Once again, I'm a few days later than I'd like writing about one of our many events. As is probably already evident, we've had a really packed schedule this summer in Israel. It seems like at any moment we've been on the road - always either heading to or from our next engagement. From technology conferences and historical sightseeing, to company visits and business meetings, the Smith team has been busy, busy, busy!
Anyway, on to the issue at hand. Last Sunday, June 13, we had the opportunity to engage with three different Israeli companies. In our first meeting we met one-on-one with a founding partner of an Israeli venture capital firm at our hotel in Jerusalem. In the other two we did so through on-site meetings and visits at each of the other two company's headquarters, both located in the city of Be'er Sheva.
Photo by Kristin Thompson
Our first meeting of the day was with Israel CleanTech Ventures (ICV). Established in 2006, ICV is the first Israel-focused cleantech venture capital fund - dedicated to providing value added growth capital to entrepreneurs specializing in energy, water, and environmental technologies. ICV raised $75 million for its first fund in 2007, drawn from a diverse (predominantly European and American) client base, which included Robeco, Piper Jaffray, as well as other institutional investors and family offices.
Our guide to Israel CleanTech Ventures was Glen Schwaber, a founding partner and originally a native of Boston, who emigrated from the United States to Israel in 1994. Glen has a wealth of experience in the Israeli investment community, having begun his career at Jerusalem Global, a private equity firm for Israeli hi-tech start-ups before transitioning to Jerusalem Venture Partners, one of the most successful venture capital firms in Israel, and then later founding ICV with two other initial partners.Unlike a few of our previous VC meetings - where our hosts spent a significant portion of the meeting talking generally about the market in Israel - Glen dove right into a detailed discussion of a few current portfolio company investments - as well as the Israeli cleantech sector in general. Over the course of about an hour, Glen walked our group through an analysis of ICV's strategy, including a thorough breakdown of their investment criteria, market approach, and screening process.
There were two portfolio companies I found particularly interesting. The first was CellEra, which is a a fuel-cell company with a revolutionary new type of fuel cell, the Platinum-Free Membrane Fuel Cell (PFM-FC). CellEra's solution eliminates major cost components in current fuel-cells, such as very expensive platinum. The second investment was in a firm, Scodix, which has developed a revolutionary Digital UV Embossing press. The machine and associated process are inherently environmentally friendly - the process requires no plates or silk, minimum electricity power, and results in virtually no printing waste.
All together, our meeting with Glen was really interesting, and no doubt about it, ICV's current portfolio investments (and investment strategy generally) are really cutting edge!
