Five minutes into what was supposed to be the defining meeting of his company’s trajectory, Amos Bar-Joseph heard the alert on his phone. Incoming. He had ninety seconds to reach the shelter.
“Excuse me,” he told the investors on the video call. “I need to go.” And then he went. His co-founders, one in military fatigues from reserve duty and the other stranded in Greece with the airspace closed, kept the conversation going without him. Their CEO was in a bunker. The pitch continued.
The investors on the other end of that call were the team at Link Ventures in Boston. They had reached out to Swan, not the other way around. The product was working. The metrics were strong. The timing, by every rational measure, could not have been worse.
They invested anyway.
The Company That Almost Wasn’t
Swan is an AI-powered GTM engineering platform. In simpler terms, it automates the technical plumbing that sales and marketing teams spend enormous time maintaining — the routing logic, the data enrichment, the outreach sequences, the fragile integrations between tools that break every Tuesday afternoon.
Bar-Joseph founded the company with Ido Goldberg and Niv Oppenhaim. All three are Israeli. All three were building Swan when the conflict with Iran escalated in late 2024.
What they did not anticipate was that the escalation would coincide almost exactly with the moment their company became investable.
“We didn’t invite these conversations. The investors came to us. And then the war started, and we couldn’t stop.”
What Fundraising Under Fire Actually Looks Like
The popular narrative about Israeli startup resilience tends toward the heroic. Founders who push through. Teams that never stop. The nation that builds despite everything.
The reality is less cinematic and more exhausting.
Bar-Joseph has a young son — a newborn at the time. During the worst of the bombardment, he and his wife relocated to his mother-in-law’s home because she had a private shelter. The public shelters were available, but getting there in the middle of the night with an infant was a different calculation entirely.
“You get an alert that says in the next few minutes, you’ll need to enter the shelter,” Bar-Joseph explains. “So you stay close. Then the alarm sounds, and you have ninety seconds. You go in, you wait, you come out ten minutes later. Then you do it again at three in the morning. And then you have an investor call at eight.”
His co-founder Ido was called to military reserves. He joined investor calls in uniform, from wherever the army had him stationed. Niv was visiting Greece with his father when the airspace closed. His wife and child were back in Israel under the bombardments, and he could not reach them. He took calls anyway.
None of them had the option of pressing pause.
The Meeting That Closed the Round
The meeting with Link Ventures’ general partner was the one that mattered most. It was a full team call — the kind of meeting where decisions get made.
Five minutes in, the alert hit Bar-Joseph’s phone. He excused himself and ran to the shelter. On the other side of the call, Ido and Niv carried the conversation. One founder in military fatigues, another calling from a country he could not leave. The CEO absent because he was sheltering from incoming missiles.
They did not reschedule. They did not apologize. They kept going.
When Bar-Joseph returned to the call, the conversation had progressed. It was a good conversation. Link Ventures led the round at $6 million.
“The fact that the team held together under those conditions told us more than any deck could.”
The Short-Term Game
Ask Bar-Joseph about the broader situation and he does not reach for platitudes. He is direct in a way that only people who have lived under sustained threat tend to be.
“Israel is just playing the short-term game most of the time,” he says. “That’s our only way. We don’t have a long-term solution. The short term is just to buy more time for peaceful periods.”
It is a startling thing to hear from a tech CEO. Most founders traffic in ten-year visions and exponential curves. Bar-Joseph is building a company while living inside a calculation that operates on a five-year horizon between crises.
And yet the company does have a vision. Swan’s thesis is that GTM engineering — the technical work of making go-to-market systems function — should not live inside people. It should live inside systems. Humans should design direction. Systems should carry execution.
There is something quietly revealing about a founder building technology to relieve people of operational burden while personally carrying an extraordinary operational burden of his own.
What Resilience Actually Means
The word “resilience” gets used loosely in startup culture. It usually means working long hours, surviving a bad quarter, pushing through a product pivot.
For Israeli founders, the word carries a different weight.
“I don’t wonder what it would be like to live peacefully in Norway,” Bar-Joseph says. “This is the world that was given to us. Sometimes it’s better not to try and change the world. You try to change yourself instead.”
He is not performing stoicism. This is a practical philosophy forged by a population that has lived with air raid alerts, military service, and existential threat as background conditions for decades. The infrastructure is there — the Iron Dome, the shelter system, the alert networks. The cultural readiness is there too. People know the rituals. They know the ninety-second window. They know how to perform under these conditions because they have always had to.
What they do not always talk about is the cost. Bar-Joseph mentions it only when asked about his family.
“For myself, I can cope,” he says. “But when I look at my loved ones — my wife, my little one, my mother — that’s where it’s harder.”
The Thing Nobody Puts in the Press Release
There is a secondary effect of building under these conditions that does not make it into fundraising announcements.
When your co-founder is in military reserves and still shows up for the pitch, you learn something about the people you work with that no offsite or team-building exercise could replicate. When you have to excuse yourself from an investor call because missiles are incoming, and the conversation keeps going anyway, you learn something about the company you are building.
And when nothing in your professional life will ever be as difficult as sheltering your newborn during a bombardment while trying to close a funding round, you develop a particular kind of empathy for your customers. Their problems are real. Their operational pain is genuine. But you know, from direct experience, that nothing is unmanageable. That the system can hold. That people are capable of more than the circumstances suggest.
Swan closed its $6 million round. The product is growing. The team is building.
As the funding announcement went live, the country was entering another war, and the shelters are still within ninety seconds.
Amos Bar-Joseph is the CEO and co-founder of Swan (getswan.com), an AI GTM engineering platform. Swan raised $6 million in a round led by Link Ventures.
This article was written in cooperation with Tom White