8VC’s Alex Moore scouts Mideast ahead of Saudi leader’s White House visit

As Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman heads to Washington next week, venture capital investor Alex Moore is exploring laser warfare startups and sea-cruising drone technology that could capture a portion of the hundreds of billions of dollars the Gulf ruler promises to spend in the U.S.

Moore, an early protégé of Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, heads the defense portfolio at Austin, Texas-based 8VC and traveled to Israel last week to assess new investment prospects for the $8 billion firm. Other partners have been scouting companies in the UAE and neighboring countries for 8VC, which counts Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala sovereign wealth fund as an investor.

The Saudi Crown Prince, known widely as MBS, is scheduled to visit the White House on Nov. 18, where he will follow up on the $148 billion arms agreement he signed in May when U.S. President Donald Trump met him in Riyadh. The meeting in Washington will also take up Saudi Arabia’s longstanding request for a comprehensive defense pact similar to one with Qatar and may determine the disposition of some $450 billion more in Saudi funding commitments to the U.S. 

“We’re very interested in this new possible agreement with the Saudis,” Moore, 43, said in an interview with The Circuit in Tel Aviv, predicting it will “unleash innovation.” 

Trump says he will press MBS again next week to normalize relations with Israel by joining the Abraham Accords, the U.S.-brokered pact from 2020 that was signed by the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco. Many Israeli-founded startups establish headquarters in the U.S. and some of their technology could be attractive to the Saudis.

Among the firms Moore visited during his week in Israel was Particle Lab, which is developing anti-missile systems using supercharged, subatomic particle beams; and LiteVision, the maker of a wide-angle camera mounted on airborne drones to identify threats such as rocket launchers on the battlefield.

“Israel has the talent to actually leapfrog the U.S. ecosystem in a few categories,” Moore said, citing lasers and other directed-energy technologies as an area where Israel is “radically ahead.”

Escorting Moore through his meetings was Isaac “Yitz” Applbaum, a longtime San Francisco-based VC investor who – together with his son Aaron Applbaum and partners Frederic Landau and Yoav Knoll – recently founded Kinetica, an Israeli venture capital firm specializing in defense startups. Moore also notched a meeting with Isaac Herzog at the Israeli President’s Modernist-style residence in Jerusalem’s Talbiyeh neighborhood.

The Kinetica team includes Saar Tzur, a Major General in the Israeli Defense Forces reserves and adviser to drone maker Heven Aerotech, and Amit Kunik, a reserve Brigadier General in military intelligence.

On the relationship with 8VC, Yitz Applbaum says: “We are their eyes and ears in Israel.”

Moore’s visit is an indication that Israel is starting to emerge from the two years of the Gaza war, when foreign investors refrained from visiting the country even if they “stayed engaged quietly,” said Avi Hasson, CEO of Startup Nation Central, which tracks Israel’s tech industry. “What we are seeing now is an acceleration – senior partners are back on the ground, activity is picking up, and the ecosystem is moving from quiet maintenance to renewed growth.”

A 2005 graduate of Stanford University in economics who stands 6-foot-5 (196 centimeters), Moore was the first employee hired by Palantir, the data-mining powerhouse that bridges Silicon Valley and the Washington national-security world, where he became Director of Operations.

Working while in his twenties with Thiel and co-founder Alex Karp – both legends in the software industry – was an education in broadly divergent styles of management, he recalls, particularly in the take-no-prisoners world of young software engineers.

Running an engineering organization is like “taming a wild animal,” Moore said. “We had kind of a motley crew of these super-genius engineers… and the smarter the people are, the more rebellious they get, and they don’t want to agree on things. Like, ‘My architecture idea is better than yours. Why would we build the product your way?’ You have to get them on the same page.”

Part of Palantir’s success was the way that Thiel and Karp played off each other, Moore said. “Peter is this big vision, world-level type of problem solver. So I think from him, we basically got this confidence of just being extremely bold, even as young people. Like, ‘Why don’t we build the best software company in the world?’ So you kind of start believing it. You get a lot of that strength from Peter, that level of extremity, of extreme thinking.”

Karp, on the other hand, was more of a philosopher and an artist. “He is a genius at understanding the mood of the team – adding a sense of humor here, adding some tough love here, and conducting the orchestra in a way that feels very seamless. He kind of pulls the genius engineer out of his own head.”

After leaving Palantir in 2010 and founding two businesses himself, Moore joined 8VC, a fund started by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and headed its startup incubator program. One of the young companies he mentored was Saronic, a maker of maritime drones for the U.S. Navy, which is now valued at $4 billion. Working with Saronic from the ground up kindled an interest in maritime technology that he found in Israel at startups Orca AI and Metacentric Systems.

Sitting at dusk in the courtyard at Tel Aviv’s fashionable Norman Hotel, Moore says drones should be used to address conflicts such as the attacks on ships by Yemen’s Houthi rebels that have paralyzed traffic in the Red Sea – a body of water bordered both by Saudi Arabia and Israel.

“I think we will end up with a mostly autonomous, or entirely autonomous, policing force of boats that follow around oil tankers and have interdiction capabilities. One will have drones, one will have directed-energy, others will have guns, another will have warheads,” Moore said, spinning out battle scenarios as he leaned back in an Adirondack chair.

“If you’re going into dangerous areas, I think that’s the future,” he said.

As for winning some of the Saudi contracts MBS will be offering in Washington this week, and others pledged by the UAE and Qatar during Trump’s Middle East swing in May, Moore said several companies in 8VC’s portfolio are primed to compete.

“Where we are at now is we have industrial-grade startups that are ready and capable of setting up factories and facilities and building products in the Middle East,” Moore said. 

“It’s really about knowing that the companies we do send over to do those deals can deliver,” he said. “I’m more optimistic than ever.”