Palo Alto tops NIS 1 trillion in Tel Aviv, HyperGuest raises $25 million, and Amnesty on Pegasus in Morocco

Noa For the first time, a company on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange is worth more than a trillion shekels. It's Palo Alto Networks.

Eli And by one count, that single stock is now about a third of the value of everything traded on the exchange.

Noa Good morning, it's Sunday, the fourth of October. I'm Noa.

Eli And I'm Eli. From the end of the week and the weekend: Palo Alto's milestone in Tel Aviv, a twenty-five million dollar round for the hotel tech company HyperGuest, and a new Amnesty report on Israeli spyware in Morocco.

Noa We start in Tel Aviv. On Thursday, Palo Alto Networks shares rose about five and a half percent, according to Calcalist and Globes, and its market value passed one trillion shekels.

Eli CTech puts that at about $326 billion. It's the first company in the exchange's history to get there. Ynet says Teva, in second place, is worth about a hundred and forty-three billion shekels, roughly a tenth of Palo Alto.

Noa Remind us why an American company trades in Tel Aviv at all.

Eli Palo Alto was founded by the Israeli entrepreneur Nir Zuk in 2005. In February it completed its $25 billion purchase of the Israeli cyber company CyberArk, and listed in Tel Aviv on the twenty-third of February. CTech says its value has risen about a hundred and sixty-four percent in the seven months since.

Noa And the chief executive has done rather well personally. CTech reports that Nikesh Arora bought about $10 million of shares in March, at around $147 each, when the stock was down more than twenty percent for the year.

Eli By Wednesday's close that stake was worth about $27 million. CTech also counts twelve Israeli companies among the twenty-four significant acquisitions Palo Alto has made under Arora. Israel isn't a side office for this company. It's half its shopping list.

Noa Next, funding. HyperGuest, an Israeli travel tech company, has raised $25 million from AMI, the mid-market investment arm of Apax Partners, CTech reports.

Eli HyperGuest was founded in 2020. It lets hotels connect directly with booking sites, travel agencies, technology providers, and now AI agents, without building a separate link for each partner. The company says it has processed more than a billion dollars in transactions.

Noa Chief executive Nir Yaron told CTech that AI is transforming the whole landscape, and called it a tectonic shift. The company has about a hundred and sixty employees in twenty-one countries, about a quarter of them in Israel.

Eli It had raised $28 million before this, from Lightspeed, Viola Ventures, the Altshuler fund and the travel fund THYAR. And Techloy's weekly tracker says it was the biggest disclosed round that week across Africa, the Middle East and Israel.

Noa Now to a report on Israeli spyware abroad. Amnesty International says Morocco's domestic intelligence service used Pegasus, made by the Israeli company NSO Group, against journalists and activists.

Eli Amnesty says the deployment began in September 2017, with abuses documented through 2021. The report rests on testimony from a former Moroccan intelligence employee, leaked documents and journalistic investigations.

Noa According to Amnesty, leaked records list a hundred and three Moroccan phone numbers as potential targets. Sixty-five belong to civil society, including twenty-two journalists and media workers. Amnesty alleges zero-click attacks and network injection through the state-owned Maroc Telecom.

Eli Amnesty also names Italian and British-German spyware vendors. It says Morocco did not reply before publication, and Africanews notes Morocco has repeatedly denied spying on its citizens. Amnesty's account carries no response from NSO.

Noa Our last main story is about jobs. Calcalist reports on a new Employment Service report about Haredi women in high tech. They make up eight point eight percent of tech job seekers, but only about five and a half to six percent of people employed in the sector.

Eli The number of Haredi women looking for tech work rose about twenty-eight percent in two years, against eleven percent for other Jewish women. About seventy percent are in software roles, which the report calls particularly exposed to AI.

Noa The report also points to qualifications. Sixty-four percent hold technical diplomas, but only about a fifth hold academic degrees, compared with sixty-three percent of other women in the data.

Eli That matters, because software is the kind of work the report sees AI reaching first. Overall, Haredi women's employment is high, about eighty-one percent, close to other Jewish women. The problem is specific to tech.

Noa Now the quick round-up.

Eli CTech reports that Carter Church, a staff AI engineer at SentinelOne, used OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra to solve an 1809 cipher letter to one of Napoleon's generals, in about six hours from a single scanned page. A database of historical ciphers now marks it solved.

Noa The Jerusalem Post reports that Haifa prosecutors have indicted Mohammad Khalaf, twenty-five, of Baka al-Gharbiya, for contact with a foreign agent. The indictment alleges he did paid tasks for an Iranian handler, used AI and consulted ChatGPT. His lawyer is reviewing the file.

Eli And CTech reports $127 million in US Navy contracts for Israeli defense companies. An IAI subsidiary gets $114 million for missile launch canisters, and Elbit gets $13.5 million to repair aviators' survival radios, with some of the work in Holon.

Noa One thing to watch. How much one company now moves the Tel Aviv market. If Palo Alto really is about a third of the value of every share traded there, as Ynet reports, then a bad day on Nasdaq is now a bad day in Tel Aviv.

Eli And the reverse is true. For Israeli investors, the exchange's biggest local story is now a California cyber company with deep Israeli roots.

Noa That's Israel Tech Daily. If this was useful, follow the show wherever you're listening, and read our startup profiles at Startup to Follow dot com.

Eli See you tomorrow morning.