By Omer Sher, Chief Growth & Marketing Officer to Consumer Brands | Partner at Beyond22 – Early Stage Consumer Fund

The case for Israeli consumer startups looks different than it did even two years ago.

For most of the last two decades, Israeli venture capital had a clear center of gravity: B2B and enterprise software. Cyber. Infrastructure. SaaS. Deep technical products. The model worked, and for good reason. Consumers sat outside that comfort zone.

AI is changing the operating economics of consumer company-building. In some ways, AI is doing for consumer operations what cloud did for software infrastructure: turning what used to require heavy upfront capacity into something lean teams can access from day one.

I come to this from an unusual vantage point. I spent 20 years at P&G, most recently as Chief Growth Officer for P&G Specialty Beauty, where I led growth across a portfolio of acquired founder-led consumer brands. I now invest in early-stage consumer startups as a partner at Beyond22, and work independently with private equity owners on consumer portfolio growth.

AI Makes the Consumer Operating Model Lighter

For years, the early path in consumer was brutally inefficient. A founder needed creative, paid testing, research, customer service, content, localization, analytics, lifecycle marketing, and often inventory before the market had given enough proof. Every learning cycle burned time and cash.

AI reduces that burden. A founder can test creative angles, build sharper landing pages, localize content, analyze customer feedback, automate parts of service, and move from insight to market with a much smaller team.

AI lowers the cost of finding out whether there is a real consumer truth worth building around. Founders can test more angles, reach more precise audiences, improve the product experience faster, and build conviction before the company needs the full infrastructure consumer historically required.

At the same time, the deeper consumer assets remain hard to copy. A prompt can help write content, test claims, or analyze reviews. It cannot replicate a product people trust, a formula that works, a brand that earns belief, or a habit that becomes part of someone’s life. AI compresses the operating burden around the company while leaving the most valuable consumer moats intact.

Why This Fits the Israeli Founder Profile

The historical case against Israeli consumer was clear. The local market is small. The US consumer market is culturally specific. Israeli founders often come from technical backgrounds and are sometimes less fluent in brand, packaging, storytelling, creator culture, and retail relationships.

But the category is shifting toward a model where Israel’s strengths matter more. The next generation of consumer companies will be more technical, more personalized, more data-driven, and more global from day one. That version of consumer is closer to the Israeli founder profile.

Israeli founders are used to building with constraints, selling into markets outside their home country, and moving fast because the local market was never large enough to be the destination. Many are technical, with real product instincts. That combination – product depth, global orientation, speed, and now AI-powered operating leverage – is increasingly what the best consumer companies are built on.

Omer Sher is a partner at Beyond22 and a former Chief Growth Officer at P&G Specialty Beauty.