The Man Who Put Israeli Tech on the Map — Literally

The Cartographer of the Startup Nation: How Guy Franklin Turned a Map Into a Movement Every great institution begins with a question nobody else thought to ask. For Guy Franklin, a Tel Aviv-born accountant then working at EY in Manhattan, the question arrived in 2013 with the force of the obvious: how many Israeli startups are actually operating in New York — and why can no one tell me? The answer, it turned out, was 56. Guy put them on a map. A dozen years later, that map — Israeli Mapped in NY — counts more than 440 active Israeli startups in New York City, and Franklin himself has become something rarer than a unicorn: an indispensable human being. If Silicon Valley has its power brokers and Tel Aviv its generals-turned-founders, New York's Israeli tech scene has Guy, a man who built the ecosystem's central nervous system armed with little more than a spreadsheet, relentless generosity, and a startling inability to forget a name. From Side Project to Institution What began as a cartographic curiosity is today the most comprehensive database of the Israeli tech ecosystem in New York — a living, continuously updated atlas of companies, founders, funding stages, addresses, and open positions. Founders use it to find co-conspirators. Investors use it to find deals. Job seekers use it to find employers. Journalists use it to find out what on earth is happening. It is, in the truest sense, infrastructure — the kind nobody appreciates until they imagine its absence, like plumbing, or Wi-Fi, or a direct flight from JFK to Ben Gurion. The numbers tell the story of an ecosystem in full bloom. From 56 companies at inception to over 440 today — roughly an eightfold expansion — the map has documented, and in no small part accelerated, New York's emergence as the second home of the Startup Nation. The community now counts more than 400 Israeli founders, along with the VCs and operators who orbit them. When the New York Stock Exchange wants to celebrate Israeli innovation, it doesn't call a consulate. It calls Guy. The Bell Tolls for Him And call they did — three times. In July 2023, August 2024, and October 2025, the NYSE invited Israeli Mapped in NY to ring the Opening Bell, with Franklin assembling on the podium a who's-who of Israeli tech royalty: Wiz's Assaf Rappaport, Cyera's Yotam Segev, Dazz's Merav Bahat, and a rotating cast of founders representing hundreds of companies and untold billions in enterprise value. In January 2026, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange followed suit, with Franklin opening trading alongside eight leading CEOs — presumably because ringing bells on only one continent had begun to feel provincial. That same month, he was received by President Isaac Herzog in Jerusalem. One suspects the President wanted to be added to the database. The Weekly Engine Room But the grandeur of the bell ceremonies obscures the quieter machinery that makes Israeli Mapped in NY genuinely transformative: the events. Weekly, free, and ruthlessly usef