Israeli venture capital fund StageOne Ventures has announced the closing of its $65 million StageOne II fund. The Herzliya-based fund, which invests in early-stage enterprise software and communications technology startups hopes to repeat the success of its first fund. The $46 million StageOne I fund had six successful exits and boasted handsome returns to its investor base. These successes included Guardium (sold to IBM), Traffix (sold to F5 Networks), Trivnet (sold to Gemalto), Octalica (sold to Broadcom), Oversi (sold to Allott Communications) and Crescendo (sold to F5).
Yuval Cohen and Tal Slobodkin will preside over StageOne II as managing partners, and are joined by Benny Schnaider and Professor Meir Feder, both serial entrepreneurs, as partners, as well as Tal Jacobi, partner and CFO. The five have been investing together for several years and bring decades of solid operational and entrepreneurial experience, as well as acute investment know-how and network reach.
StageOne II will seek to make investments in such verticals where the management team believes ample opportunity abounds in the Israeli technology ecosystem such as enterprise software, big data, cloud, security, mobile, storage, fintech and IoT. The fund has made four investments to-date in Avanan, SafeDK, Capitalise and Minerva Labs.
The fund's base of limited partners includes past investors, multinational financial institutions, leading insurance conglomerates, notable family offices, fund of funds and sophisticated private investors, all from North America, Asia Pacific, Israel and South Africa.
Cohen said "These are exciting times to be investing in Israel's enterprise and communications technology sector. Opportunities are plentiful, appetite is robust, and we are seeing a number of historically successful entrepreneurs hitting the ground running with their next venture."
Slobodkin said, "We strongly believe that the right combination of highly skilled founders, sound valuations and a mature technology ecosystem is the key to operating a successful venture fund in this environment. It is now our duty to identify the outliers that we believe will make the best investments, and we have the right team in place to carry out this objective."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on July 7, 2015
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