Dan Avida, who last June sold Decru to Network Appliance (Nasdaq: NTAP) for $272 million in cash and shares, is now jointly founding a new fund with former Lightspeed Venture Partners general partners Isaac (Yitz) Applbaum, Gill Cogan, and Ken Elefant. The new fund, Opus Capital, is expected to raise an estimated $250 million.
Other general partners in Opus include former Juniper Networks VP worldwide marketing Carl Showalter and Mark Michaels.
Opus is expected complete its financing round in the coming months. The fund will invest in the seed and first financing rounds of companies in communications and networks. It is still not clear whether the fund will establish a branch in Israel, but it is unquestionably expected to make massive investments in companies in Israel.
According to Opus’s website, the fund partners will continue to manage investments for the funds they left: Lightspeed and Weiss, Peck & Greer Venture Partners, whose founder, Phil Greer, will be a special limited partner in Opus.
Before Avida and Serge Plotkin founded Decru, Avida was president and CEO of Efi Arazi’s Electronics for Imaging. Decru was a US company that supplied storage solution for enterprises. Before it was acquired, the company had 45 employees.
Gill Cogan, an expatriate Israeli, was one of the first partners in the first venture capital fund to operate in Israel -- Athena Ventures. He invested in Galileo Technologies, which was sold to Marvell Technology Group for $2.7 billion in shares. Cogan is currently a director in Israeli start-up Personeta.
Published by Globes [online] - www.globes.co.il - on December 4, 2005