For 246 days, Hamas held Noa Argamani in Gaza. When Israeli special forces pulled her out on June 8, 2024, and flew her by helicopter to a hospital outside Tel Aviv, a doctor greeted her by name. “The first thing I asked is, ‘How do you know my name?’” she told Business Insider. “I didn’t realize the whole world knew who I was.”
The world knew her from a video. Hours after the October 7, 2023, assault began, men swept through the Nova music festival grounds, found Argamani and forced her onto a motorbike. Someone filmed it: a young woman reaching toward her boyfriend, begging her captors, “Don’t kill me.” She was 25, a student about to start her third year studying artificial intelligence at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She had thought she might become a software engineer. This past weekend, Israel’s military said it had killed the man who drove the motorcycle.
This month, at 28, Argamani started a new job. She has joined Vine Ventures, a venture capital firm that backs early-stage companies in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and defense technology. Her task is to work with Israeli founders who want to grow in the United States, the market that usually decides whether a startup becomes big or merely successful.
“In this moment, if I want to learn and make an impact, VC is the right place for me,” she says. “I want to be surrounded by people who dream big.” She talks of herself as a bridge. “My mission is to help Israeli startups go to market and really break this border.”
The job grows out of the two years since her rescue. She became a leading advocate for the hostages still in Gaza, meeting presidents and diplomats and speaking at the Time100 Gala. She stood in the gallery of the House chamber while Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress, in a borrowed suit; her own clothes no longer fit after eight months of captivity. She built a contact list few interns could dream of, and she is candid that the list is part of what she brings.
She also went back to Ben-Gurion University and found that AI had remade her field while she was underground. Models wrote better code; digital “agents” were taking on work once reserved for people. She rejoined anyway. With classmates, she used large language models to scan news articles for antisemitic rhetoric and map the countries it came from; through an entrepreneurship programme, she designed a startup to help children with autism.
But the life outside had changed. “There’s the person you were before October 7, and the person you are after,” she says. Strangers stopped her in airports. She posted fragments of her new existence to 201,000 Instagram followers: the steps of the Capitol, the bow of a yacht, the World Cup final. Offers came in — companies, startups, speaking, modeling. A desk behind a screen no longer seemed enough. “I felt that coming back to coding would be a waste,” she says. “I want to do something with more impact — to make a change in the world.”
Through the advocacy work she met Eric Reiner, Vine’s founder, who has spent his career between Israeli startups and American capital — first at Insight Partners, then at Dynamic Yield, an Israeli advertising-algorithms firm sold to McDonald’s in 2019. Vine manages about $500 million and has backed Israeli companies including Wonderful, Qodo and Eon. In April he invited her to intern. This month she went full-time.
Her hiring lands at a strange moment for the startup nation. Google this year completed its $32 billion purchase of Wiz, founded by former Israeli military officers. Yet a 2025 report from the Israel Advanced Technology Industries Association found that 53% of the country’s tech companies had seen more employees ask to move abroad, citing security worries. Venture funding, after two years of decline, is rising again on the back of large rounds for firms such as Cyera, HiBob and Wonderful, according to PitchBook.
For five months she has been learning the trade: how to size a market, how to test a young company, how to read a refusal. Israeli investors, she says, will cut a founder off mid-pitch to say what is wrong. Americans are politer and less useful. “They can smile the whole pitch, but after that they will pass and never tell you why.” She will split her time between San Francisco and Tel Aviv.
She thinks captivity taught her something founders need. A person can do everything demanded of them and still have no say in what happens next. “Sometimes, no matter how hard you work, things are not going to work out well,” she says. She wants to coach founders through those stretches.
The facts of her life do not flatter optimism. She reached home in time to see her mother, who died of brain cancer three weeks later. She watched friends murdered; some bodies came back months afterward in hostage exchanges. She went to funeral after funeral. She calls herself, with a laugh, a “naïve optimist,” then corrects the record: optimism is now a decision, not a temperament.
“I lost a lot of people. I saw in my own eyes hell, being in tunnels, looking in Hamas’ eyes. But I choose every day to have another part of my life, to look forward, to go to work, and not let the grief become my identity.”
The full-time role began in September. Her working week will run between San Francisco and Tel Aviv.