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- Noa Argamani, freed after 246 days in Hamas captivity, is starting a new career in venture capital.
- Now working at Vine Ventures, she supports Israeli start-ups in entering the US market.
- Argamani uses her network and experience to help other founders in uncertain times.
After 246 days in Hamas captivity, Israeli special forces freed Noa Argamani and airlifted her to a hospital outside Tel Aviv. There, a doctor approached her and said, “Noa, we are truly glad you are here with us.”
Argamani was confused. “The first thing I asked was, ‘How do you know my name?'” she recalls. “I wasn’t aware that the whole world knew who I was.”
At 25, Argamani had become one of the faces of the attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. On the morning of her abduction, she was a student about to begin her third year of studies in artificial intelligence. She dreamed of becoming a software developer. Perhaps one day she would start her own company.
This month, she started a new job. Argamani now works at the venture capital firm Vine Ventures, which supports early-stage startups, particularly in the fields of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and defense technology. She collaborates with Israeli founders and companies looking to expand their business in the United States. Her network is proving invaluable in her new role: her ordeal catapulted her onto the global stage, connecting her with leading politicians and business magnates alike.
“If I want to learn and make a difference at this stage, the venture capital industry is the right place for me,” she says. “I want to be surrounded by people who have big dreams.”
For Israeli founders, America is often the market that determines whether a promising startup is merely successful or becomes truly massive. Argamani sees himself as a potential bridge between the two countries – as someone who can help Israeli founders turn their companies into global market leaders in their category.
“My mission is to help Israeli startups get to market and truly break through this barrier,” she says. If she succeeds, she could bring more of the world’s best technology, networks, and business expertise back to her home country.
On an early autumn morning, I met Argamani, now 28, in the lobby of Vine’s New York office, an ice-cold matcha in hand. She is slim, her long dark hair cascading down her back. Dressed in a blue shirt, faded jeans, and mules, she could be any woman in her mid-twenties from the West Village on her way to work. She speaks softly and deliberately, maintaining constant eye contact. She had flown into the city specifically for this interview before continuing on to San Francisco for meetings .
Over the past two years, Argamani has been repeatedly asked to revisit what happened to her. This time, she wanted to talk about what came after. Before we met, she texted me: “This interview is very special because [we] are focused on returning to life and rising from hell.”
Hours after the initial attack on October 7, a crowd from Gaza swept through the grounds of the Nova Music Festival, searching for survivors. They found Argamani and forced her onto a motorbike. Someone filmed it. Argamani, her eyes wide and mouth open, reaches out to her boyfriend and pleads with her captors, “Don’t kill me.” The video went viral on news broadcasts and social media, making Argamani an unwilling celebrity.
Last weekend, the Israeli military announced that it had killed the terrorist who had been driving the motorcycle used to abduct her.
In the months following her rescue on June 8, 2024, she became a prominent advocate for the hostages remaining in Gaza, meeting with presidents and diplomats and giving speeches at events such as the Time100 Gala. She stood in the gallery of the House of Representatives when Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress. She wore a borrowed suit; her own clothes no longer fit her after eight months of captivity.
She resumed her studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, a public research university in southern Israel. She discovered that artificial intelligence had fundamentally changed the field of software development during her captivity. Models were writing better code. Digital workers, so-called “agents,” were beginning to take over tasks once reserved for humans.
Argamani got back into it. She and her classmates used large language models to scan news articles for patterns of antisemitic rhetoric and then mapped the countries where it originated. They created a website where users could select a date and see where this rhetoric was most prevalent. As part of an entrepreneurship program, she conceived a startup to help children with autism.
But life outside of school had changed. “There’s the person you were before October 7th, and the person you are afterward,” she says. Strangers stopped her at airports and crosswalks. She gave speeches on stages and shared glimpses into her life with her 201,000 Instagram followers: posing on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, gazing into the distance from the bow of a yacht, and video calling her father from her seat at the World Cup final.
Job offers followed. She could join a company or help start one. She could pursue a career as a speaker or model. A desk job no longer seemed ambitious enough. She had access. She had attention. Sitting behind a screen suddenly seemed like a waste of both.
“I felt it would be a waste to go back to programming ,” she says. “I want to do something that has more of an impact – change the world.”
Through her involvement, Argamani met Eric Reiner, the founder of Vine Ventures. Reiner had spent his career between Israeli startups and American capital, first at Insight Partners, then at Dynamic Yield, an Israeli startup that used algorithms to personalize digital ads and websites, before being sold to McDonald’s in 2019.
Reiner founded Vine to invest in companies on both sides of the Atlantic, but the focus was to be on Israel, where the team would identify founders and help them enter new markets. The firm, which manages assets of around $500 million (approximately €425 million), has supported Israeli success stories such as Wonderful, Qodo, and Eon.
Israel has long been a startup hub that outperformes its size. This year, Google completed its $32 billion (around €27.2 billion) acquisition of Wiz, founded by a group of former Israeli officers. But the war had put pressure on the “startup nation.” A 2025 report by the Israel Advanced Technology Industries Association found that 53 percent of the country’s tech companies were seeing increasing numbers of employees requesting relocations abroad due to growing security concerns. After two consecutive years of decline, venture capital investment in Israeli startups is on the rise again, according to PitchBook, fueled by mega-funding rounds for companies like Cyera, HiBob, and Wonderful.
In April, Reiner invited Argamani for an internship. That’s when the spark ignited. In the venture capital sector, she says, she can help more than one company at a time. She can leverage the network she’s built to open doors for founders. And at Vine, whose presence stretches from San Francisco to Boston and New York, all the way to Tel Aviv, she can help Israeli startups make the crucial leap into the US.
Over the past five months, she’s been immersing herself in the job. Learning how to assess a market. How to value a young company. She helps founders analyze the rejections of other investors. Israeli investors, she says, will interrupt a founder mid-pitch to explain what’s wrong. Americans are more polite. “They can smile throughout the entire pitch, but then they reject it and never tell you why,” she says. Since September, she’s been working full-time and will split her time between San Francisco and Tel Aviv.
Making her network available is one way she believes she can be helpful. Coaching is another. Her time in captivity taught her that you can do everything that’s asked of you and still have no control over what happens next. That’s also a reality in startup life, she says. “Sometimes things just don’t go well, no matter how hard you work,” she says. She wants to help founders navigate these periods of uncertainty and understand what they can learn from them.
She emphasizes that she has always been an optimist, yes, she says with a laugh, even a “naive optimist.” This instinct, she says, helped her recognize the miracles that marked the darkest time of her life. She survived captivity. She made it home in time to see her mother one last time, who died of a brain tumor three weeks later . She saw surviving hostages return to their families. “When you’ve seen so many miracles,” she says, “you become even more optimistic.”
But she also saw how much can be taken from you. She had to watch friends being murdered. Others remained in captivity after their murder; their bodies were returned months later as part of hostage exchanges. She went from funeral to funeral.
For Argamani, optimism is no longer just a character trait. It’s a decision she makes despite the past – a refusal to let the worst thing that ever happened to her determine her future.
“I have lost many people. I saw hell with my own eyes when I was in the tunnels and looked Hamas in the eye,” she says. “But every day I choose to begin a new part of my life, to look ahead, to go to work and not to let grief become my identity.”
