Founders’ sentiment and business impact of the Israel-Hamas war

Published in

Symbol

3 min readDec 20, 2023

There’s much speculation about the implications of the war on the ability to raise funds, close new customers, and hit planned milestones. Though we are still not close to the end of this mega-event and its shock waves, in this survey we sought to get a snapshot of the current situation, both in terms of actual impact to date and in terms of the founders’ sentiment — how concerned they are and how the war affects their gut feeling about the future.

We reached out to founders from the extended networks of Symbol, Intel Ignite, and Samsung Next.

One finding that stands out is that 74% of founders plan on raising funds in 2024 and the vast majority are optimistic about their odds of success. This speaks to the Israeli spirit and optimism, and also — hopefully — to the resilience of the startup ecosystem even as we navigate through this extremely complicated time. It will definitely be an interesting year…

96% of the founders who completed the survey raised external funding. 4% are pre-funding or bootstrapped.

One difference that stood out between pre-round-A to post-round-A companies, is that later-stage founders are significantly more concerned about company productivity, compared to their earlier-stage peers.

Commercial Implications

Early-stage (pre-series-A) companies report a stronger impact than later-stage companies. While 35% of the earlier-stage companies had contracts that didn’t materialize due to the war, only 14% of later-stage (post-series-A) founders reported this happened to them.

Company Presentation

We didn’t dig into this point beyond this one question. But anecdotally, we heard this goes both ways — while some founders told us that nowadays they aren’t externalizing the ‘Israeliness’ of their company, others actually make a point in priding that they are operating out of Israel.