Oren Zeev

Last updated
Oren Zeev
Born (1964-09-23) September 23, 1964 (age 58)
Haifa, Israel
Alma materBSc cum laude Elecetrical Engineering, Technion, Israel. MBA with Distinction, INSEAD, France
Occupation(s) Venture Capitalist, Entrepreneur, Angel Investor, and Managing Partner of Zeev Ventures.
SpouseHagit Zeev

Oren Zeev is an Israeli-American venture capitalist and head of Zeev Ventures, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm with early-round investments in technology companies. Zeev has had notable investments in Houzz, Audible, Chegg, Navan, Inc., and Tipalti. He is co-founder and co-chairman of ICON, a non-profit organization focused on bridging Israeli and Silicon Valley technology and business. [1]

Contents

Engineering career

Zeev graduated BsC Cum Laude, EE from Technion-Machon Technologi Le’ Israel, and earned an MBA with Distinction in Business from INSEAD in France.

Zeev developed and implemented image and signal processing algorithms prior to his career as a venture capitalist. He was a Research staff member at IBM and part of the founding team of IBM's chip design group in Haifa, Israel.

Investment career

Following his time at IBM, Zeev spent 12 years at Apax Partners as a General Partner. He joined in January 1995 as part of the founding team of Apax Israel. In 2002, Zeev moved to the US and co-headed, and later headed, the Technology Practice of Apax and its Silicon Valley office. His first investment was Audible where he was also a board member.[ citation needed ]

Zeev Ventures

In 2007, Zeev established Zeev Ventures in Palo Alto to focus on early-stage companies. At Zeev Ventures, he has been an early investor and has held board and chairmanships at various companies including Houzz, [2] Chegg, Homelight, Tipalti, [3] TripActions, [4] and NEXT Insurance. For Houzz, Zeev led the Series A round in the company in 2010, and then invested another $20 million from his fund, Zeev Ventures, expanding on the 8% of the company he already owned. [5]

Tipalti

In 2010, Zeev Co-founded Tipalti when another one of Zeev's portfolio companies approached him with a major challenge they were facing around processing payouts to their global partners. To explore and address this problem, Zeev recruited Chen Amit, who he had studied and gotten his MBA with while at INSEAD, to create and run the company. Tipalti now processes over $11 billion in annual transaction for over 1,000 clients and over 4 million suppliers around the world. [6]

In 2014, Zeev was featured in Techcrunch on his investment approach that has achieved an annual 100 percent IRR. [7]

In 2017, Forbes wrote an article about Zeev's unique investment approach that had led to such a high portfolio success rate. [8]

In 2019, Zeev was profiled by CNBC on how he chooses start-ups for investment. [9]

Personal life

Zeev was born in Haifa, Israel in 1964. He moved to California with his wife, Hagit Zeev, and 2 children in 2002. [10] Zeev currently lives in Los Altos Hills, California.

List of startup investments

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Venture capital</span> Form of private-equity financing

Venture capital is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which have demonstrated high growth. Venture capital firms or funds invest in these early-stage companies in exchange for equity, or an ownership stake. Venture capitalists take on the risk of financing risky start-ups in the hopes that some of the companies they support will become successful. Because startups face high uncertainty, VC investments have high rates of failure. The start-ups are usually based on an innovative technology or business model and they are usually from high technology industries, such as information technology (IT), clean technology or biotechnology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Draper Fisher Jurvetson</span> American venture capital firm

Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) is an American venture capital firm focused on investments in enterprise, consumer and disruptive technologies. In January 2019, DFJ Venture, the early-stage team, spun out and formed Threshold Ventures. DFJ Growth continues to be managed by co-founder John Fisher and the existing DFJ Growth partner team.

Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California which specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. As of 2022, the firm had approximately US$85 billion in assets under management.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mayfield (company)</span> Venture capital firm

Mayfield, also known as Mayfield Fund, is a US-based venture capital firm that focuses on early-stage to growth-stage investments in enterprise and consumer technology companies. Founded in 1969 and based in Menlo Park, California, it is one of Silicon Valley's oldest venture capital firms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Index Ventures</span> European worldwide venture capital firm

Index Ventures is a European venture capital firm with dual headquarters in San Francisco and London, investing in technology-enabled companies with a focus on e-commerce, fintech, mobility, gaming, infrastructure/AI, and security. Since its founding in 1996, the firm has invested in a number of companies and raised approximately $5.6 billion. Index Venture partners appear frequently on Forbes’ Midas List of the top tech investors in Europe and Israel.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Accel (company)</span> Venture capital firm

Accel, formerly known as Accel Partners, is an American venture capital firm. Accel works with startups in seed, early and growth-stage investments. The company has offices in Palo Alto, California and San Francisco, California, with additional operating funds in London, India and China.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bill Gurley</span> American businessman

John William Gurley is an American businessman. He is a general partner at Benchmark, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm in San Francisco, California. He is listed consistently on the Forbes Midas List and is considered one of technology’s top dealmakers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matt Cohler</span> American venture capitalist

Matt Cohler is an American venture capitalist. He worked as Vice President of Product Management for Facebook until June 2008 and was formerly a general partner at Benchmark. Cohler has been named to the Forbes Midas List of top technology investors and in 2019 was named to the New York Times and CB Insights list of top 10 venture capital investors. Cohler made the Forbes 'America's 40 Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40' list in 2015.

Klaus Hommels is a German venture capitalist. He focuses on early and growth-stage investments and has founded his own venture capital fund by the name of Lakestar, through which he has been investing mainly in digital businesses. He has been invested in Facebook, Skype and Xing; other examples are Klarna and Revolut.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">New Enterprise Associates</span> American Venture Capital firm

New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is an American-based venture capital firm. NEA focuses investment stages ranging from seed stage through growth stage across an array of industry sectors. With ~$25 billion in committed capital, NEA is one of the world's largest venture capital firms.

Floodgate Fund is a venture capital firm based in the United States created by Mike Maples Jr. and Ann Miura-Ko. It was originally named Maples Investments, but was renamed Floodgate Fund in March 2010. It is focused on investments in technology companies in Silicon Valley.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chris Hollod</span> American businessman

Chris Hollod is a venture capitalist, angel investor, and advisor in Los Angeles. Hollod was the co-founder and chief executive officer of Tailwind Acquisition Corp. which merged with Terran Orbital in March 2022 in a $1.8 billion deal. Over the course of his career, Hollod has completed more than 150 deals across five different investment entities, including investments in Uber, Airbnb, Houzz, Spotify, Pinterest, Duolingo, Airtable, Oscar Health, Flexport, Casper, and Warby Parker.

In business, a unicorn is a privately held startup company valued at over US$1 billion. The term was first published in 2013, coined by venture capitalist Aileen Lee, choosing the mythical animal to represent the statistical rarity of such successful ventures.

For the sociological term, see Social capital.

Navan is an online travel management, corporate card and expense management company.

Rubrik is a cloud data management and data security company based in Palo Alto, California, United States, founded in December 2013.

HomeLight is a real estate technology company founded in San Francisco, CA and based in Scottsdale, AZ.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DST Global</span> Venture capital firm

DST Global is a venture capital and private equity firm that primarily invests in late-stage internet companies. DST Global has been described as one of the largest and most influential venture firms in the world, with an estimated $50 billion in assets under management. DST Global’s founder is Yuri Milner and its co-founders are Saurabh Gupta, John Lindfors, Rahul Mehta and Tom Stafford. The company was founded in 2009 as a spinoff from Russian company Digital Sky Technologies, which became Mail.ru Group. In the early 2010s, DST Global international investments were focused on emerging markets such as China.

Aydin Senkut is an American investor, serial entrepreneur and executive, who is managing partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Felicis Ventures. Earlier in his career, he was Google's first product manager.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ICONIQ Capital</span> American wealth management and investment firm

ICONIQ Capital is an American wealth management and investment firm based in San Francisco, California. It functions as a family office that provides wealth management services to high net worth clients such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Jack Dorsey and Jeff Weiner. The firm also is involved in investments related to Private Equity and Venture Capital.

References

  1. ↑ "How Israeli Expats In Silicon Valley Produce Winning Startups". Inc.com.
  2. ↑ "Houzz's Founders Have Become Tech's Newest Power Couple". Forbes.
  3. ↑ Zeev, Oren (20 February 2018). "Why I Decided to Lead Tipalti's Series C Round of Funding". Medium.
  4. ↑ "TripActions launches its business travel app and unveils a $14.6 million round". House of Bots.
  5. ↑ "Houzz's $4B Valuation Sets Investor Oren Zeev Apart". Forbes.
  6. ↑ "Tipalti Surpasses $11 Billion in Annual Transactions, Grows by 80+%". Bloomberg.
  7. ↑ "Meet Oren Zeev, Silicon Valley's Builder-Investor". Techcrunch. 22 February 2014.
  8. ↑ "Houzz's $4B Valuation Sets Investor Oren Zeev Apart". Forbes.
  9. ↑ "How this venture capitalist chooses start-ups for investments". CNBC.
  10. ↑ "Meet Oren Zeev, Silicon Valley's Builder-Investor". TechCrunch. 22 February 2014.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.