Viola Ventures (formerly Carmel Ventures) is a venture capital firm that invests in Israeli or Israeli-related early stage companies with significant ideas that can lead to transformational companies.
As part of the Viola Group, we lead an independent investment strategy with a dedicated team and investors, while also offering our portfolio companies the added value of being part of a multi-strategy investment group with $2.8B AUM.
$1B AUM across 5 funds:
Fund I $171M
Fund II $202M
Fund III $235M
Fund IV $194M
Fund V $222M
Founded in 2000, we are the only Israel-based VC fund with six investing partners solely dedicated to early-stage tech investments. This allows for unique depth and diversification that spans across a wide range of backgrounds and verticals.
We invest across a number of key market segments including Enterprise Infrastructure & Applications, FinTech, Frontier & Deep Technologies (automotive, IOT, AR/VR, drones), Robotics and Consumer Services.
Our mission is to partner with Israeli tech startups from inception, even as early as a PowerPoint deck. Typically we invest as the first institutional money with flexibility around seed, A, B rounds -$2m-$10m.
With a portfolio of over 90 companies, Viola Ventures has backed a substantial share of Israel’s exits to date, including Actimize, RedBend, DesignArt, CopperGate, Exelate and ECI.
29 Jan 2019
When Co-founder and CEO of Verbit.ai, Tom Livne, came to see me for the first time in 2016, he pitched me on their new and advanced speech-to-text engine that he has built together with his two co-founders, Kobi Ben Zvi and Eric Shellef. While we were intrigued by the technology (since it outperformed any other…
12 Sep 2018
The Mobility market has undergone major technological disruption in recent years. Propelled by innovation, it is driven by the primary goal of reducing the cost of transportation (per mile per person/package) through the all-important trinity of Shared, Autonomous and Electric vehicles (SAEVs). A race is now underway to lead the fulfillment of this future mobility…
4 Sep 2018
Start-Up Nation Central’s (SNC) has published its inaugural Israel FinTech Report this week. The report offers a comprehensive analysis of the state of the Israeli Fintech ecosystem and its importance in the global Fintech arena. It includes trends as well as an analysis of the performance and activity of Fintech companies in Israel. Viola is…
6 Aug 2018
20 minutes into my first meeting with Limor Schweitzer, the founder of MOV.AI, I already knew this is going to be my next investment. I have been struggling with myself over the past few months about whether my past experience in enterprise software is still going to be relevant 10 years from now. For some…
27 Jul 2018
One of the most discussed topics among SaaS companies is how salespeople should be compensated. To see where Israeli startups stand vis-à-vis the international benchmarks, we surveyed both portfolio and non-portfolio companies about their sales compensation policies. We believe that this survey can be used as a great “sanity check” tool for CEOs, CFOs and…
17 May 2018
The second ever Israel Growth Summit (2018) took place in Tel Aviv in May, co-hosted once again by Viola and the Israel Growth Forum. Attendees included over 150 Founders, CEOs and senior executives from Israel’s top growth-stage companies, who shared their insights on a variety of challenges including strategy-building, go-to-market, global management, scaling R&D and…
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