Fresh Spot 🥬 by fresh.fund - A New Year & New Opportunities 🌱
Fresh Spot - thoughts from fresh.fund
Hey there! Welcome to Fresh Spot - a quarterly newsletter from the team at fresh.fund.
First - we wanted to wish you all a belated Shannah Tovah, a Happy Jewish New Year, a fresh year filled with new opportunities and joy. To our extended fresh.fund family, we’ve created a fun video for you all to enjoy, expressing the faith we have in our awesome founders.
Below you’ll find all the details on how we continue to discover, accelerate, and invest in emerging talent across Israel’s startup ecosystem. But before we dive in, we want to highlight portfolio company Remilk that starred in a recent Nas Daily’s Planet Warrior Series in Partnership with Facebook. Click here or on photo to play video.
🤑 Investments
NEW INVESTMENT - we invested in a stealth startup serving the critical infrastructure space. More to come… Stay tuned…!
FOLLOW-ON ROUNDERS - Nine (!) of our portfolio companies have raised capital or received an investment term sheet in the last quarter 💪🏽
😇 Portfolio Highlights & Opportunities
ContextualWeb is expanding and is looking for marketing and content superstars to help promote its search services. Content writers, technical writers, and SEO experts — feel free to reach out to roik@contextualwebsearch.com for details.
Diptera.ai (formerly SMT Labs) just graduated from the prestigious IndieBio accelerator in NYC with flying colors. Congrats, Eli, Ariel, and Vic!
GiantLeap was featured in Geektime - check out the article!
MDI Health is looking for a talented and versatile developer who has proven experience in both backend and frontend development as well as a demonstrated affinity towards product management. Please get in touch if you think you or anyone in your network might be a good fit.
🎓 University Partnerships
Israeli universities continue to be a source of energy for community growth at fresh.fund. It’s exciting to be part of the shift in the way universities think about entrepreneurship and investing in education. Here are a few highlights:
The University of Haifa’s HIL Fund just concluded its first investment committee, welcoming three new companies into the HIL Fund Portfolio: Wellmanage, Edusoul, & CodeAssist. Welcome to the family! Click here or on video to play.
fresh.fund’s course in partnership with ACT Shenkar officially launched with 25 students from across disciplines and programs - from Jewelry design to CS Engineering. Onwards!
Zell Entrepreneurship Program - fresh.fund partnered with the Zell Entrepreneurship Program’s Venture Fund to support their dealflow and due diligence efforts. A great new connection in the academic ecosystem!
A “demo day” was held a few weeks ago at BGU to celebrate Cactus Capital’s second anniversary. Cactus-funded ventures got the opportunity to pitch to distinguished investors and members of the ecosystem.
Last week we had the opportunity to moderate and participate in a panel hosted by Polytechnic University Innovation Hub in Hong Kong.
fresh.fund hosted an online event attended by over 60 people, in partnership with WeWork Labs, Joy Ventures & Cornerstone Ventures. The event was promoted by all of our wonderful University partners around the globe: ACT Shenkar, HIL - Haifa Innovation Lab, Cactus Capital, & HUJI Innovate.
💭 Other Thoughts
We’re compiling a list of successful startups founded by academics and recent grads. Here’s a sneak peek:
The fresh.fund Facebook group has grown to 1,758 members. We encourage you to join the conversation. Click here to join - and invite your friends! If you have any questions feel free to email michal@fresh.fund.
We were excited to come across recent student venture activities at Stanford University:
One group of Stanford grad students put together Stanford 2020, a new fund created entirely by Stanford classmates to invest in their fellow students’ ventures. Read more here.
Fresh Spot is from the home of fresh.fund and is by Zaki Djemal and Michal Ner-David. Zaki is the founder and Managing Partner at fresh.fund and Michal is anything community and partnerships. You can stay on top of our most recent updates and opportunities by following us on Linkedin & Facebook.