
Holy Land: Startup Nations
Israel has more startups and venture capital per capita than any other country, and WIRED's four-part Future Cities season looks past Tel Aviv's Rothschild Boulevard tech corridor to see who else is building in the region. Cameras follow founders in East Jerusalem, Ramallah, and the West Bank, where a parallel startup scene is emerging under very different political constraints, and travel south to Beersheba, now a cybersecurity hub built partly around Israeli military intelligence expertise. Interviews with entrepreneurs and engineers trace how Silicon Wadi's cluster of tech companies grew out of the country's specific geography, politics, and culture rather than in spite of them. One research team demonstrates using ordinary smartphone hardware to cut costs in healthcare diagnostics, a small example of the kind of practical engineering the series treats as representative. The film keeps returning to the same tension: a single tight strip of land producing two separate, unequal versions of the same startup story, and asking what each side's tech ecosystem needs to keep growing.