Pitango Venture Capital, established in 1993, is Israel's largest

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which h ...

fund with over $1.8 billion under management. Pitango is focused on seed, expansion and late stage companies in core technologies, consumer, and Life Sciences. The firm's investors include

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and

HarbourVest Partners HarbourVest Partners is a private equity fund of funds and one of the largest private equity investment managers globally. The firm invests in all types of private equity funds, including venture capital and leveraged buyout funds, and also di ...

History

The fund was founded as Polaris Venture Capital in 1993 by Rami Kalish, as part of a government initiative named the Yozma program ("Initiative" in Hebrew); which offered attractive tax incentives to any foreign venture-capital investments in Israel and offered to double any investment with funds from the government. In 1996, Kalish was joined by Chemi Peres, son of former Israeli president

Shimon Peres Shimon Peres (; he, שמעון פרס ; born Szymon Perski; 2 August 1923 – 28 September 2016) was an Israeli politician who served as the eighth prime minister of Israel from 1984 to 1986 and from 1995 to 1996 and as the ninth president of ...

, to create Polaris Fund II, which raised more than $100 million. Polaris II invested in 35 high-tech companies. Some were partially funded by another Israeli VC firm, Eucalyptus Ventures. When the investments proved successful, Polaris II and Eucalyptus merged into Fund III in early 2000.Chemi Peres: ‘Startups are not for pessimists’
Ruthie Blum; ISRAEL21c, October 8, 2013 In 2000, Rami Beracha, who joined Pitango in 1996, became a managing

general partner General partner is a person who joins with at least one other person to form a business. A general partner has responsibility for the actions of the business, can legally bind the business and is personally liable for all the partnership's debts an ...

. He resigned in 2018. In 2001, Polaris Venture Capital changed its name to Pitango Venture Capital, to avoid confusion with

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

based

Polaris Venture Partners Polaris Partners is a venture capital firm active in the field of healthcare and biotechnology companies. The company has offices in Boston, Massachusetts, New York, NY and San Francisco, California. History Polaris Partners was founded in 1996 ...

. Although the

firm was founded in 1996, which was after Pitango was founded, the Israeli firm decided to change its name. Pitango takes its name from the semi-wild Surinam Cherry that grows in Israel. Pitango Venture Capital Fund IV followed in 2004, and in 2007, Pitango V. In 2010, with the support of the Israeli government, Pitango established the first fund in the country focused on investment in the

Arab-Israeli The Arab citizens of Israel are the largest ethnic minority in the country. They comprise a hybrid community of Israeli citizens with a heritage of Palestinian citizenship, mixed religions (Muslim, Christian or Druze), bilingual in Arabic an ...

sector, called Al-Bawader (Arabic for “early signs”).

Notable companies

AppsFlyer AppsFlyer is a SaaS mobile marketing analytics and attribution platform, headquartered in San Francisco, California. History AppsFlyer is a privately held company founded in 2011 by Oren Kaniel, its current CEO, and CTO Reshef Mann. AppsFlyer ...

* Duda *

EarlySense EarlySense was an Israeli medical device company with offices in the United States. It has sold its proprietary contact-free continuous monitoring technology to Hillrom, now Baxter. History The company was founded in 2004 by Dr. Danny Lange, Yo ...

eToro eToro is an Israeli social trading and multi-asset investment company that focuses on providing financial and copy trading services. Its headquarters are located in Central Israel, and the company has registered offices in Cyprus, the Unite ...

Evolven Evolven is a technology company that provides IT operations analytics (ITOA) for businesses. Founded in 2007, Evolven is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey, with offices in Europe and Israel. History Evolven applies the principles of IT ...

Formlabs Formlabs is a 3D printing technology developer and manufacturer. The Somerville, Massachusetts-based company was founded in September 2011 by three MIT Media Lab students. The company develops and manufactures 3D printers and related software and ...

Graphcore Graphcore is a British semiconductor company that develops accelerators for AI and machine learning. It aims to make a massively parallel Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) that holds the complete machine learning model inside the processor. Hi ...

Kaminario Silk is a technology company headquartered in Needham, Massachusetts, United States. Silk offers a cloud platform for enterprise customers with mission-critical applications. The company has offices in Boston and Israel. History CEO, Dani Golan ...

mySupermarket mySupermarket was an independent shopping and comparison shopping website for groceries in the United Kingdom. It retrieved price information from multiple online retailers, so that customers could compare their prices. On 27 February 2020 Gil ...

* Radwin * Riskified * Silk platform *

Taboola Taboola is a public advertising company headquartered in New York City. The CEO of Taboola is Adam Singolda, who founded the company in 2007. It provides advertisements such as "Around the Web" and "Recommended For You" boxes at the bottom of man ...

Varonis Systems Varonis Systems is a software company with headquarters in New York City with R&D offices in Herzliya, Israel. They developed a security software platform that allows organizations to track, visualize, analyze and protect unstructured data. Varo ...

* Via Transportation, Inc. *

Zerto Zerto Ltd., through its main product the ''Zerto IT Resilience Platform'', provides disaster recovery, backup and workload mobility software for virtualized infrastructures and cloud environments. Zerto is co-headquartered in Boston and Israel a ...

Exits

References

External links

* {{Venture capital firms Venture capital firms of Israel Privately held companies of Israel Investment companies of Israel