VentureBeat

A Mountain View start-up called Fusion Dynamic, which allows companies to easily manage their data centers, has set a milestone for tenacity and for Israeli entrepreneurial drive.

The company launched today, announcing it has raised $6 million from Israeli venture firms Tamir Fishman Ventures, Evergreen Ventures, and Decima Ventures.

The intriguing back-story to this company, though, happened several weeks ago, when it held a meeting in Israel and sat through increasing hostilities even as Hezbollah shells began to drop nearby — determined to stay on plan.

The company has research and development operations in Israel, and had scheduled a week-long off-site in northern Israel to prepare for its launch. The small team arrived in the northern Israel village of Amirim on July 10 — a charming place overlooking the Sea of Galilee. On July 12, though, two Israeli soldiers were kidnapped from an area on the Israel-Lebanon border — less than half a mile where the Fusion Dynamic team had traveled to the day before. Shelling began later than evening, as the region slipped into war. But the company’s president Udi Paret said the group decided to stay and finish its work. Hostilities have been frequent in Israel’s past, but “I’ll never say you get used to it,” he said.

Israeli forces recommended that non-residents evacuate, but the team — which included some Americans and Norwegians — resisted. The day they left, Paret took two of the group members to the exact area along the Sea of Galilee that would be hit with a rocket the next day.

In retrospect, he says, he is quite astonished that the group decided to stay. But he said he’s glad they did, because Fusion Dynamic is operating in a fast-moving data-center sector where there are a lot of competitors — and the meeting helped them launch today. He said the meeting reflects the company’s mission to provide a product tenacious in helping companies with their datacenter needs (see the company’s product details here). The company has twelve customers, Paret says.

Perhaps, the company was foolhardy.

However, the story fits with what we’ve been hearing elsewhere about Israeli’s cultural love affair with entrepreneurship these days. Last month, the NYT’s Tom Friedman wrote about legendary investor Warren Buffett’s move to buy Israeli company Iscar, how it generated widespread enthusiasm and how it symbolized where Israel’s head is. The Friedman story is buried behind its Times Select subscription wall, but here’s the gist:

Nobody wanted this war, and nobody was prepared for it. Look closely at pictures of Israeli soldiers from Lebanon. There is no enthusiasm in their faces, and certainly no triumphalism. Their expressions tell the whole story: “I just don’t want to be doing this — another war with the Arabs.”

They have so much more to do with their lives, and they live in a society that empowers and enables them to do it. (Unfortunately, the Buffett company is in northern Israel and had to be temporarily closed because of rocket attacks.)

The desire to get on with business is what kept the guys at Fusion Dynamic camped out, fixated on their start-up even as shells began falling. “That’s exactly the way we felt,” said Paret.

Next Story: Medical devices: Silicon Valley’s emerging glamour sector
Previous Story: Mayfield hires Navin Chaddha, announces profitable “exits”

Tags: co:fusion-dynamic, inv:decima-ventures, inv:evergreen-ventures, inv:Levensohn, inv:tamir-fishman-ventures, people:udi-paret