Israeli-founded companies created more than 20,000 jobs in California and paid average earnings nearly double those of other companies in the state in 2024, according to a new report from the U.S.-Israel Business Alliance.
“It’s really interesting and helpful to actually quantify what the economic impact of Israeli-founded companies in California looks like,” Aaron Kaplowitz, president of the alliance, told JNS.
Released on Tuesday, the report states that, as of 2024, there are 367 Israeli-founded companies in the state, which created 22,650 jobs.
Those companies added $6.5 billion to the economy—similar to gross domestic product—and $8.9 billion in total gross economic output, or overall business activity, according to the report.
The average earnings from jobs that Israeli companies created was $175,093 annually, which Kaplowitz called the report’s “most eye-popping statistic.” Average annual income in the state is $88,255, per the report.
“If you look at all the other companies, the state average is $88,000 and change, so it’s almost exactly double the average earnings at jobs not created by Israeli-founded companies,” Kaplowitz told JNS.
According to the report, 32 Israeli-founded “unicorns,” or companies with a value of at least about $1 billion, are headquartered in the state. That’s the most of any state and is followed by New York, according to Kaplowitz.
“These companies tend to have a higher valuation,” he told JNS. “They are huge job creators typically and they generate a lot of revenue, because they’re doing a lot of business.”
Four of the top five industries of Israeli-founded companies in the state are in the technology field––custom computer programming services, software publishers, computer equipment manufacturing and computer systems design services.
The other industry is restaurants, which comes in fourth of five.
The report breaks down how much economic impact Israeli-founded companies have on each county in California. The biggest impact was seen in Santa Clara County (11,002 jobs), followed by Los Angeles County (2,701), San Francisco County (2,315) and Orange County (1,015).
Kaplowitz told JNS that the unicorns are almost entirely in Silicon Valley counties.
“There’s a byproduct of an Israeli-founded company succeeding,” he said. “If you have a megacompany, like a unicorn, in Silicon Valley and all of a sudden you have 30 of them, well it follows logic that maybe you would then have like a hummus restaurant that pops up, or Israeli entrepreneurs who want to service that economy and that demographic would naturally follow.”
The alliance, with some help from University of California, Berkeley students, identified and confirmed all 367 Israeli-founded companies in the state through registered databases, he told JNS.
The major in-state issue of water is mentioned only briefly in the report.
Kaplowitz told JNS that “there’s a lot of things we had to leave off the table for the report, because we’re just limited by word count and pages.”
Israel is “the world leader” when it comes to specific water technologies, so its export footprint on the matter spans across the globe,” he said.
“California has had drought issues in recent years. There’s a lot of activity happening on the ground with Israeli water tech,” he said. “Israeli water tech has been so embedded in California already that it wasn’t such a novelty to include it in this report.”
The alliance has also issued reports on New York, Virginia and Florida in recent months.
Kaplowitz said that Israeli-founded companies have had the biggest impact on New York, as there are 648 such companies in the state. California comes second to New York in most of the main statistics, he said.
But California has had the highest numbers of average earnings and unicorns compared to the other states that the organization has examined, per Kaplowitz.
California is slated to host the Olympics and World Cup, so embracing Israeli security technology would be “a strategic opportunity” for the state, according to the report.
“Israeli companies specialize in aggregating data from open sources, social media, sensors and classified or proprietary feeds to identify emerging risks,” it states. “For events such as the Olympic Games, which unfold over weeks and across multiple venues, this kind of intelligence-driven security enables authorities to move from reactive response to proactive prevention.”
“It’s inevitable that there’s going to be cybersecurity attacks or attempted attacks on some of these mega-events,” Kaplowitz told JNS. “It happens all the time. It happens thousands of times a day. There’s no reason to think it won’t happen when all eyes are on California.”
“If California wants to have the best technology for safety and security, especially in cyber, then Israeli founders have to have a seat at the table,” he said.
‘Helping the largest economy in the U.S.’
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, drew controversy after saying at a recent event promoting his book that hard‑liners in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition want to annex Judea and Samaria, which he said has caused some observers to describe Israel “appropriately as sort of an apartheid state.”
In a subsequent event, he said that he was referring to a Thomas Friedman op-ed in the New York Times expressing concern about the direction of the Israeli government.
Kaplowitz told JNS that he didn’t want to criticize Newsom, who was the second governor in the country to visit Israel after Oct. 7.
There is a “track record of support,” he said.
“There’s rumors that he will be running for president one day,” Kaplowitz said. “I hope that he focuses on what’s happening right now in California and understands that Israeli founders and Israeli companies are helping him at his job and making him look better by helping the largest economy in the U.S. power forward.”
Kaplowitz thinks that given what’s happened in the state since Oct. 7, including two Israeli Americans recently being attacked in the Bay Area, elected officials should “publicly say that California is open for business to Israeli entrepreneurs.”
“I think the Israelis need to feel like California is still a place where they can build a successful business and create more local jobs,” he told JNS.
