New Fund Announced by Meron Capital to Advance Israeli Tech

On Monday, Meron Capital made an announcement regarding the completion of Meron II, which is its second round of funding. The company raised a total f $50 million to make investments in early-stage technology software startups, based in the State of Israel. 

Its first fund had been backed by only a single investor, specifically a wealthy family based in the UAE. Meron II, on the other hand, received investments from various investors, which also included its investor from the first round. Investors from all over the globe, such as Germany, Switzerland, and France also participated, along with institutional investors. 

The Managing Partner at Meron, Liron Azrielant, went on to add that the company completed the first fund before the country and UAE had signed a peace agreement. However, despite the absence of diplomatic relations, there was enough goodwill between the investor and Meron Capital to collaborate. She went on to add that the people involved in the funding were aware of who the investor exactly was. 

According to the Partner, the wealthy family belonging to UAE will be the main partner in the new fund, as well. But she added that there will be additional investors. Moreover, she revealed that it was the family’s first experience investing in companies in their early stages and therefore, were not used to putting funds into corporations that do not have any revenue as yet. 

Meron Capital introduced its inaugural fund in the year 2017 and has made several investments in no less than 16 startups until now. Four of these early-stage companies have successfully exited. Loom Systems, an AIOps startup, was purchased by ServiceNow, whereas Reshuffle, an API integration platform was acquired by the micro-blogging website, Twitter. Meanwhile, Clear Genetics, a digital health corporation, was bought by Invitae. Lastly, Planon acquired Axonize, an IoT startup.

Furthermore, 10 of the startups have collected additional financing with Solugen, Armory, and Immunai, reporting a sum of investments, which exceeded $300 million. 

The new fund is all set to focus on at least 18 to 20 seed, and pre-seed investments in various startups, especially those that are developing software-based solutions for fintech, digital health, cybersecurity, enterprise, and DevOps, amongst others. The company makes investments ranging from $500,000 to $2.5 million in every project. 

The second fund has been used to make investments in four corporations already. These include LendAI, which operates in the market for mortgage lending, where Meron received backing from the third-largest bank in Israel, along with the first PTO clearinghouse, Sorbet. In addition, a Fintech startup, Firmbase, was also awarded funds from Meron II, as well as Laminar. The latter is the first-ever Data Protection platform, which consists of cloud-native applications. It received investments from Insight Partners and TLV Partners, too.

Liron Azrielant and Daniel Roditi co-founded Meron. The former graduated from the LGO dual degree program at MIT with an MBA and Master’s in electrical engineering and computer science.