What's fresh at fresh.fund 🍎🍯
New investments, portfolio highlights, job opportunities, interesting content, and more...
Hey there! Welcome to fresh.spot - a quarterly newsletter from the team at fresh.fund.
We’re excited to share with you our new investments, portfolio highlights, job opportunities, recommended content, and more exciting updates.
These last few months have been busy. We’ve made 3 new investments and our portfolio companies have raised ~$50M in follow-on rounds.
Our appetite for more interesting pre-seed investment opportunities is only getting bigger so if you’re an early-stage startup founder or know someone who’s working on something interesting and unique, feel free to make an intro. It’s never too early to start a conversation.
We wish you and your families Shana TovaU’Metuka, here’s to new beginnings 🍷
Let’s dive in.
💸 New Portfolio Companies
We’re excited to announce our investments in three new companies during the last few months - accSenSe, Wisor, and Ginzi.
accSense - Co-founded by Muli, Itzik & Daniel, accSenSe is an easy-to-use SaaS platform that protects cloud access control systems from ransomware and misconfiguration with a complete set of enterprise tools for optimal system management. Their vision is to become a market leader in a new category: SaaS Access Continuity Management - the new best practice to ensure your access control systems are no longer single points of failure.
Wisor - Co-founded by Raz, Dan & Orel, Wisor is a data-driven automation solution that brings digital transformation to traditional freight forwarding companies. They’re building an AI-based plug-and-play pricing optimization and shipment automation platform that helps small-medium-sized global freight forwarders to eliminate freight pricing, booking, and shipping inefficiencies.
Ginzi - Co-founded by Ben, Laurence, and Royi, Ginzi is a real-time customer satisfaction solution tailored to leading IT and business service providers. While existing solutions collect customer feedback once/ twice a year or after major events, with Ginzi you can track changes in customer sentiment as they occur in ongoing day-to-day interactions. Ginzi’s real-time capability allows you to maximize opportunities and address issues as they arise - increasing customer lifetime value and preventing churn.
🌟 fresh.fund Portfolio Highlights
Payem, which builds an end-to-end spend and procurement platform for high-growth and multinational organizations raised $27M. We’re are proud to be the company’s first pre-seed investor and be a part of the company’s journey alongside leading VCs such as NFX, Pitango, LocalGlobe, and Glilot. (Read more here)
Nas Academy, founded and led by Nuseir Yassin (AKA “NAS Daily”), raised $11M Series A led by Lightspeed Ventures. The company is building a platform for creators to monetize their unique knowledge, giving them tools to create classes and academies their fans and followers can attend online. We’re proud to participate in this round and be part of Nas’s journey right from the start. (Read more here)
MDI, raised a $6M seed round led by Hanaco Ventures with the participation of fresh.fund. It recently launched its end-to-end AI platform for personalized medication. A recent clinical trial at Hadassah Hospital showed that the platform presented up to 40% more life-saving patient insights than the clinical pharmacists had identified. (Read more here)
Diptera, which is using AI to fight the growing threat of mosquitoes, announced its $3M seed round led by Trust Ventures. We’re glad to be one of the company’s first investors and be part of this round as well, helping the company fulfill its impactful mission. (Read more here)
remilk continues to make waves, featured in TheMarker as one of Israel’s most prominent startups disrupting the traditional milk industry by creating a lab-grown dairy unique technology. (Read more {in Hebrew} here)
Wisio, a passion-economy startup that created a platform that helps creators monetize their follower relationships in an authentic way, was interviewed and shared their vision of changing the way creators interact with their fans. They are now raising their Seed round after a successful POC. (Read more here)
GiantLeap, a science-backed early childhood development platform, gaining progress, managed to become the world’s largest study on early childhood development, with over 2M data points collected to date. (Read more here)
ITC, which utilizes AI and Computer Vision to clear traffic jams featured in Calclaist’s CTech. (Read more here)
Roy Kovarski, founder of Usearch, sharing his vision of building a new type of B2B search engine, aimed to help organizations find the most relevant data in the vastness of the web. (Read here)
And last but not least, Danielle from Peech rocked the stage at the 8200 EISP demo-day, making a pitch that raised above the noise, big time. She wrote and created a video about it, worth for every entrepreneur (and investor) to check out. Oh, and here’s the full pitch.
🚪 Job Opportunities
From our portfolio:
Payem is growing rapidly and is looking for full-stack developers, mobile developers, product managers, designers, and more. {EXPLORE HERE}
Gamitee has few open positions including a senior front-end engineer, head of customer success, and more {EXPLORE HERE}
Zorba is looking for a Full-stack developer and an SEO/ Paid Marketing Specialist {EXPLORE HERE}
Diptera is looking for a Senior Machine-Learning Engineer {APPLY HERE}
Wisor is looking for a full-stack tech lead {APPLY HERE}
Deltika is looking for a full-stack front-end developer and a backend & big-data developer {EXPLORE HERE}
From around the ecosystem:
Bezalel Academy of Art & Design is looking for a Managing Director to lead a new indie games incubator they are launching. {APPLY HERE}
Glilot Capital is looking for a Community & Marketing Manager to join their value creation team. {APPLY VIA: dorin@glilotcapital.co}
The Israel Innovation Authority is looking for an experienced manager to lead their “Knowledge and Research Commercialization” unit {APPLY HERE}
Techstars TLV is looking for a Venture Principal to join their Israel’s team {APPLY HERE}
Aleph VC is looking for a BizDev team member to join their business development pod {APPLY HERE}
OurCrowd has many open positions in the investment team, marketing team, data team and more {EXPLORE HERE}
Students 💗 Startups
During the last few months we successfully finished two programs of our ‘Investor’s Course’, a program which aims to democratize the knowledge on venture capital and how investors think, among students from diverse backgrounds and fields.
We did one program in partnership with the JLM Impact consortium which includes The Hebrew University, Bezalel Academy of Art & Design, and Azrieli College of Engineering, and another program with Ariel University.
Over 60 students participated (out of 200 that applied) including PhD, Masters, and Bachelor students from various fields such as Industrial Design, physics, philosophy, architecture, psychology, biotechnology, computer science, materials engineering, economics, and more.
Besides that, we continue to be active in contributing and being involved as mentors and speakers in university-affiliated entrepreneurship programs and student-led entrepreneurship initiatives. As a pre-seed fund, we believe the academic environment in Israel is a hotbed for prominent early-stage current and future founders and always looking to support in any way we can.
🌐 fresh.links
Interesting content we've stumbled upon and recommend to read/listen to:
Choosing Your “North Star Metric” - A comprehensive guide with a lot of good examples on how companies should choose their business metrics and why it matters to choose them wisely. {Via “Future” by a16z}.
Why Going to the Doctor Sucks- A post in “WaitBuyWhy” (which we love!) about a startup called “The Lanby”, explaining beautifully the problem it is solving, the value proposition, and the solution. An inspiring way to tell your company’s story. {Via “WaitButWhy”}
Diffracted VC: The Categories - @Nicolas Colin maps out various trends around what he defines as the 'Diffraction of VCs' and how the "contours of VC as an asset class are becoming blurry as many VCs are diversifying their model". {Via Nicolas’s “European Straits” Blog}
How to Eat an Elephant, One Atomic Concept at a Time - A deep-dive analysis on how Figma and Canva became market leaders in a field Adobe dominated, how they recognized digital design trends and evolved from design tools to “design ecosystems”. {Via “kwokchain” blog}
The “Creator Economy” is booming. Huge momentum nowadays for “Creator Economy” startups. We have two portfolio startups (NAS Academy & Wisio) in this field and totally believe now is the perfect time to build a tool/platform that helps ‘creators’ monetize their creative skills, knowledge, expertise, and influence.
*If you’re building a ‘Creator Economy’ startup, we’d love to get to know you!
Here are few links covering this space and its opportunities:
The new rules of the “creator economy” {Via The Economist}
The Creator Economy Market Cap {Via SignalFire}
The Ultimate Guide to the Creator Economy {Via Antler}
“The Creator Economy is the 2nd Renaissance {A video by Pateron’s Founder}
If you reached all the way here, you’re definitely gif-worthy!
fresh.fund is an Israeli Micro-VC fund investing in pre-seed stage startups across segments and verticals. We invest up to $300,000, often as the first institutional investors, and provide follow-on funding up until Round A.
To date we've invested in over 20 startups, 90% of which have gone on to raise follow-on funding from top-tier investors both in Israel and abroad, including Lightspeed, Pitango, NFX, LocalGlobe, Graph Ventures, Vertex, CPT Capital, YC, and others.
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