The events of October 7th have resulted in a devastating blow to the Israeli economy, impacting people, communities, businesses, and governments. Israel’s citizens are however mobilizing to begin recovering from this once-in-a-generation challenge, prompting communities and businesses both inside and outside Israel to demonstrate support, resilience, and ingenuity.
This crucial Lab set forth an innovative regional financing plan to leverage technologies, support local businesses, and finance infrastructure urgently needed for Israel’s growth. This Lab follows initial discussions at the Milken Institute 2024 Global Conference “Shaping a Shared Future” on May 8, 2024, an earlier pre-Lab workshop hosted by Apollo Global Management in New York on February 21, 2024, focused on scaling small business securitization, and numerous other discussions with key stakeholders.
The Lab w conveneג leading Israeli and international financial institutions, technology platforms, and policy makers with a goal of identifying and developing innovative financial structures to support the Tekuma (Western Negev) region and the work of Israel’s National Recovery Administration. Key areas of focus include initiatives in agriculture, food, water, energy, desert and health tech, and infrastructure, as well as support for small and medium-sized businesses. This is an especially critical time to support Israel’s post-war recovery, as there are emerging opportunities that can leverage the recent budget ($3 billion) to fast-track projects and programs.
The specific goal of this work is to create new capital access models to raise and deploy new equity-debt instruments faster, design leveraged and scalable public-private-philanthropic partnership models to finance infrastructure and generate new sources of capital accelerating small and medium-sized business financing. As is our practice, this Lab will be to advance a work process to design solutions that can be translated and deployed in Israel with a particular focus on the western Negev. An important element of this work process will involve the recruitment and training of Milken Fellows who will work with each team (small business, VC and equity, and infrastructure financing) following the Lab to expand and strengthen capacity within the region.