The incredible rise of AI continues to dominate the tech industry. However, not everyone is aware of what an outsized role Jewish founders have played in developing this game-changing technology. 

For a start, Jewish founders are responsible for some of the biggest and most influential AI companies of today. 

Sam Altman is one of the most infamous examples of this trend. The founder and CEO of OpenAI often refers to himself as a “Midwestern Jew”.

However, we don’t have to look far to find other prime examples in the tech industry. 

Anthropic represents one of OpenAI’s biggest rivals in the GenAI space thanks to its intelligent assistant Claude. This company was founded by Jewish siblings, Dario and Daniela Amodei, and the duo has become known for their commitment to AI safety. 

Yet this isn’t just a new trend. Sergey Brin is the co-founder of Google, one of the biggest tech companies in the world. He also played a leading role with the company’s current AI initiatives, including Google Brain and Gemini.

Further, Jewish investors Semyon Dukach and Eugene Malobrodsky of One Way Ventures are today two of the most prominent venture capitalists in the world.

AI founders in Israel are also making sizable contributions to the evolution of this technology. According to a 2025 report from Remagine Ventures, 342 Israeli startups are primarily building products based on generative AI, rather than simply using it as a secondary feature in a $20Bn boom. One stand out example is Israeli CEO Liam Galin, who is building SCAILIUM, the world’s first GPU-native software engine that eliminates CPU bottlenecks.

These Israeli-based founders and executives are raising impressive sums with their AI ventures, such as Pavel Gurvich, one of Israel’s veteran cyber entrepreneurs, who raised $75 million for Tenzai. 

While Jewish founders are leading some of the biggest AI companies and high-growth ventures, they are also experimenting with industry applications and unexplored use cases.  

How Dean Bracha is solving blind spots in the Premier League football 

Long before Dean Bracha ventured into the world of entrepreneurship, he attended his first Arsenal game during a visit to the UK when he was just nine years old. 

The story could have easily ended there, but for Bracha, the trip changed the course of his future forever. Visiting Arsenal’s stadium sparked a lifelong obsession with football and the Premier League. 

Back in Israel, Bracha would follow club activity in close detail. This led him to establish an Arsenal supporter’s community, which today has more than 7,000 members. His ongoing contributions writing match reviews, analyzing players and discussing transfers ended up setting the stage for Bracha’s current venture, Marquee. 

Marquee is a fast-growing sports analytics startup already gaining traction with major clubs across Europe and beyond. 

His desire to share a data-driven breakdown of player activity from a fan perspective led to Bracha receiving messages from scouts at clubs, both in Israel and internationally, curious as to how he had this level of information. The community also helped him meet the co-founders of the startup. 

The level of interest in the outputs of a simple tool Bracha had built as a passion project led him to question how football clubs were adapting to the new era of digital data. After speaking with football teams in Israel, Europe and the US, Bracha quickly pinpointed a common pain point. Club managers weren’t suffering from a lack of access to data, but an overload. 

Bracha explains that a typical Premier League match today will generate thousands of data points. It’s impossible for humans to analyze everything. Most clubs, he says, use just 4 to 15 percent of the data available to them. Marquee’s goal is to unlock the insights found in the remaining 85%. 

The company provides the top football clubs with an AI-powered decision intelligence layer. The platform combines data from multiple providers and internal club systems to generate clear, contextual recommendations tailored to each club’s playing style, constraints and objectives in one place. 

Ibrahim Hasanov solves a common B2B pain point with AI 

The future of AI hinges on the technology being useful in real-world use cases. Another example of a Jewish founder advancing the industry with valuable new ideas can be found with Ibrahim Hasanov. 

Hasanov has been building hardware since the age of six and coding since the age of eleven. He moved into entrepreneurship at the age of thirteen, but his current venture, MyUser, is a prime example of how AI generates the most value when it solves a widespread pain point. 

Hasanov’s time as a serial entrepreneur meant he had direct experience with the laborious nature of B2B outreach and lead engagement. For many businesses, this entire process represents the bottleneck holding back their expansion.

With MyUser, Hasanov offers other founders an AI-powered solution to fast-track this process, scaling the company with new clients without demanding huge overheads or teams. 

Hasanov’s solution is a standalone B2B sales agent. Once the client sets the budget and search criteria, the agent takes on the full sales cycle: from researching ideal prospects to scheduling meetings on the calendar.

The agent spends approximately 20 minutes researching each potential contact, analyzing profiles on LinkedIn and X to produce hyper-personalized emails. It then handles all follow-up communication autonomously, answering queries, sending reminders and booking appointments. 

With this AI-powered approach, Austin-based fintech BlueBanc built a sales pipeline valued at $1.8 million and increased its outreach response by 338% in just 90 days after adopting Myuser. 

The next chapter of AI 

Jewish founders have already helped to establish the companies building foundational AI models and LLMs that are reshaping industries across the world. 

However, the next chapter of AI adoption will hinge on finding use cases that deliver value and support the AI adoption in the long-term term. Entrepreneurs such as Ami Gal, Tzahi (Zack) Weisfeld and Ron Oliver, along with Dean Bracha and Ibraham Hasanov, are just some examples of the wave of Jewish founders making this happen. 

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)