Former NBA basketball star and Israeli investor Omri Casspi is leaving the Sheva fund, which he cofounded with David Citron, and is focusing on his new venture capital fund Swish Ventures, which has announced the closure of a $60 million seed fund. Investors include Sequoia and other funds and entrepreneurs.
Casspi tells "Globes," "I am launching an independent and new fund after refining the seed investment model that I want to implement."
Sheva will end operations after investing in eight startups and Casspi's former partner Citron will shift to pre-seed investments. Casspi and Citron will continue to make follow-on investments from Sheva's remaining capital to maintain their stake in the portfolio companies. From January 1, Casspi will begin his new role at Swish. He says, "I wanted a more international name than Sheva, and something still connected to the world of basketball."
Sheva is breaking up mainly due to the different interests of its partners and lack of common path ahead rather than because of the returns it has achieved. On paper, Sheva has been one of the most successful funds in recent times, achieving phenomenal returns thanks to investments in fast-growing companies such as EON and Upwind Security, which have both increased their valuations enormously within a short period of time.
EON last week raised money at a valuation of $1.4 billion, while Upwind today announced a financing round at an estimated valuation of $900 million – triple its previous financing round.
Casspi says, "Sheva is in the top 5% in the world (for small funds) and we have a big position with growing companies. For example, we invested over 15% of our first fund in EON. This stems, among other things, from collaboration with outstanding investors. The investment in Upwind, we did with Cyberstarts, and PointFive with Index Ventures." Some of the success was achieved by focusing on seed investments in serial entrepreneurs who had previously sold their startups and were raising relatively large rounds.
The network of business connections that Casspi has woven and the knowledge he has acquired in the tech investment world have enabled him to compete for some of the most prominent deals in Israel. Upwind founder Amiram Shachar is not just an entrepreneur of a portfolio company. Shachar met Casspi on the basketball courts of California as a basketball fan and a young entrepreneur living in Silicon Valley, even before he sold his previous company, Spot.ai for $450 million. At one point, they made a joint promise. Shachar would found a new company, while Casspi would found a venture capital fund that would invest in Shachar's startup.
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The friendship with Shachar led Casspi to consider founding Sheva and brought him closer to the social circle of Gili Raanan, founder of Cyberstarts, which has investments in fast-growing cybersecurity companies such as Wiz and Cyera. "Amiram was the turning point in my career," admits Casspi. "I would sit with Amiram after every conversation with Gili Raanan, write things down, make references and go to board meetings as a silent observer, writing my own assessments. That's how I understood what kind of deals I liked, and I learned to know the cybersecurity industry in all its nuances. So there were those who asked: 'Casspi, what does he even have to do with cybersecurity,' but I looked at it as a challenge."
"The industry embraced me with open arms"
Casspi met EON founder Ofir Ehrlich, who had previously sold CloudEndure to Amazon, as a private investor. "I met him two years ago. I told him about the fund and did my usual pitch. He shared with me his plans to leave Amazon and start his own company and said he liked the connection to Israeli entrepreneurs in the US, and we each went our separate ways. He had 15 investment offers and in the end he decided he wanted to work with me. I invested in the seed round together with Sequoia and Lightspeed – I, after all, came from basketball. I didn't know what data backup was or what Sequoia was, or who CrowdStrike was. The industry welcomed me with open arms," says Casspi.
Another figure in Casspi's circle is Sean Maguire, one of the promising partners at Sequoia, who has been a pro-Israel voice since October 7 and led Sequoia to increase its investments in Israel precisely during these difficult times. Maguire, who is well-known in US right-wing circles, helped Casspi fly Elon Musk to Israel more than a year ago to visit Kfar Aza (a kibbutz on the Gaza border attacked on October 7) and broadcast his impressions live. After the visit to Israel, Musk wore the dog-tag calling for the release of the hostages. The connection with Maguire eventually led to deeper business ties between the two funds. Sequoia is one of the investors in the new Swish fund. In the past, Sequoia also invested in Gili Raanan's Cyberstarts fund, in addition to being a co-investor with its portfolio companies like Wiz.
Casspi is joined at Swish by Dana Alexandrovich, who will be operating partner. She previously served as deputy to Microsoft Israel R&D deputy CEO Michal Braverman-Blumenstyk and has been a security researcher at the Ministry of Defense and in commercial industry.
Investors in Swish's $60 million fund include serial entrepreneurs such as the founders of Armis Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael, Granolite (sold to Intel) founder Asaf Ezra, as well as a number of entrepreneurs who themselves raised capital from Sheva including Erlich and Shachar and Gal Ben-David, one of the founders of PointFive. Other investors include US and Israeli institutional entities whose names Casspi is not disclosing. According to the PitchBook website, the More investment company invested in Sheva.
Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on December 2, 2024.
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2024.
