Pitango VC, established in

1993 The United Nations General Assembly, General Assembly of the United Nations designated 1993 as: * International Year for the World's Indigenous People The year 1993 in the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands had only 364 days, since its ...

, is

Israel Israel, officially the State of Israel, is a country in West Asia. It Borders of Israel, shares borders with Lebanon to the north, Syria to the north-east, Jordan to the east, Egypt to the south-west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. Isr ...

’s largest and longest standing

venture capital Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to start-up company, startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in ...

fund with over $3 billion USD under management as of

2025 So far, the year has seen the continuation of major armed conflicts, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Sudanese civil war (2023–present), Sudanese civil war, and the Gaza war. Internal crises in Bangladesh post-resignation v ...

, with a recent vintage in

2020 The year 2020 was heavily defined by the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to global Social impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, social and Economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, economic disruption, mass cancellations and postponements of even ...

of $750M USD making it the largest venture group in Israel. Headquartered in

Tel Aviv Tel Aviv-Yafo ( or , ; ), sometimes rendered as Tel Aviv-Jaffa, and usually referred to as just Tel Aviv, is the most populous city in the Gush Dan metropolitan area of Israel. Located on the Israeli Mediterranean coastline and with a popula ...

, Israel ( Sarona) Pitango has raised 14 venture funds, invested in more than 300 companies and accomplished over 90 companies becoming publicly traded in

NASDAQ The Nasdaq Stock Market (; National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the U.S. by volume, and ranked second on the list ...

and

NYSE The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE, nicknamed "The Big Board") is an American stock exchange in the Financial District, Manhattan, Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It is the List of stock exchanges, largest stock excha ...

or acquired by strategic players such as

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

Cisco Cisco Systems, Inc. (using the trademark Cisco) is an American multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, s ...

. Investors are institutional and strategic investors from the US, Europe, Japan, and SouthEast Asia and have included

Time Warner Warner Media, LLC ( doing business as WarnerMedia) was an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate owned by AT&T. It was headquartered at the 30 Hudson Yards complex in New York City. It was established as Time Warne ...

Citigroup Citigroup Inc. or Citi (Style (visual arts), stylized as citi) is an American multinational investment banking, investment bank and financial services company based in New York City. The company was formed in 1998 by the merger of Citicorp, t ...

Eastman Kodak The Eastman Kodak Company, referred to simply as Kodak (), is an American public company that produces various products related to its historic basis in film photography. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, and is incorporated i ...

Deutsche Bank Deutsche Bank AG (, ) is a Germany, German multinational Investment banking, investment bank and financial services company headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany, and dual-listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange. ...

and

HarbourVest Partners HarbourVest Partners, LLC is a private equity fund of funds and one of the largest private equity investment managers globally. The firm invests in all types of private equity funds, including venture capital and leveraged buyout funds, and also ...

. Pitango VC invests through three dedicated funds, Pitango First (early-stage investments), Pitango HealthTech (HealthTech investments), and Pitango Growth (growth investments). Notable successful investments made by the firm include Via, DriveNets, AppsFlyer, Forescout, and Varonis.

Domains of investment

Pitango invests in a wide range of technology and innovation-driven sectors. These include deep

technology Technology is the application of Conceptual model, conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way. The word ''technology'' can also mean the products resulting from such efforts, including both tangible too ...

fields such as

generative artificial intelligence Generative artificial intelligence (Generative AI, GenAI, or GAI) is a subfield of artificial intelligence that uses generative models to produce text, images, videos, or other forms of data. These models Machine learning, learn the underlyin ...

(AI),

quantum computing A quantum computer is a computer that exploits quantum mechanical phenomena. On small scales, physical matter exhibits properties of wave-particle duality, both particles and waves, and quantum computing takes advantage of this behavior using s ...

, and

cybersecurity Computer security (also cybersecurity, digital security, or information technology (IT) security) is a subdiscipline within the field of information security. It consists of the protection of computer software, systems and networks from thr ...

, as well as infrastructure-focused areas like

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

DevOps DevOps is the integration and automation of the software development and information technology operations. DevOps encompasses necessary tasks of software development and can lead to shortening development time and improving the development life ...

, and enterprise infrastructure. Pitango is also active in

financial technology Financial technology (abbreviated as fintech) refers to the application of innovative technologies to products and services in the financial industry. This broad term encompasses a wide array of technological advancements in financial services, ...

(FinTech) and TransitTech, reflecting its interest in modernizing financial services and urban mobility solutions. In the

healthcare Health care, or healthcare, is the improvement or maintenance of health via the preventive healthcare, prevention, diagnosis, therapy, treatment, wikt:amelioration, amelioration or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other disability, physic ...

sector, Pitango supports ventures in digital health,

medical devices A medical device is any device intended to be used for medical purposes. Significant potential for hazards are inherent when using a device for medical purposes and thus medical devices must be proved safe and effective with reasonable assura ...

, and

biotechnology Biotechnology is a multidisciplinary field that involves the integration of natural sciences and Engineering Science, engineering sciences in order to achieve the application of organisms and parts thereof for products and services. Specialists ...

. Additionally, the firm invests in companies operating in sales and marketing technologies, as well as retail and

eCommerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) refers to commercial activities including the electronic buying or selling products and services which are conducted on online platforms or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile comm ...

platforms.

History

The fund was founded as Polaris Venture Capital in 1993 by Rami Kalish. In

1996 1996 was designated as: * International Year for the Eradication of Poverty Events January * January 8 – A Zairean cargo plane crashes into a crowded market in the center of the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo ...

, Kalish was joined by Chemi Peres, son of former Israeli president

Shimon Peres Shimon Peres ( ; ; born Szymon Perski, ; 2 August 1923 – 28 September 2016) was an Israeli politician and statesman who served as the prime minister of Israel from 1984 to 1986 and from 1995 to 1996 and as the president of Israel from 2007 t ...

, to create Polaris Fund II, which raised more than $100 million. Polaris II invested in 35 high-tech companies. In 2001, Polaris Venture Capital changed its name to Pitango Venture Capital to avoid confusion with Boston-based Polaris Venture Partners. Although the

Boston Boston is the capital and most populous city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city serves as the cultural and Financial centre, financial center of New England, a region of the Northeas ...

firm was founded in 1996, which was after Pitango was founded, the Israeli firm decided to change its name. Pitango takes its name from the semi-wild Surinam Cherry that grows in Israel. Since then, the company has grown to include 14 partners, a value-add team, an operations and support team, and venture partners.

Notable companies

* AppsFlyer * Duda * EarlySense *

eToro eToro Group Ltd. is an Israel, Israeli multi-asset Investment management, investment and social trading company focused on providing Financial trading, financial services. eToro was founded in 2007 in Tel Aviv by Yoni Assia, Ronen Assia, and Da ...

* Evolven *

Formlabs Formlabs is a 3D printing technology developer and manufacturer. The Somerville, Massachusetts-based company was founded in September 2011 by three MIT Media Lab students. The company develops and manufactures 3D printers and related software a ...

Graphcore Graphcore Limited is a British semiconductor company that develops AI accelerator, accelerators for AI and machine learning. It has introduced a massively parallel ''Intelligence Processing Unit'' (IPU) that holds the complete machine learning mo ...

* Kaminario * mySupermarket * Radwin *

Riskified Riskified is a publicly traded company that provides software as a service (SaaS) fraud and chargeback prevention technology. History Riskified’s technology uses behavioral analysis, elastic linking, proxy detection, and machine learning to d ...

* Silk platform *

Taboola Taboola, Inc. is a Public company, publicly traded advertising and technology company headquartered in New York City. It provides "content recommendation" adverts on its partner websites. History Taboola was founded in 2007 by Adam Singolda. The ...

* Varonis Systems *

Via Transportation, Inc. Via Transportation, Inc. is a technology company that provides software as a service (SaaS) and operations to improve public transportation networks for cities, transit agencies, schools and universities, healthcare providers, and corporations a ...

Zerto Zerto provides disaster recovery, ransomware resilience and workload mobility software for virtualized infrastructures and cloud environments. Zerto is a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise company which is headquartered in Spring, Texas, U ...

Exits

References

External links

* {{Venture capital firms Venture capital firms of Israel Privately held companies of Israel Investment companies of Israel