Glilot Capital Opens New $170M Growth Fund

Israel-based Glilot Capital Partners, typically an early-seed investment firm, has launched its first early growth fund.

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The new $170 million fund—called Glilot+—is the firm’s fifth fund. The new fund primarily will look for post-Series A enterprise software and cybersecurity opportunities, said Lior Litwak, who will lead the new fund, which is looking to invest, on average, between $5 million and $15 million in about 10 to 15 companies.

“We want to make sure people know we are open for business at these later-stage rounds,” Litwak said.

Investments

Glilot Capital was founded in 2010, when the venture world was being questioned and investing was very different, said Kobi Samboursky, co-founder and managing partner. Nevertheless, Samboursky said, the firm stayed true to its beliefs.

“We came up with a vision, saying startups are still the way of the world,” Samboursky said. “We started small, like a boutique.”

The firm started slow, averaging about two investments a year and had eight investments in its first four years, Samboursky said. Glilot now has made just less than 30 investments and has had 10 M&A exits, including companies bought by Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, Intuit and Marketo, he said.

Cyber and the cloud

There are specific areas of cloud, enterprise software and cybersecurity the firm will explore in deploying its new fund, Litwak said. He pointed to areas such as identification and authentication, technologies that disrupt the traditional security operations center model and even fintech opportunities around things like cybersecurity insurance.

“Cyber is just exploding,” said Arik Kleinstein, Glilot’s co-founder and managing partner.

Kleinstein added that Glilot Capital should have significant opportunities with the new fund to add to a portfolio that already has a handful of companies on a path to becoming unicorns—as the Israeli startup ecosystem continues to produce significant tech companies.

“People used to look at the Israeli market as a place to do smaller M&A deals, but now there are unicorns growing here,” Kleinstein said.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias.