Israeli Venture Capital Firm Raises $60M For Future Investments

A group of cyber entrepreneurs in Israel have raised $60 million of venture capital to invest in cybersecurity startups.

The fund was raised by Cyberstarts just six months after it raised $200 million for a new opportunity fund in February. Its total assets under management, or the total market value of the investment managed on behalf of clients, is now $374 million.

Cyberstarts has invested in several cybersecurity companies this year, including Bionic (a platform helping organizations operate and protect applications) and Cyera (a cloud data security platform for companies).

The venture capital firm’s portfolio companies raised a total of $2 billion in 2021 alone. The company was founded in 2018.

“Most of the entrepreneurs we have partnered with grow into significant businesses over a short period of time because we invest in people, not ideas. In fact, sometimes our portfolio companies don’t even have the ‘idea’ prior to investment,” said Gili Raanan, founder of Cyberstarts.

Cyberstarts also announced the appointment of Doug Merritt, former President and CEO of Splunk, a global software platform that searches, analyzes and visualizes machine-generated data gathered from devices, apps, and websites for IT infrastructure and businesses.

He will chair Sunpeak, Cyberstarts’ new go-to-market advisory board, which will provide portfolio companies with hands-on guidance from world-renowned technology leaders to ensure early success. This is part of the firm’s mission to build the world’s most important cybersecurity companies. 

“We take a unique approach to mentoring our portfolio companies via our Sunpeak community. Doug brings unparalleled experience in executing go-to-market strategy and will be key to helping our portfolio accelerate business potential, while minimizing risk,” said Lior Simon, General Partner of Cyberstarts.

“I’m excited to work with the team to build the Sunpeak community with top GTM leaders from across the globe and help the next generation of cybersecurity entrepreneurs scale their businesses rapidly and strategically,” said Doug Merritt, Chair of the GTM advisory board at Cyberstarts.

“I’m excited to have Doug Merritt join our team to help create the cybersecurity textbook for optimizing go-to-market strategy as chair of our Sunpeak advisory board. The addition of this new community is a natural next step in our mission to build the world’s most important cyber companies,” said Raanan.