The Sarona Ventures Fund, under the Sarona Partners Group, has announced a new fund of $20 million which only includes investments from private investors and wealthy families. The fund’s focus is on early-stage investments in Israeli entrepreneurs and startups in the Seed and Series A stages.
Several significant investors have joined the fund, including multiple unicorn co-founders, among them TripActions, Verbit, Deel, ContentSquare and SumUP. Other investors include founders and managers from the most prominent funds in the world including Spark Capital, which invested in Twitter and Slack, and Green Bay Ventures, which invested in Lime, Dropbox, DocSign, Spotify and MoonPay. Anish Acharya, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, who led the firm’s investments in Deel and Titan among others, has also personally invested.
The fund will primarily focus on companies who have completed Sarona Partners’ 365x scale-up programs, as well as companies that have graduated from the prominent US accelerator, Y-Combinator, and recently launched fund-owned accelerators.
“We are lucky and proud to have so many amazing people join our vision,” said Toot Shani, founding partner and CEO of Sarona Partners. “We are honored to have our scale up strategy validated by the best people of the industry. With the help and advice from such amazing investors, our startups will fly.”
Additional investors joining Sarona include the partners’ fund of the global law firm Orrick, and other entrepreneurs like the Afflelou family, owners of the French optics consortium, Austria’s largest angel investor Johann ‘Hansi’ Hansmann, Justin Mateen, co-founder of Tinder, Dr. Ravi Dattatreya and Olivier Elbaz, former General Manager at Salesforce.
Recently, the new fund partook in a Series A investment in TINT, a company that enables tech platforms around the world to embed insurance and regulations into products, that was a graduate of the Y-Combinator program. The Israeli companies that the fund has invested in include: ByondXR, a 3D and augmented reality company that is backed by OurCrowd and the Union Group; Salvador Tech, a cyber-attack, software, and hardware recovery company, that is backed by Chemi Peres’ Pitango Fund; Agora, an investment management software that recently announced a fundraising round led by Aleph Venture Capital; Depoint, whose solution helps retail organizations track their inner-workings and is backed by monday.com’s first angel investors; and Medcase, a company that provides medical data to giants like Google.
Sarona Ventures was founded in 2017 as an arm of the Sarona Partners Group, by Philip Bouaziz (Chairman) and Toot Shani (CEO), on the grounds of the Bouaziz family office investment house. With aggregated investments in over 300 startups, to date, the Group’s portfolio includes seven unicorn companies.
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