Qumra Capital has announced the closing of its $150 million second fund, six months after the closing of the first $115 million of the fund and its initial investments. Like its first fund, Qumra Capital II is a late stage fund investing in growth startups with an international market presence and annual sales of at least $10 million. Qumra Capital II plans to invest up to $15 million in each of 2-3 companies each year and overall invest in about 12 companies over the next four years.
Qumra Capital I was a $100 million fund which invested in eight companies: Fiverr, JFrog, Appsflyer, Riskified, Signals Analytics, Minute Media, Sweet Inn and Eyeview.
Managing partner Boaz Dinte said, "Seven of the eight companies grew 70%-100% within a year of our investment. This shows that these are excellent companies with strong management and high market capabilities that answer a genuine need, reach large markets and know what to do with the money."
Qumra Capital, a pioneer of late stage funds in Israel, was founded in 2014 by Dinte, Erez Shachar, and Sivan Shamri Dahan who worked together at Evergreen Venture Partners, one of Israel’s veteran venture capital funds. Shachar and Dinte were managing partners at Evergreen. The partners were joined by Daniel Slutzky who serves as the fund’s CFO and was previously Benchmark Israel’s operating partner and CFO.
The investors in the second fund are mainly family offices that invested in the first fund as well as US, European and Israeli financial institutions.
Last September, Qumra Capital II led a $31 million investment in oren and Roni Frank's online therapy company Talkspace. Dinte said that in the past 18 months $1.6 billion has been invested in 45 late-stage companies, in what is a market with growing demand. Half of the market is not relevant for Qumra, which only invests in financing rounds of up to $50 million. Qumra says that although there was demand of more than $150 million for the fund, Qumra II was capped at the original target.
Dinte added, "What we are looking for at the moment is 5% of the market. And in my opinion the market is only growing. The rate at which companies are moving into the late stage phase is outstripping the rate at which companies are leaving the market. So far this strategy has been good from our point of view, to enter companies that want to make a leap from sales of $10-20 million to sales of $80-100 million."
Dinte observed that the average age of companies raising $30 million is currently seven years, two years younger than the average age in 2013. Investments made by Qumra have so far been in companies operating for five years and with an average annual revenue of $18 million and an annual rate of growth of 150%.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on January 8, 2018
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2018