The First Decade
The First Decade
Did You Know?
When Entrée Capital was founded ten years ago we knew we wanted to build a successful ‘startup’ – just not what the form and path to success would look like.
The firm began when childhood friends Aviad (Avi) Eyal and Martin Moshal got together to start making investments using their own capital in an organized way. Avi would run the firm and Martin would provide guidance and deal-flow. Entrée initially operated at a small scale, doing a few ‘angel’ deals a year (from that lone desk and chair in the picture). When Avi moved to Israel, the approach evolved and the firm started to take shape.
Entrée’s early successes led to additional funds being invested. The firm started to gain credibility and make a name for itself. Next, Entrée was leading investments.
Looking back, Entrée’s trajectory seems to have been a methodical one – however, like a startup, in its early days, Entrée weaved, pivoted, made errors and missed opportunities – all on the road to “product:market” fit.
Today, the firm is poised to capitalize on its success and has created a platform that will hopefully serve as its launchpad for additional funds over the next decade. In 2020 it was ranked as the 4th most prominent Fund in Europe (dealroom.co), the most active Fund in Israel (IVC), and Avi Eyal was listed as #3 on 2021’s Forbes Midas List of European, Middle East, and Israel investors. As of the end of 2021, Entrée has produced over 25 exits and IPO’s and 15 Unicorns.
In the next decade we hope to become a recognized firm and brand sitting alongside other leaders in the VC world with a team that has the unique abilities, focus and determination that will set it apart always.
Entrée Capital was ‘officially’ established ten years ago – little could we have imagined then where we would be today. As we enter our second decade, we have decided to share our story of how we got here and the building blocks that will serve us over, hopefully, decades to come. Our story is inextricably linked to the people who we work with: The folks who are part of the firm and the founders who we invest in. They all have the ability to see possibilities and the drive and determination to make things happen. Hence our mission – “Partnering with the Exceptional to Build the Impossible.”
In the past decade we are proud to have backed over 100 startups, many of which are now successful. The companies that we’ve invested in employ over 10,000 people directly and tens of thousands more as contractors and partners. They have contributed to the global economy, whether it be by making significant scientific achievements, creating new products or improving people’s livelihoods. They have changed people’s lives for the good in the areas of health, finance, security, productivity, the environment and more. Today, these companies have a combined value of $335bn. Believing in people who want to change the world is in our DNA. As we move into our second decade we hope to continue to grow and become a global leader, working with our stakeholders who believe in our vision, mission and values.”
Entrée Capital’s values permeate all that we do. Combined they
make up our DNA – and that is what makes us the firm that we are.
Teamwork is at the heart of our company. Our team members know that they can count on each other through respectful collaboration and holding ourselves accountable. Within the team we put a huge emphasis on entrepreneurship and independence which means that we can all run at a fast pace.
They say that your reputation precedes you. For the Entrée team, diligent execution of fiduciary duties and placing stakeholders’ and founders’ interests above all else is paramount.
Everything is open. Everything can be seen. Entrée is transparent in all it does. It sets high moral and ethical standards. “We treat all our stakeholders the same way we expect to be treated ourselves,” says Eran.
Entrée respects all nationalities, religions, and personal identity choices. Everyone is entitled to dignity and mutual respect. Our team and investments reflect these values. Entrée hires on competence and our team is one that people admire.
Entrée is driven by a passion and a desire to succeed. Humility sits alongside that desire, recognizing how important it is to always remain humble and how it’s important to always be searching for ways to improve everything that the firm does. Our founders’ successes create our successes.
Entrée Capital manages over $650 million and has invested in hundreds of global startups in the US, Canada, the UK, Europe, Israel, Australia, Africa, India, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates.
Founders: Roy Mann and Eran Zinman
Founded in late 2012, Tel Aviv based monday.com is the developer of a work operating system (Work OS) that organizations of any size can use to create the tools and processes they need to manage every aspect of their work. By combining building blocks, such as apps, automations and integrations, teams can build or customize the workflows of their dreams.
Entrée’s relationship with monday.com began in 2013 when it invested in the seed round of the company. Entrée has invested in every financing round thereafter, always believing in the entrepreneurs and contributing to the business.
On June 10, 2021 monday.com rang the bell and officially became a publicly traded company on Nasdaq. The IPO was the most lucrative initial public offering ever by an Israeli software company raising $574 million at a market value of about $6.8 billion. Two weeks later, the company was worth $10bn!
“Avi has been our partner, mentor and friend for the past eight years and we have learnt so much from him. He has always believed in our product and in us as founders and has guided us through establishing our vision, strategy and growth,” says Roy. “One thing that has always stood out is the constant supportive approach that we get from Entrée. Avi and Ran always trust us and their persistence for success has lead them to be mentors to us in both business and life.”
“Entrée will always be a true winner in our eyes. With Entrée at our side we know that every day that we have someone to trust (and to kill it at our karaoke parties!). To have a partner like you in the decision- making process is priceless,” says Eran.
Founders: Roy Mann and Eran Zinman
Founded in late 2012, Tel Aviv based monday.com is the developer of a work operating system (Work OS) that organizations of any size can use to create the tools and processes they need to manage every aspect of their work. By combining building blocks, such as apps, automations and integrations, teams can build or customize the workflows of their dreams.
Entrée’s relationship with monday.com began in 2013 when it invested in the seed round of the company. Entrée has invested in every financing round thereafter, always believing in the entrepreneurs and contributing to the business.
On June 10, 2021 monday.com rang the bell and officially became a publicly traded company on Nasdaq. The IPO was the most lucrative initial public offering ever by an Israeli software company raising $574 million at a market value of about $6.8 billion. Two weeks later, the company was worth $10bn!
“Avi has been our partner, mentor and friend for the past eight years and we have learnt so much from him. He has always believed in our product and in us as founders and has guided us through establishing our vision, strategy and growth,” says Roy. “One thing that has always stood out is the constant supportive approach that we get from Entrée. Avi and Ran always trust us and their persistence for success has lead them to be mentors to us in both business and life.”
“Entrée will always be a true winner in our eyes. With Entrée at our side we know that every day that we have someone to trust (and to kill it at our karaoke parties!). To have a partner like you in the decision- making process is priceless,” says Eran.
Did You Know?
Founders: Assaf Feldman, Eido Gal
Riskified (NYSE: RSKD) helps enterprise merchants increase revenue, improve customer experience and cut costs by recognizing legitimate customers and keeping them moving toward conversion.
Assaf Feldman and Eido Gal started Riskified because they believed e-commerce merchants were turning away legitimate customers out of fear of fraud. Merchants were using outdated rule-based or scoring fraud prevention solutions that left the liability for fraud in their hands, and they felt this was not helpful. Riskified would create a new solution that took the best of what machine learning had to offer and make more accurate decisions, approve more orders, while shifting the liability to Riskified, thus allowing the merchants to focus on what they do best.
On July 29th, 2021 Riskified IPO’d on the NYSE (RSKD). It priced at $21 per share yet ended the day on $26, a 24% increase, valuing it at over $4bn.
When they first started, Assaf and Eido knew only a few angels and VCs. When Riskified started to look for investors, Entrée Capital was one of the first they encountered, introduced by Eden Shochat. The connection with Avi was immediate. “They are not only investors but are also experienced founders, capable of providing good advice to entrepreneurs starting their own companies,” says Eido. Entrée invested in the seed round and then led the Series A – at a time when success was not obvious at all.
Looking back at our emails, Entrée has always said, “Go Big or Go Home is not an option.” And this held true for Riskified. Each business has its own pace at any point in time and what’s good for one sector is not always good for another.
Keeping a company successful and growing at a fast pace for a decade is no small feat. Entrée helped us at the first stages of the company, backed us in our Series A when others would not and continued that support doubling down again before our next round – Entrée has been a great partner. We wish you much success and many more celebrations in the future!
Founders: Assaf Feldman, Eido Gal
Riskified (NYSE: RSKD) helps enterprise merchants increase revenue, improve customer experience and cut costs by recognizing legitimate customers and keeping them moving toward conversion.
Assaf Feldman and Eido Gal started Riskified because they believed e-commerce merchants were turning away legitimate customers out of fear of fraud. Merchants were using outdated rule-based or scoring fraud prevention solutions that left the liability for fraud in their hands, and they felt this was not helpful. Riskified would create a new solution that took the best of what machine learning had to offer and make more accurate decisions, approve more orders, while shifting the liability to Riskified, thus allowing the merchants to focus on what they do best.
On July 29th, 2021 Riskified IPO’d on the NYSE (RSKD). It priced at $21 per share yet ended the day on $26, a 24% increase, valuing it at over $4bn.
When they first started, Assaf and Eido knew only a few angels and VCs. When Riskified started to look for investors, Entrée Capital was one of the first they encountered, introduced by Eden Shochat. The connection with Avi was immediate. “They are not only investors but are also experienced founders, capable of providing good advice to entrepreneurs starting their own companies,” says Eido. Entrée invested in the seed round and then led the Series A – at a time when success was not obvious at all.
Looking back at our emails, Entrée has always said, “Go Big or Go Home is not an option.” And this held true for Riskified. Each business has its own pace at any point in time and what’s good for one sector is not always good for another.
Keeping a company successful and growing at a fast pace for a decade is no small feat. Entrée helped us at the first stages of the company, backed us in our Series A when others would not and continued that support doubling down again before our next round – Entrée has been a great partner. We wish you much success and many more celebrations in the future!
Did You Know?
Founders: Brandon Krieg, Ed Robinson
Stash is a New York-based digital investing and banking platform founded by Ed Robinson and Brandon Krieg which has raised over $300m from top tier investors such as Entrée Capital, Valar, USV and Goodwater.
When they founded Stash, Brandon and Ed realized that everyday Americans couldn’t get access to important advice and financial education. They wanted to make it easy for everyone to start investing in themselves, their children, and their future. As they didn’t see any company in the market truly educating people on how to create wealth for themselves, they started one.
Five years on Stash has made investing and saving an incredibly positive habit, encouraging large numbers of people to put small amounts of money away on a regular basis.
Brandon and Ed were introduced to Entrée through friends in London – that introduction started a long and amazing relationship. “What’s valued most is the clock-speed thinking of the firm – and the honest and candid advice that they give. Entrée helped with product strategy and financing,” says Brandon. “We’re excited to evolve alongside Entrée and to continue to work together.”
Founders: Brandon Krieg, Ed Robinson
Stash is a New York-based digital investing and banking platform founded by Ed Robinson and Brandon Krieg which has raised over $300m from top tier investors such as Entrée Capital, Valar, USV and Goodwater.
When they founded Stash, Brandon and Ed realized that everyday Americans couldn’t get access to important advice and financial education. They wanted to make it easy for everyone to start investing in themselves, their children, and their future. As they didn’t see any company in the market truly educating people on how to create wealth for themselves, they started one.
Five years on Stash has made investing and saving an incredibly positive habit, encouraging large numbers of people to put small amounts of money away on a regular basis.
Brandon and Ed were introduced to Entrée through friends in London – that introduction started a long and amazing relationship. “What’s valued most is the clock-speed thinking of the firm – and the honest and candid advice that they give. Entrée helped with product strategy and financing,” says Brandon. “We’re excited to evolve alongside Entrée and to continue to work together.”
Did You Know?
Founders: Dotan Bar Noy, Gal Diskin, Ron Liberman
Authomize was founded by a group of seasoned and visionary entrepreneurs who identified the challenges IT and Security teams face in managing and securing authorizations in today’s complex environment. Authomize’s goal is to allow organizations to manage these challenges without compromising on productivity or security.
The Authomize founders are three longtime friends and entrepreneurs that finally had the opportunity to work together on a challenging project. After years of working in the security space, the team wanted to find a problem that felt like uncharted territory – and that was authorization. Authentication had been solved and the market was already full of good solutions. What was lacking was the next step and this is where it got hard. Not only did one need to confirm a user’s identity, but also gain a deep, granular understanding of who they are in the context of an organization and then use that to provide organizations with an automated, end-to- end solution for managing permissions. The founders believed that they could bring something far better to the table.
“Our story of getting started pretty much followed the startup playbook. And we were lucky to have good partners with us from early on. The team at Entrée, especially Eran Bielski, worked with us through the ideation stage, providing us with critical feedback that helped us to reach our value proposition faster,” says Dotan, CEO and co-founder.
A special thanks to Entrée and especially Eran for:
Founders: Dotan Bar Noy, Gal Diskin, Ron Liberman
Authomize was founded by a group of seasoned and visionary entrepreneurs who identified the challenges IT and Security teams face in managing and securing authorizations in today’s complex environment. Authomize’s goal is to allow organizations to manage these challenges without compromising on productivity or security.
The Authomize founders are three longtime friends and entrepreneurs that finally had the opportunity to work together on a challenging project. After years of working in the security space, the team wanted to find a problem that felt like uncharted territory – and that was authorization. Authentication had been solved and the market was already full of good solutions. What was lacking was the next step and this is where it got hard. Not only did one need to confirm a user’s identity, but also gain a deep, granular understanding of who they are in the context of an organization and then use that to provide organizations with an automated, end-to- end solution for managing permissions. The founders believed that they could bring something far better to the table.
“Our story of getting started pretty much followed the startup playbook. And we were lucky to have good partners with us from early on. The team at Entrée, especially Eran Bielski, worked with us through the ideation stage, providing us with critical feedback that helped us to reach our value proposition faster,” says Dotan, CEO and co-founder.
A special thanks to Entrée and especially Eran for:
Did You Know?
Founders: Meirav Oren, Danny Hermann, Barak Cohen, Ran Oren
Versatile believes that construction is a form of manufacturing and in the power of data to support and change decision-making. Versatile uses sensors mounted on the hook of any crane to transform data gathered non-intrusively into actionable insights and to deliver the right information, to the right person, at the right time.
“My dad was a General Contractor and my brother is a Project Manager so when I went to work at Intel I was a bit of a disgrace to my family! But a fatal accident on the site my brother was working on led to the belief that we must be able to control construction – the world’s most fragmented and unstructured manufacturing process – and the rest is history. Versatile’s co-founders got together because we were all in the right place at the right time – and we had a little bit of luck on our side too!” says Meirav.
Commitment and vision. I look for investors who have the ability to recognize greatness and partner with founders in a significant, empowering way. It’s good to have Entrée in our corner!
Founders: Meirav Oren, Danny Hermann, Barak Cohen, Ran Oren
Versatile believes that construction is a form of manufacturing and in the power of data to support and change decision-making. Versatile uses sensors mounted on the hook of any crane to transform data gathered non-intrusively into actionable insights and to deliver the right information, to the right person, at the right time.
“My dad was a General Contractor and my brother is a Project Manager so when I went to work at Intel I was a bit of a disgrace to my family! But a fatal accident on the site my brother was working on led to the belief that we must be able to control construction – the world’s most fragmented and unstructured manufacturing process – and the rest is history. Versatile’s co-founders got together because we were all in the right place at the right time – and we had a little bit of luck on our side too!” says Meirav.
Commitment and vision. I look for investors who have the ability to recognize greatness and partner with founders in a significant, empowering way. It’s good to have Entrée in our corner!
Did You Know?
Founders: Sacha Michaud, Oscar Pierre
Glovo aims to give everyone easy access to anything in their city. This is our vision and it summarizes what we are trying to build. We want people to find everything they are looking for in a city and we provide easy and immediate access to it.
We launched in 2015 with a very simple app with only two services: “Order Anything” and “Send a package”. It was a two-sided marketplace: users and on-demand couriers. We quickly learnt two things: 1- people want to see content, products, pictures, prices, menus…the open-text was too hard to understand and killed conversion; and 2- it was too expensive. Our only revenue stream was the user and we had to charge them the entire courier cost plus our margin, which ended up being around 6-7 pounds. Very few people were willing to spend 6 pounds to get things delivered to them.
So that’s when we launched “Glovo2.0”, where we included the partner stores, and became a 3-sided marketplace. By adding their content, products and prices to our platform and charging them a commission on orders generated, we solved both problems.
Entrée made decisions quickly and are easy to work with. The Entrée team really support founders and have been there when we needed them – for example analyzing the market, preparing us for IPO, and working with other investors behind the scenes.
Founders: Sacha Michaud, Oscar Pierre
Glovo aims to give everyone easy access to anything in their city. This is our vision and it summarizes what we are trying to build. We want people to find everything they are looking for in a city and we provide easy and immediate access to it.
We launched in 2015 with a very simple app with only two services: “Order Anything” and “Send a package”. It was a two-sided marketplace: users and on-demand couriers. We quickly learnt two things: 1- people want to see content, products, pictures, prices, menus…the open-text was too hard to understand and killed conversion; and 2- it was too expensive. Our only revenue stream was the user and we had to charge them the entire courier cost plus our margin, which ended up being around 6-7 pounds. Very few people were willing to spend 6 pounds to get things delivered to them.
So that’s when we launched “Glovo2.0”, where we included the partner stores, and became a 3-sided marketplace. By adding their content, products and prices to our platform and charging them a commission on orders generated, we solved both problems.
Entrée made decisions quickly and are easy to work with. The Entrée team really support founders and have been there when we needed them – for example analyzing the market, preparing us for IPO, and working with other investors behind the scenes.
Did You Know?
Entrée is led by people with a shared vision, values and drive to succeed. More than that, the partners, who have had experience running and building their own companies, understand what makes founders tick – and what support they need to build successful companies.
