He was a partner of the former CEO of Google, and wants to compete with the security giants

Alon Dror is an exception in the landscape. In the Talpiot military-academic excellence program, in which he took part, the graduates, at the end of the track, usually ask to join special units and unusual positions. But the officer from the 2010 batch asked to drop the ranks and move to the armored fighter track. “The course was difficult, intense and interesting,” he explains, thanks to his physics and math studies, “but I really wanted to be a fighter.”

● For the full 40 to 40 project

In the MAPAT (Directorate for Research and Development of Weapons and Technological Infrastructure), which leads the program to train a technological leadership reserve for the defense R&D community, they have not encountered such a request during the previous 15 years.

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● 40 to 40 | The basketball player who aimed for the NBA – and reached one of the most important positions in Nvidia

Dror grew up in Jerusalem, the youngest of three. His mother was a vice president at Bezeq and the municipality, and his father was in insurance and investments. Before the army, he did a year of service in the kibbutz movement in Nitsana. “My dream was to become a sort of commander-in-chief.” In the army, he wanted to join the regiments, “but I was injured, my profile dropped and I was accepted into the Talpiot.”

But in the end he succeeded as mentioned. When he arrived at the armory (after uploading a profile) his track mates wondered if it was a military police officer in disguise. Dror went on to the tank commanders’ course, in Operation Tzuk Eitan he fought with the paratroopers, then returned to the officers’ course in BHD 1, this time in the fighter track. Later he found himself as a platoon commander in the CMP, the advanced training in the Armored Corps.

Three years later in the field, he returned to his quarry in Talpiot – El Pituah Technology, and at the same time was appointed deputy commander of an armored fighting company. “I was on a team that was involved in the discovery of tunnels in 2016. It was a quite impossible task, where we were looking for technologies to locate and intercept tunnels. There were a lot of resources with the support of Mapat, I managed 20 projects at the same time, and after about three years we managed to find a systemic solution.”

Among other things, Dror won the Israel Security Award, but his abnormality in the military landscape continued until the end of his service, when he asked to command the Hashomer farm, a base for recruits of special populations (resilience – lack of motivation to serve; and MKAM – high adjustment difficulties). This time he was refused. His last position was a first-year commander in Talpiot, until he was released with the rank of captain in 2018.

It is doubtful whether the poisoned patriot thought then that in less than a decade he would be the CEO of a hot start-up. Today the defense company Sling, established in 2024, has already managed to raise more than 100 million dollars, among others from the venture capital funds LUX, Sequoia and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s investment fund.

“I wanted a budget department”

In fact, for many years he did not think about the security field at all. “The dream was to reach the public service, I wanted a budget department,” he says. do you like to suffer I ask and he is quick to reply: “I am drawn to complex places. One of our investors from Sequoia said that one of the reasons he chose to invest in us is that he heard from friends that I like to suffer. For him, if there is high resistance, then it is worth it.”

As fate would have it, Dror did not meet the threshold conditions for budget department tenders because he lacked a background in economics – which is what led him to apply for business administration studies abroad. “I applied to Stanford, was accepted, and flew to California in Corona. I started from scratch.”

What did you see in the US?
“It was a crazy experience, I ate from the fruit of the tree of knowledge. You see the back end of the American economic and business world. There is a positive naivety to entrepreneurship there. In the land of the ecosystem, and Israelis in general, are more cynical. Many of the people who come with big dreams – are dismissed. In the US it’s the other way around, there are people there with delusional dreams.”

The developments in Dror’s life continued to unfold at record speed, when one of the lecturers at Stanford added him to the foundation under his leadership. That lecturer is none other than Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, chairman of the company and chairman of the parent company Alphabet. “But after a period there I realized that I didn’t feel like investing. It’s hard to find things you believe in outside the army.”

At the beginning of 2023, he started looking for ideas for startups. He moved between teams and friends from Stanford and Tel Aviv, in many fields, including cyber and artificial intelligence. “In every field, I felt that I was able to come up with ideas that made sense from a business perspective, but something was still missing. I realized that I wasn’t looking for a quick win, to sell a company and get rich quickly, but something big, megalomaniac, and with a lot of impact.”

And when we talk about a megalomaniacal dream, what is more appropriate than starting a large security company in Israel from scratch? Elbit, the Aerospace Industry and Rafael are huge companies in local terms, which are also among the 50 largest defense companies in the whole world. But Dror was not ready to accept the situation, in which there is no vibrant start-up ecosystem in the field of Israeli defense, at the same level as in cyber.

Android’s equivalent

Dror returned to Israel on September 15, 2023, three weeks before the outbreak of war. On October 5 – two days before the massacre – he sat down with the CTO of Mapat for a conversation that dealt with the development of a system to protect the border with the Gaza Strip using drones.

During the war itself, he served in the reserves in the Defense Forces, and was involved in the procurement of drones. “I got to see the good things in the Israeli system. Everyone gets involved and develops ideas for improvement. It was crazy, and today the IDF is one of the most advanced in the world in the field of drones.”

In 2024, Dror joined Hamotel Meridor, which was a partner in the Vintage Investment Fund. Together they founded the defense start-up Sling, which develops a command and control system that makes it possible to connect diverse technologies into a single integration. Some of Kela’s advanced systems are already in service with the security forces in Israel and other countries.

“They tell me, ‘You came just in time to ride the wave,’ but I think we were late. We should have founded the company a year ago, and maybe that would have made a difference.”

The choice of an open architecture (which includes existing external products) is an attempt to unite a variety of startups. The company wants to become as extensive an integrator as possible, which will gather, for example, radar technologies, signal intelligence and interception. If the move is successful, the small and very young company will become a real rival of Elbit, which operates in the field.

“A startup will always be faster than a large company,” states Dror. “The whole product thesis of the company is to build a technological infrastructure. We learned from the war that there are many developments in the field and in the units.”

What have we learned from the enemies?
“They manage to use commercial products, they don’t have the complex processes of a Western army and they run fast. They bring a drone from one day to the next, night vision equipment from an express plane, and here they have a technological advantage over you. The military software infrastructure must be updated throughout the West, not just in Israel. We need something similar to Android, which allows everyone to cooperate.”

Is the State of Israel also a breeding ground for defense start-ups, or only for large companies?
“Start-ups unequivocally, and even more so in the last two years. Mpaat has been working on this change for a decade. This is the agenda of the head of the organization Danny Gold from day one.”

Isn’t the hype in the field a bubble that will burst the day tensions drop?
“It’s not a bubble. It doesn’t behave like a bubble. On the contrary – the defense budgets of all the countries of the world have more than doubled in recent years. There is more demand than supply. The market is trying to catch up, but it takes time. There are real, large, long-term contracts behind all the companies. Government procurement is a trend with a lifespan of decades, it will not stop tomorrow morning.”

“The big industries are afraid”

Dror says that Bakala drew a lot of inspiration from the American defense company Andoril. The company, whose system is closed, began its journey by marketing a command and control system for the American Border Guard, and in a short period of time it became a giant that sweeps up huge contracts in a buying spree.

Recently, for example, Endoril won a contract worth $20 billion from the US Army – to unify commercial and defense AI solutions into one system. The value of Endoril, established in 2017, is estimated at $84.5 billion.

“The path we took in terms of products is similar to Andoril’s. We started with border protection, a modern software infrastructure, and on that we built solutions. They paved the way for many. We managed to reach a level where our products are ready and in use in no time.”

What happened with Andoril can happen with Kele here in Israel?
“Slingshot is not one product. There are several working under the same architecture and this creates superpower. If our teams are the fastest, it will also make the big industries work faster. The industries are afraid, because historically they blocked each other with software.

“It makes business sense, but in the long term we want to provide, similar to the cloud and mobile, the ability to easily switch from one provider to another and speed up the pace of development. That’s what’s important. We’re different from Andoril and other companies in the field. We were born from the great pain that if we don’t cooperate, things don’t move.”

Where do you see Kela in a decade?
“The largest security company in the world”.