News & Updates
DISPERSION AND PERSISTENCE OF RETURNS: UNDERSTANDING THE DYNAMICS OF ISRAELI VENTURE CAPITAL
At Sweetwood Ventures, we are dedicated to improving our ability to choose exceptional venture capital fund managers in Israel. As venture capital continues to scale and more investors are allocating capital, the asset class is poised for more growth. With this taken into account, it is important to consider new parameters of identifying top-performing managers in the ecosystem. General Partner, Amit Kurz, shares his thoughts on the importance of taking dispersion and persistency of returns into account in order to identify consistent top-performers in the asset class. Based on our data capturing fund return profiles within the past decade, we have identified two important outliers that have proven their consistency of remaining in the top quartile funds category in subsequent funds – Emerging Managers and Renaissance Managers. The link to the article below: https://akurz.medium.com/dispersion-and-persistence-of-returns-understanding-the-dynamics-of-the-israeli-venture-capital-5a7f33d4a1b4
Notable Investment Rounds
Wiz, a Cyberstarts portfolio company, secured a $100 million Series A round co-led by Index Ventures and Sequoia with the participation of Insight Partners and Cyberstarts. Wiz is a cloud security innovator that helps companies secure their cloud infrastructure at scale, providing security teams with risk insights.
Verbit, a portfolio company of Viola Ventures and Vertex Ventures, secured a $60 million Series C round led by Sapphire Ventures with the participation of ClalTech and Vertex Ventures, among others. Verbit uses AI and human intelligence to provide smart transcription solutions in real time.
Percepto, a portfolio company of Emerge VC, secured a $45 million Series B round led by Koch Disruptive Technologies with the participation of Union Square Venture Partners and Spider Capital. Percepto creates AI-powered autonomous robots that monitor and protect tangible assets from anywhere in the world.
Notable 'Exits'
Innoviz Technologies Ltd., an Amiti Ventures portfolio company, which produces lidars, laser-based sensors that allow cars to detect their surroundings, went public through a SPAC (NASDAQ: INVZ) that provided $150 million in cash and raised $200 million from investors at $15 per share, which valued the company at $1.4 billion.
Snap Inc (NYSE: SNAP), a software and programming company and creator of social media platform Snapchat, acquired Voca.ai, for $70 million, a Lool Ventures portfolio company which uses AI technology to develop human-friendly agents to reduce the size and cost of call centers.
Recommended Reads
With investors expecting a Latin American boom in cryptocurrency, Mexico's financial services platform, Bitso, closes on $62 million in financing [TechCrunch] Water futures set to join likes of gold and oil and trade on Wall Street for first time [Business Insider] Amazon to buy Cyprus and move HQ there - 10 Outrageous Predictions for 2021 [Forbes] As a teenager, Taihei Kobayashi spent two winters sleeping on the streets of Tokyo. Now, he's the CEO of a billion-dollar tech startup. [Bloomberg]
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