The Hidden Trillion-Dollar Boom You're Missing!

Hi, I'm Amy Shapiro, journalist at CEK. We're here today at the Defense Tech Expo 2026 in Tel Aiv. I'm joined by Manny Shalom, the CEO of T3 Defense. Manny, thank you so much for joining us today. >> Thank you for having me. Thank you so much. >> It's an absolute pleasure. Um, to start off with, can you talk us through the uh the kind of mission statement of T3 Defense? So I've started the journey

almost three years ago just when the war in Ukraine was in about four or five months and I what I came to realize we are entering a defense era and a defense era as opposed to other parts is very interesting it's delayed meaning the minute a war starts or a president says he wants a golden dome it takes few years it actually shows in the P&L of companies so that's number one number two defense cycles are very long. So

once you start buying defense, it's going to take five, seven, 10 years. And number three, there is no sensitivity to price. If we need a tank or a submarine or an anti- drone, we buy it whatever the price is. Think of all the congressional hearing of overspending according to budget. So there is no sensitivity to price, long cycle and delayed. So I thought it's a very good

story for a public company. That's where I started. And what T3 defense started as identifying the right parameters of what would be a good acquisition target. I have identified 22 criteria and based on that we I have identified 440 potential target companies worldwide 60% in the US about 30 in Israel and the rest of the world ownership revenue profitability sector and those could be very boring parts and let me give you an

example 40% of the companies we look at are metal processing very old school industrial processes but if you build a submarine or a tank or a drone, everybody starts with a taking a metal and shaping it. And those metal processing company today have a backlog of 15 years. 15 years to process the orders they have. So it's a very exciting industry. Now as opposed to

other industries, defense is very uh robust in the sense that many different parts we invest in uh industrial companies, we invest in application companies, we invest in software businesses. So you have to understand in different things as opposed to um biotech where you you talk molecules here you need to understand a lot of different moving parts all of them are part of a big picture and that's what T3

uh defense is looking to do is to imagine the modern battlefield to understand what would be the moving parts there and try to identify what would be the relevant building blocks of that and what we do is we go and buy those building blocks because we think that the battlefield will make all those building blocks go and and we provide them financing, we provide them management and marketing and we try to explode them in a good way meaning to give them what they need in order to grow globally. >> Right. And and so T3 is like a massive

holding company responsible for the the companies that we see here behind us. If you were to summarize what is your kind of acquisition ethos, what is it that really makes a defense company stand out to you? >> So the strategy is or the think process starts with us identifying the battlefield. We break down. So let's take the US submarine. Uh the the Ministry of War in the US announced they're going to new uh submarine for the US. So we would have a think group that would start on understanding how do you build a submarine? What are the different components? Usually there are something like 2,000 subcontractors.

About 15 or 20 of them are irreplaceable, meaning it's going to be very expensive to replace them. And what we do is we try to identify those irreplaceable ones and try and buy them. So the strategy is to buy something that is going to be a very long-term contract and find the unique uh partners, the unique subcontractors that were going to be that and we try to come up with a cohesive coherent story of what would be uh part of that and we always look for those synergies inside of the group and outside with potential new customers. And finally, Manny, what uh for you and and your companies, what are the unique uh challenges and opportunities of building a defense startup, a defense company in Israel? >> So many many public companies or

investors in general are very financially oriented, meaning they come with they start with the Excel file, how much they make, what's going to be the multiples and so on and so forth. We try to take a more strategic view understanding uh more than that. It's not just how the numbers are going to shift. It's also a lot about the people, a lot about the interconnectivity with other holding companies, um, with the market, with our competitors. Uh, again, a lot of people are today are investing in defense. We try to really look at the at the actual underlying product that is going to be part of a bigger picture, not just the Excel file. Again, I think a lot of good companies are there doing it. We put a lot of uh a lot of uh uh

weight into the per people aspect and what the people are, what they're doing, how long they've been in business. Um so we are we are very excited about it. It's a very interesting journey. >> Absolutely. Well, good luck uh with the rest of your journey. It's been a real pleasure to talk to you today, Manny. >> Thank you so much.