Norwest Venture Partners sets it sights on Israel with new appointment
Norwest Venture Partners, one of Silicon Valley’s leading VC firms, has brought in Dror Nahumi, a former executive from one of Israel’s largest telecoms, to lead the firm’s investments in Israeli start-ups.
Israel’s start-up scene, which relies almost entirely on business from outside the country, has been posting good numbers. According to IVC, Israel’s VC research center, the country’s high tech sector saw $3.2 billion in mergers and acquisitions and $701 million in IPOs in 2007. The most significant activity came from AOL’s $363 million purchase of ad network Quigo and a $160 million IPO for BigBand Networks, which sells multimedia networking technology to companies like Comcast and Verizon.
As for Norwest, the firm already has already invested over $30 million in Israel, spread across companies like in-game advertising start-up DoubleFusion, calendering software maker Timebridge and a handful of others. Its most recent exist in Israel happened when Red Hat bought Qumranet, a desktop virtualization company, for $107 million in cash. Norwest’s Managing Partner, Promod Haque, says that the firm sees an opportunity to push further into Israel and that Nahumi, who has spent the last 17 years working for both American and Israeli companies, will be its conduit.
Nahumi says that the fact that the venture capital market in Israel is consolidating makes the opportunity ripe for a global fund like Norwest. He says that with his access to and knowledge of Israel’s start-up ecosystem and Norwest’s reach in the United States, an Israeli entrepreneur will have leverage they couldn’t get with an Israeli VC, alone.
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About the Author, Dan Kaplan
Once upon a time, Dan considered himself a magazine journalist with dreams of "The New Yorker" and a couple of well-reviewed but only mildly successful books. Then one day, life, as it is known to do, decided it was time for rebirth. Like so many things before it, this rebirth was conceived on a mostly-empty plane to Reno. Now, instead of magazine writing, Dan would plunge into the world of New Media and write for Matt Marshall's blog.
It's funny how it goes.