Fresh Fund | Wrapping up 2023, starting 2024
Latest Investments, portfolio news, and career opportunities at our portfolio companies
It’s been a while since we’ve published a newsletter. The truth is that since Oct 7th we haven’t felt like sharing.
But, we have been busy.
Since the war broke out on October 7th, we’ve finalized three new investments, for a total of 17 investments since launching our second $35M pre-seed fund just over a year ago.
It's not (just) about delivering #NoMatterWhat; it's about our conviction that Israeli tech, with its unique combination of talent, ambition, curiosity, and resilience will continue to deliver strong outcomes. We are blown away by the strength and determination of our founders and their teams, and we are confident in the ability of our portfolio and the broader community to reemerge strengthened from this ordeal.
In hopes and prayers for peaceful days, and a better 2024,
The Fresh Fund team
👋 Welcome to our Portfolio
Cubic - Founded by Oran and Guy, Cubic is a tech-driven solution that transforms the complex suite of freight forwarding services (International inventory transport, customs, insurance, etc.) into a simple online product. Cubic integrates with the e-commerce ecosystem (Amazon, Shopify, IMSs, 3PLs, etc.) and automates a significant part of the freight forwarding process to help merchants save time, money and gain control over their operations.
Ditto - Founded by Eddie, Sahar, and Itay, Ditto is an AI personal fitness trainer that can “see” you with any camera and interact with you while you train. Its virtual coach guides you through a gamified workout experience and creates personalized fitness plans based on your preferences and progress over time.
Guardoc - Founded by Hadass and Ori, Guardoc aims to revolutionize clinical compliance and patient care, starting with Long Term Care. Guardoc develops a smart audit engine that analyzes clinical documentation in near real-time to identify errors, gaps, and discrepancies. This results in accurate and compliant patient charts. With Guardoc, providers no longer have to go through the lengthy and time-consuming process of clinical compliance, allowing them to increase their financial profits while freeing up clinicians’ time to provide better care.
Proov - Founded by Maya and Einat, Proov.ai is a GenAI powered model validation platform for financial institutions. Bridging the gap between data science and compliance teams, Proov.ai streamlines and enhances the validation process, ensuring regulatory compliance and unlocking the full potential of AI in banking.
Vayu - Founded by Erez, Shenhav and Shai, Vayu is an AI-based B2B billing & account receivable infrastructure platform that is based on flexible pricing models and unstructured data digestion. The core mission of the company is to elevate finance to a strategic level, achieved by leveraging AI to automate the quote-to-cash process. Vayu's no-code revenue platform unites finance, revenue teams, and engineers, streamlining the process for achieving flexibility in iterating on pricing strategies.
Yuki - Founded by Ido and Amir, Yuki is building tools to help businesses keep spending on data infrastructure under control. With spend on Snowflake, Databricks and others expected to eclipse $50B by 2028, it’s time to start building FinOps tools in the space.
Stealth - we’ve made investments in two startups still in stealth - one is an AI platform for developing biologics and the second is a sales-intelligence startup.
💫 Portfolio Highlights
AcSense was named as one of Israel's top 21 most promising startups by Mako and IVC.
CarbonBlue has been chosen as a carbon removal supplier in Frontier’s latest round of pre-purchases for 2023. 14 companies were selected to get a pre-purchase in this batch out of 132 projects that applied. Only 30 companies got Frontier so far. This is a significant milestone for the company, that gives a strong vote of confidence on their unique CDR approach and its commercial potential moving forward. Don’t miss this article published in Haaretz (in Hebrew), featuring the company’s solution, journey so far, and vision for a net-zero future. Also, listen to this video interview on the ‘This is CDR’ show with Dr. Dan Deviri, the company’s co-founder and CEO.
Gigablue was featured on TheMarker’s most promising Israeli startups list. The company’s solution was also featured on NatureCode, an Israeli organization promoting bio-mimicry solutions. The company has recently partnered and will be featured in the next Carbon Unbound conference taking place in NYC next year.
ITC launches in the US market and deploys a traffic management solution in Peachtree Corners, one of the nation's first smart cities powered by real-world connected infrastructure and 5G.
MDI Health solution for Adverse Drug Reactions”, one of the leading causes for deaths in the US, was featured in this article published in Forbes. MDI raised $20M in Series A at the beginning of 2023 a round which was led by Intel Capital with the participation of Maverick Ventures and existing investors.
Nia, together with The Pew Charitable Trusts, Shipt, and the US Chamber of Commerce organized the Nontraditional Workers and Retirement Policy Summit, in Washington D.C. Representatives from companies, organizations, and the media such as Gusto, Intuit, WSJ and Aspen Institute participated in the panels. You can watch the full event here.
Remepy’s CEO and Chief Medical Officer were interviewed on the PharmaPhorum podcast, sharing their forward-thinking vision of how tailored software can unlock brain patterns that modulate the immune system and enhance the efficacy of drugs. Check out “Lu Yehi”, an initiative by Remepy aimed at helping people in Israel to strengthen themselves and their loved ones through a collection of effective tools and methods to cope with anxiety, uncertainty, fear, and trauma.
Sloyd got accepted to A16Z’s prestigious ‘SPEEDRUN’ program for gaming startups from around the world. Beyond the top-notch content and hands-on support, the program also includes $500K funding. Read more in this profile article published (in Hebrew) on Geektime
Twelve was mentioned on the popular fintech newsletter “Fintech Brainfood” for their “Grow now, Pay Later” innovative credit solution that enables companies to borrow against their paid marketing performance.
Wisor’s partnership with Windward, which will help the company enhance freight visibility and optimize business operations for its customers, was featured in Yahoo Finance.
☕ Pre-Seed Coffee Events
In early 2023, we launched a new pop-up event series called 'pre-seed coffee'. It is organized in collaboration with our friends at Google for Startups Israel. In each event, we try to tap into a specific theme and collaborate with relevant early-stage VCs from Israel and abroad. Our goal with this initiative is to create informal and intimate conversations between pre-seed-stage founders and early-stage investors, hopefully leading to useful tips and insights that founders can apply throughout their entrepreneurial journey, especially in the current funding environment. We also learn a lot, by the way, from the founders' questions and comments.
We’ve already organized three events so far, one with R-Squared Ventures around what it’s like to raise a pre-seed in Israel vs. what it’s like in the US (read more here), one with Ibex Investors, Upwest, and Yazamiyot focused on women-led startups (read more here) and another one with Foundation Capital and Team8 focused on Fintech.
We hope and look forward to continuing this series of events in 2024.
🚪 Portfolio Job Opportunities
Ditto has a few open positions for developers {explore here}
Lexense (Cape Law) has few open positions for people with legal background {explore here}
MDI Health is looking for Clinical Pharmacists and Health Plan Sales Manager {explore here}
Nas Company is looking for a Product Manager and Marketing Growth Manager {explore here}
Visitt has a few open positions in R&D, Product, Finance and Marketing {explore here}
Wisor AI has a few open positions in R&D, Sales and Customer Success {explore here}
Fresh Fund is a sector-agnostic pre-seed fund investing in Israeli founders. As one of the largest and most active dedicated pre-seed funds in Israel, we love to partner with founders from day zero.
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