PICO Ventures Secures $80M For Second Investment Fund

PICO Venture Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm with offices in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and New York, announced this week that it closed a fund with $80 million in capital commitments. PICO manages a first fund of some $50 million.

Founded in 2015, PICO says it invests in “visionary Israeli entrepreneurs building future-defining technologies,” rather than in startups in specific sectors.

PICO has 15 portfolio companies including Vroom, the Israeli-founded, US-based online platform for buying and selling pre-owned cars,
Spotinst, which built an AI-powered platform for workload management and cloud computing, Gloat, an AI-powered internal talent marketplace recently names among Israel’s 10 ‘hottest’ startups in 2019 according to WIRED Magazine, and Tastewise, the AI-powered food trends prediction and intelligence startup.

With the new fund, PICO expects to invest in about 15 more startups, Elie Wurtman, a co-founder of PICO Venture Partners, told Globes.

“We’re at a turning point at which it is necessary to continue reinforcing and assembling the management capabilities of entrepreneurs in Israel. We have passed the stage at which everyone is aiming just for an exit; we’re building large companies now, and we want to be part of this,” he said.

“On both the person level as entrepreneurs and at the fund level, our success is at the initial stage – bringing a company from nothing to a situation in which it has revenue, and to accelerate it with a very operative, almost entrepreneurial, perspective of how I help a company build itself rapidly….It is certainly easier to write a big check for a company that is already stable, large, and so forth, but if there’s no one to invest in the initial stage, there will probably be no mature companies,” Wurtman told Globes.