Israel Seed Partners, a venture capital group specializing in seed capital investments, has closed Israel Seed Limited Partnership III, a new capital fund totaling $40 million. This brings the total capital managed by Israel Seed to $58 million. Israel Seed will typically invest in the seed and first round, with an average investment of $1-2 million.
Investors in this new fund include institutional investors such as Invesco, BT Alex Brown (now DeutscheBank), Nomura Securities, The Wellcome Trust, Clal Electronics and Clal Industries, Flag Venture Management, Silicon Valley Bank, the law firm of Wilson-Sonsini-Goodrich and Rosati and others. The fund has also secured the moneys of well-known Internet entrepreneurs such Marc Andreessen (co-founder of Netscape and CTO of AOL), Jerry Yang (co-founder of Yahoo), Pierre Omidyar (founder of EBay) and Eric Schmidt (CEO of Novell).
Jonathan Medved, Managing Partner of Israel Seed Partners, said that the involvement of such institutional investors and individuals in early stage funding of Israeli local high tech is "a tremendous vote of confidence in the Israeli start-up market. Our investors realize that Israel has clearly emerged as the most exciting venture market outside of Silicon Valley".
Israel Seed has 18 portfolio companies in from its first two funds, including Compugen, Dealtime.com, Foxcom, Xacct, and others. Israel Seed Partners include Neil Cohen, Managing Partner of Israel Seed, Jon Medved and Michael Eisenberg. The three started Israel Seed in a garage at the end of 1995 with $2 million in initial funding.
According to Michael Eisenberg, Managing Partner of Israel Seed, the new fund will focus on consumer E-Commerce, Web Content, broadband infrastructure, and technology enabling Business to Business commerce on the Net.
Published by Israel's Business Arena June 15, 1999