Mr Moshe Shahaf, Executive Director

Mr. Shahaf brings to the Fund exceptional experience in international high tech R&D and the complete venture capital investment cycle.

Over the last decade, Mr. Shahaf has been an active venture capital manager. For the last 5 years, he was the leading Managing Partner at Vertex Venture Capital in Israel, a fund focused on early stage technology businesses. Prior to that, he was a Partner at Formula Ventures and worked as an investment consultant with various Israeli venture capital funds and investment banks.

Mr. Shahaf has consistently focused on early stage opportunities, from incubation through to expansion stage rounds of investment. He was on the Board of Directors of three incubators: the Initiative Center of the Negev, which was supported by the Office of the Chief Scientist in Israel; Kerem; Formula Ventures’ private incubator; and The Technion Incubator, a privatized incubator owned jointly by Vertex and the Technion. Mr. Shahaf led seed investments in teams forming new companies (both external to and spin-outs from larger companies), as well as leading a number of Series A investments. He also led investments in more mature companies which were challenged by the need to "re-align" their businesses in response to changing markets.

Although Mr. Shahaf invested mostly in Israeli and Israel-related ventures, as a result of world wide due diligence, he had numerous opportunities to invest in ventures in the USA, UK, France, and China. In addition, he had the opportunity to work and co-invest with strategic investors, typically large enterprises, from the USA, Germany, Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan.

In the course of developing his portfolio companies Mr. Shahaf gained invaluable multicultural and international business experience.

As a successful venture capitalist, Mr. Shahaf had the pleasure of guiding his portfolio throughout the entire process, from building the teams, the products, and the business through syndicating multiple investment rounds and finally reaching the climax, divestment. Mr. Shahaf participated both in floating companies on NASDAQ as well as completing a number of M&A transactions.

Across Mr. Shahaf's outstanding portfolio were a number of start-up companies that developed successful new technologies that addressed growing global markets including: grid computing, PoE, WiFi, WiMAX, UWB, DVBH, RFID and sophisticated software applications.

Prior to becoming a venture capital manager, Mr. Shahaf had 20 years of hands-on managerial experience in Israeli and International technology development teams including:

Major (ret.) in the Israeli Defence Force elite technology unit;
Director, National Semiconductor Corp., (USA & Israel);
VP R&D and CTO: Wave Systems Corp., (USA);
VP R&D: RAD Network Devices Ltd., (Israel); and
VP R&D and CTO: DSP Group Inc. (Israel & USA)

In these roles, Mr. Shahaf gained a deep and broad technology background in the areas of VLSI design, enterprise and embedded software, security, networking and digital signal processing.

As VP R&D of several multinational companies as well as a prominent venture capitalist, Mr. Shahaf has had a unique, lifetime opportunity to "surf" the wave of high tech development. From the microprocessor revolution in the early eighties, through the birth and growth of the Internet and networking, digital signal processing and the proliferation of digital audio and video, to the era of Wireless communications.

Mr. Shahaf holds B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology; an M.B.A from Tel Aviv University; and a Masters in Law from Bar Ilan University, Israel