Noam Mills

Mills began fencing at age nine, choosing the sport over flute as one of the after-school activities that fit her transportation schedule.[1] She trained at a club in Kfar Saba and demonstrated rapid development, becoming Israeli champion by age 11 and joining the national team at 13.[1] At 17, she began training under coach Ohad Balva, who would guide her through her senior international career.[1]

Mills grew up in Hod Hasharon, the middle daughter of a mother who worked for an insurance company and a father who owned a lighting-fixture business. In 2006, her father suffered an infection that caused severe brain damage and later died. Mills said her athletic breakthrough came while she was spending significant time at the hospital, an experience that gave her perspective beyond fencing.[1]

Her early ascent on the international stage came in 2006, when, at age 19, she won two World Youth Cups in women's épée and reached the top of the world rankings among under-20 competitors.[1] Her path to Harvard University was also shaped by fencing: she has said that Harvard's fencing coach, Peter Brand, attended the 2005 Maccabiah Games looking for prospective students, and that the sport made attending the university possible.[1]

Mills qualified for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing as the first Israeli female épée fencer ever to earn a place at the Games.[1][2] She was part of an Israeli delegation of 43 athletes competing across 12 sports; the contingent included 20 female athletes, Israel's largest women's presence at an Olympics at that time.[4] She placed 22nd in the individual women's épée event and was eliminated in the first round.[4][1]

Mills later recalled that a month before the Olympics she had placed seventh at the European Championships and defeated the fencer who went on to win Olympic gold, making her first-round exit in Beijing especially difficult.[1]

One week after the Beijing Games concluded, Mills began undergraduate studies at Harvard, where she earned a degree in economics alongside a minor in neuroscience and fenced recreationally on the university team.[1] She retired from competitive fencing around age 26, near the time of the 2012 London Olympics, a cycle for which she had been identified as a prospective contender.[5][1]

At the 2009 European Championships in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, Mills finished seventh.[6] She advanced through pool bouts against opponents from Sweden, Finland, and Turkey, then won direct-elimination matches against a Turkish opponent, Romania's Simona Alexandru, and Romania's Anca Măroiu before falling 15–13 in the quarterfinal to Ukraine's Yana Shemyakina.[6]

At a 2009 world championship event, Mills became the first Israeli female fencer to reach the last 16 and continued her run with 15–10 and 15–8 victories over French and Italian opponents before a 14–14 golden-touch loss to Ukraine's Poczykylova.[7]

At the 2010 European Fencing Championships in Germany, she won the bronze medal in women's épée—the first medal won by an Israeli fencer at either the European or World Championships and the best senior result in Israeli fencing history to that point.[3] En route to the podium, she defeated Russia's Anna Sivkova, Hungary's Dorina Budai, and Italy's Francesca Quondamcarlo before losing 15–8 to Germany's Imke Duplitzer in the semifinal.[3] The Israeli Olympic Committee announced a 25,000-shekel grant in recognition of the achievement, with half allocated to her coach.[3]

Away from major championships, Mills also won a competition in Mödling, Austria, an occasion later recalled for the Israeli team and local Jewish community members singing Hatikvah themselves when the anthem was not played at the medal ceremony.[8]

Before returning to Harvard in 2014 for an MBA, Mills worked at Boston Consulting Group. After completing the degree, she returned to Israel and spent two years on the investment committee of the FIMI fund. She then worked as a manager at the AI company SparkBeyond before becoming CFO of Mixtiles.[1]

In 2022, Mills co-founded Panax alongside Niv Yaar and Sefi Itzkovich.[1] The company develops an AI-powered cash-management platform that connects bank accounts, digital wallets, and other financial systems, standardizes and processes data in real time, and surfaces cash-flow risks and opportunities for its clients.[1] Panax raised a $5 million seed round led by TLV Partners in 2022 and a subsequent $10 million round led by Team8, bringing total funding to $15 million.[9][1] By 2025, Panax had 32 employees, most of them in Israel and some in New York.[1]

Mills has drawn explicit connections between her experience as a competitive fencer and her approach to building a startup, noting that both involve low odds of success, intense pressure, and the need to recover from failure.[1] She has described fencing as a deeply mental discipline requiring athletes to read opponents, adapt continuously, and tolerate discomfort—qualities she regards as transferable to entrepreneurship.[1]

Mills remains a reference point for the development of Israeli fencing. Her 2010 European Championship bronze was the first Israeli medal at a senior European or World Championship, and her 2009 top-16 run at a world championship event demonstrated that Israeli fencers could compete at an elite international level.[3][7] In 2025, she called the period "a peak time" for Israeli fencing and said it was the sport's strongest in Israel since three Israeli fencers competed at the 2008 Olympics.[10]

She has spoken about Israeli fencing's potential for wider impact, arguing that there is "no reason why Israel winning a medal at the Olympics couldn't have the same impact as winning medals had for judo in the 1992 Olympics," and attributing past difficulties not to a lack of talent but to the need to nurture it and create a platform for success.[10]