hype.
- [41:35]
A
And the endless resources that the Pentagon has at its disposal really sort of makes you wonder and think, by the way, read the document out there to our listeners. There's a whole description of some, you know, what I would still consider sci fi AI enabled war scenarios. Really sort of some scary stuff, but some exciting stuff. So I think we can conclude an adjourn. That's it for today's show. So thanks for tuning in to ArcMeat Media is what's your number. We hope you found it interesting. And if you did, be sure to like, subscribe Rate Review. You guys know the drill. Most importantly, share it with others who you think will find it interesting. If you want to make suggestions or share feedback, please reach out to us at what's your number? @ark media.org.
- [42:22]
B
What's your number? As an arc media podcast? Arc media's executive producers, adam james levin are production manager is britney cohen. Arc's community manager is ava weiner. Sound and video editing is by liquid audio. Our theme music is by midnight generation. I'm yael wisner levy I'm yonataladiri.
- [42:40]
A
See you next week.
- [42:41]
B
Y see you.
- [42:47]
A
This podcast offers general business and economic information and is not a comprehensive summary for investment decisions. It does not recommend or solicit any investment strategy or security.