The new Israeli venture capital fund will invest in companies with $1 million in yearly sales.
Brothers Joshua and Amiran Levinberg, who were part of the founding team of Gilat Satellite Networks Ltd. (Nasdaq: GILT; TASE: GILT), are launching a new venture capital fund today. The new fund, JAL Ventures, has raised $60 million, which will be invested in companies that already have an annual sales turnover of $1 million. The Levinbergs founded the fund together with general partners Tal Shaked and Yair Elbaz.
The fund will probably focus on two sectors: business to business (B2B) technology and the security market. JAL Ventures was founded a decade ago, but has hitherto served as the Levinberg brothers' investment arm. Commenting on the fund's launch today, Joshua Levinberg said, "There is a high-tech industry of extraordinary quality in Israel, including excellent venture capital funds. We bring mainly the vast experience we have accumulated over many years as entrepreneurs, managers, and investors. We regard ourselves as corporate builders, and have been through the startup cycle a number of times with an idea, until the company had sales in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. With the help of this experience, we are trying to help the entrepreneurs of our portfolio companies."
Shaked added, "We're looking for a winning team and a company with paying customers We've learned that there's no substitute for a determined and high-quality group of entrepreneurs, and for feedback from the market obtained from customers voting with their feet."
JAL Ventures has already made three investments: in cyber security company Dome9 Security; Fornova, which gathers tourism data; and Ametrine Technologies, which has developed a thermal camouflage technology. JAL Ventures has had three exits; it invested in Kasamaba, which was sold to LPSN for $40 million in 2007. JAL Ventures later invested in Matan Digital Printers, sold to Electronics for Imaging (EFI) for an estimated $48 million in July 2015. The third exit was two months ago, when Nanorep was sold to LogMeIn for $45 million.