How one Canadian donor is turning the Negev into Israel’s AI capital

The faculty is designed as a long-term bet on Israel’s brainpower rather than on any single technology trend. It brings together computer science, software engineering, information systems engineering, and AI under one roof to answer a very practical question: Can Israel train enough people, fast enough, to keep its high-tech engine running in an era defined by algorithms and data rather than slogans?

The project is backed by a major gift from the Schulich Foundation in honor of Stein’s work and leadership. The new faculty is expected to include about 80 academic staff members, roughly half of them AI researchers, and to serve some 2,200 undergraduate students, 400 master’s students, and 170 PhD students.

BGU says it will also host the largest artificial intelligence research center in Israel, working closely with industry partners on campus and at the adjacent Advanced Technologies Park.

“Creating the Stein Faculty of Computer and Information Science places Ben-Gurion University at the forefront of the global technological revolution,” BGU president Prof. Daniel Chamovitz said at the launch.

His argument is straightforward: Beersheba is no longer the far edge of Israel’s academic map. With a heavy concentration of AI researchers and a campus that sits in the heart of the Negev, next to the Gav Yam Negev Advanced Technologies Park, BGU is trying to turn geography into an advantage.

The new faculty will house multiple research institutes, spanning the theory and foundations of AI, applied AI, software and security, interdisciplinary computational science, and the theory of computing. For students, that means fewer silos and more cross-pollination between those who prove the theorems and those who ship the code.

Stein’s name on the faculty is the visible part of a story that stretches back more than a decade. He is the managing partner and co-founder of Leaders Fund, a Toronto-based venture capital firm.

He co-founded and sold two enterprise software companies, Workbrain and Rypple. His professional life has been spent in the space where software quietly reorganizes how companies and people work.

That mindset carries over into his philanthropy. The Schulich Foundation, founded by Canadian businessman Seymour Schulich and based in Toronto, has committed more than $150 million to philanthropic investments in Israel since 2012.

Much of the investment in education and science, including the flagship Schulich Leader Scholarships program in Israel and Canada, which supports outstanding STEM undergraduates at five Israeli universities, among them BGU.

“This is not a one-off,” Stein says over Zoom. “We have been building long-term educational infrastructure in Israel for years, and this faculty is a natural next step.”

The context in which Stein is making this statement is important. In the past few years, Canadian public opinion around Israel has grown more polarized, and donors who support Israeli institutions can find themselves under scrutiny at home. Some would read that as a reason to move money elsewhere. Stein reads it as the opposite.

“In moments like these, the instinct should be to double down, not to pull back,” he says. The foundation's primary focus, as he refers to it, remains educational philanthropy in Canada and Israel. Short-term news cycles, social media storms, and even diplomatic chills are treated as noise rather than as signals to change course.

In 2025, saying one is “excited about AI” is almost a cliché. What distinguishes Stein’s version is his insistence on talking about where the technology actually does something useful, rather than where it simply generates headlines.

“We like AI in places where it accelerates what people are already doing or helps you get the signal from the noise,” he explains. He points to portfolio companies, including Israeli cloud security firm Upwind Security, that use AI to sift through vast amounts of data and flag real threats, rather than to replace humans entirely.

Some will be disappointed, he predicts, when AI does not instantly “do everything” or wipe out entire professions. Instead, he expects a “long march” in which high-volume, low-value tasks are automated, freeing people for work that is more complex, relational, or creative.

“You are going to see a lot of the boring, repetitive stuff disappear first,” he says. “The real leverage is for people and institutions that learn how to build AI into their workflows from day one.”

One of the most striking shifts he notices is generational.

“There is an AI-first mentality among teenagers and new graduates,” Stein observes. “Their first instinct is, how do I automate this? How do I use AI to learn faster or work better?”

That cultural change, he suggests, may matter as much as any new model architecture. He expects “prompt engineering” the skill of asking AI the right questions to become a serious area of study.

He says, "The models are powerful, but if you don't know how to talk to them, you won't get much value." “I would not be surprised to see universities teaching this explicitly.”

The question behind the Stein Faculty is not just whether AI is important. It is whether Israel can produce enough people who understand it deeply. Here, the numbers provide compelling evidence.

According to the Council for Higher Education, about 28% of all bachelor’s degree students in Israel studied engineering, computer science, mathematics, or statistics in the 2022/23 academic year, which amounts to roughly 58,000 students out of some 211,000 undergraduates.

A national program launched in recent years set a target to increase the number of higher education students in high-tech fields by about 40% to meet the needs of the tech industry.

Yet the pipeline is far from balanced. A 2025 report by the Israel Innovation Authority and the Aaron Institute found that only 5.2% of all 12th-grade girls took and passed the five-unit computer science matriculation exam in 2023, and that in every district, more than 60% of computer science matriculation graduates were boys.

For a country that depends heavily on its human capital, those numbers are both encouraging and worrying: encouraging because so many students are already in engineering and computer science tracks, worrying because large parts of the population, especially women and peripheral communities, are still underrepresented.

Stein’s bet on BGU is that a large, integrated faculty in the Negev can help widen that funnel, not just for the usual suspects from central Israel but for students from Beersheba, Dimona, Yeruham, and beyond. A bigger, more diverse cohort of computer science and AI graduates is, in his view, part of national resilience.

If you listen carefully to how Stein talks about “sticking to the north star,” you can hear the Canadian backdrop. Over the past few years, Canada’s tax authorities have taken a much closer look at Israel-linked charities.

In 2024, the Canada Revenue Agency revoked the charitable status of the Jewish National Fund of Canada, citing concerns over how donations had been used, and also removed the status of the Ne’eman Foundation.

Advocacy groups such as Just Peace Advocates and Independent Jewish Voices have campaigned against Canadian charities that send money to Israeli organizations, accusing some of helping to fund war crimes or illegal settlement activity and urging the government to clamp down.

At the same time, a recent civil society analysis of tax filings found that Canadian charities still sent more than 276 million Canadian dollars to Israel in 2024, either directly or via US-based pro-Israel organizations, underscoring the flow's size and endurance even as it comes under fire.

Jewish communal leaders in Canada have warned that the combination of regulatory crackdowns, protests, and public campaigns risks creating a chilling effect on mainstream giving to Israeli hospitals, universities, and social programs, blurring the line between political disputes and core educational or humanitarian support.

Stein’s answer is not to deny the pressure, but to outlast it. The Schulich Foundation, he insists, will not allow “short-term events, news cycles, or conflicts” to dictate its long-term strategy of educational philanthropy in Canada and Israel. In that sense, the Stein Faculty is as much a statement of intent as it is a building project.

Asked how the Stein Faculty can stand out in a crowded global landscape of computer science schools, Stein does not recite rankings. Instead, he talks about texture.

“This is not AI in a vacuum,” he says. “What excites me here is seeing AI applied to cancer research, to medicine, to climate, to cyber. You have this tight-knit campus where computer scientists are talking all the time to doctors, physicists, and social scientists.”

It is a picture of AI not as a discipline sitting atop the university, but as a language that different disciplines are gradually learning to speak together. In that sense, the size of the faculty contributes to its unique characteristics.

With thousands of students and dozens of senior researchers inside one academic unit, the network effects that entrepreneurs like Stein love to talk about can begin to show up in academic life.

BGU is already co-developing a major tech park right next to the campus, where multinational companies and Israeli startups operate offices with easy access to students and faculty.

For a country that built much of its high-tech identity on the axis between Tel Aviv and Herzliya, Beersheba’s quiet buildup of cyber units, startups, and university labs is starting to look less like an experiment and more like a second pole.

“That co-location is incredibly powerful,” Stein says. “Students can literally walk across the street into world-class companies, do internships, work on real problems, and then bring those insights back into the lab and classroom.”

Philanthropy in higher education often comes with soft-focus language about impact. Stein, whose day job involves measuring performance, talks in more concrete terms about how he will know whether the Stein Faculty is working.

First, he says, there will be growth across the academic pipeline. “We want to see a healthy funnel of undergrads, master’s, and PhD students choosing to study here and choosing to stay.”

Second will be research output and collaboration with industry, measured in publications, joint projects, and the ability to attract new research infrastructure to Beersheba.

Third, the careers of graduates.

“Are they taking important roles in the industry, are they founding companies in AI or cyber, are they creating intellectual property here in the Negev?” he asks. “If the answer is yes, you get a virtuous flywheel of talent, capital, and ideas.”

He also expects BGU’s physical infrastructure to keep expanding, supported by other donors and by companies setting up shop in and around the campus. A single gift can build a faculty. It cannot build an ecosystem on its own.

“Our gift is one piece of a much bigger puzzle,” he says. “The hope is that it acts as a catalyst for others to lean in.”

‘Never again’ and ‘we stand with Israel’

All of this might sound narrowly technocratic if Stein did not also locate it in a broader moral frame. The Schulich Foundation, he notes, does not see itself as a political actor and does not presume to lecture Israelis about how to run their internal affairs.

“We do not live here, so we are not going to pretend to have all the answers about Israeli politics,” he says. “What we can do is support the people, their education, and their ability to build a stronger economy and society.”

At the core of the foundation’s work, he adds, are two simple phrases that sound more like a promise than a branding line: “never again” and “we stand with Israel.”

“For us, backing Israeli universities and students is part of that commitment,” Stein says. “If we can help build the capabilities that keep this country secure, prosperous, and innovative, then we are doing our job.”

Instead of joining the daily shout, Stein is putting his money on the students who will be writing the code that runs the next decade. Ben-Gurion University is betting that the combination of global philanthropy, deep AI expertise, and the stubborn energy of the Negev will help shape Israel’s technological future.

Stein, it seems, is prepared to hold that position for the long term.