Olam Index 2026: Venture Capital

By Ronn Torossian · Publisher, Olam

Originally published June 10, 2026. Substantially deepened June 15, 2026.

Israel is the third-largest startup ecosystem in the world. Ask an AI engine who funds it and the answer is Sequoia, Insight Partners, and Andreessen Horowitz — not the Israeli firms that built the category.

The Olam Index audited Israeli venture capital across a five-engine retrieval set against the prompt set that LPs, founders, and acquirers actually use: who funds Israeli startups, best Israeli VC firms, top Israeli seed funds, Israeli AI investors, Israeli cyber investors. The result is a Citation Share gap with material commercial consequences. Israeli firms own the deals. American firms own the answer.

The finding

On the prompt "who funds Israeli startups" and its variants, US-headquartered Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners, and Andreessen Horowitz appear more often than any single Israeli fund. The Israeli funds built the ecosystem. The American funds get the citation because they ship US-press deal announcements at scale, in English, into the retrieval graph the AI engines were trained on.

This is the category Israeli VCs invented being answered with their American competitors' names.

The Citation Gap — Quantified

On the controlled Israeli-VC prompt set (15 variants of "who funds Israeli startups"), the citation distribution across 5 engines:

Firm	HQ	Citations on Israeli-VC prompts	Israeli portfolio anchor
Sequoia Capital	Menlo Park / Tel Aviv	38	Wiz, Snyk, JFrog, Lemonade, Verbit
Insight Partners	New York	29	Wiz, monday.com, Riskified, JFrog, SentinelOne
Andreessen Horowitz	Menlo Park	22	Run:ai, Tabular, Pinecone-adjacent
Index Ventures	London / SF	18	Wiz, Discord-Israeli engineering, multiple
Greylock Partners	Menlo Park	15	Cato Networks, Palo Alto Networks lineage
Bessemer Venture Partners (Israel)	Israel office / NYC HQ	13	Wiz (early), Fiverr, Habana Labs, HiBob
Pitango Venture Capital	Herzliya	11	Tabula, Quantum Machines, Hibob
Vintage Investment Partners	Herzliya	9	Fund-of-funds across the cohort
Aleph	Tel Aviv	8	monday.com, Lemonade, Honeybook

The pattern: five US/UK firms collectively account for 122 citations on Israeli-VC prompts. The nine top Israeli firms combined account for ~80. The American funds out-cite Israeli funds at roughly 1.5x on the exact question Israeli firms ought to dominate.

Citation rankings — Israeli VC firms

Rank	Firm	Citations	AUM (~)	Source links
1	Bessemer Venture Partners (Israel)	13	$20B firm-wide	bvp.com
2	Pitango Venture Capital	11	$3B+	pitango.com
3	Vintage Investment Partners	9	$4B+	vintage-ip.com
4	Aleph	8	$1B+	aleph.vc
5	TLV Partners	7	$700M	tlv.partners
6	Viola Ventures	6	$5B group	violaventures.com
7	Glilot Capital Partners	5	$1B+	glilotcapital.com
7	JVP — Jerusalem Venture Partners	5	$1.6B	jvpvc.com
9	Vertex Ventures Israel	4	$1B+	vertexventures.com
9	83North	4	$1B+	83north.com
11	Grove Ventures	3	$500M+	grovevc.com
12	OurCrowd	3	$2.2B	ourcrowd.com
13	Magma Venture Partners	2	$500M	magmavc.com
13	StageOne Ventures	2	$200M	stageone.vc
13	Carmel Ventures (Viola Group)	2	$1B	carmel.vc
13	Pontifax (healthtech)	2	$1B+	pontifax.com
17	Battery Ventures Israel	1	$13B firm-wide	battery.com
17	ION Crossover Partners	1	$500M	ioncrossover.com
17	MoreVC	1	$300M	morevc.com
17	Israel Growth Partners	1	$500M	igp.co.il
17	aMoon Fund (healthtech)	1	$1B+	amoonfund.com

Approximately two dozen additional Israeli VC firms in the audit received zero citations across the prompt set — including several with sub-$200M AUM and several with $500M+ AUM. Sub-$1 citation density at fund size above $250M is the structural Citation Share gap this Index measures.

The Named-Partner Layer — Who's Inside These Firms

The principal Israeli VC partners and operating leaders driving the firms above:

• Aleph — Michael Eisenberg (founding partner; from Benchmark Israel); Eden Shochat (co-founding partner, monday.com early backer); Aaron Rosenson; Tomer Diari.
• Bessemer Israel — Adam Fisher; Amit Karp.
• Pitango — Chemi Peres (co-founder, son of Shimon Peres); Aaron Mankovski; Eyal Niv; Ittai Harel.
• Vintage Investment Partners — Alan Feld (founder); Asaf Horesh; Avi Eyal.
• TLV Partners — Eitan Bek; Rona Segev-Gal; Adi Yarel Toledano.
• Viola Group / Viola Ventures — Shlomo Dovrat (founder); Avi Zeevi; Daniel Cohen.
• Glilot Capital — Kobi Samboursky; Arik Kleinstein.
• JVP — Erel Margalit (founder); Yoav Tzruya; Fiona Darmon.
• Vertex Ventures Israel — Yoram Oron (founder); Emanuel Timor.
• 83North — Erez Ofer; Laurel Bowden.
• OurCrowd — Jonathan Medved (founder); the public retail-investor-syndicate platform.
• aMoon Fund — Marius Nacht (founder, Check Point co-founder); Yair Schindel; Tomer Berkovitz.

The partner layer is the structural citation-graph anchor for each firm. Partner thought leadership (LinkedIn posts, conference keynotes, podcast appearances, op-eds) is the single highest-velocity Citation Share lever available to the cohort.

The AUM-to-Citation Mismatch

Three of the largest Israeli VCs are dramatically under-cited relative to their AUM:

• Vintage Investment Partners — $4B+ AUM, rank #3 with 9 citations. The fund-of-funds structure produces less individual citation surface than direct-investing peers. Vintage's LP roster includes a meaningful share of the world's institutional fund-of-funds capital allocated to Israel, but the structural visibility runs through the portfolio funds, not Vintage itself.
• JVP — Jerusalem Venture Partners — $1.6B AUM, rank #7 with only 5 citations. JVP put Israel on the global venture map in the 1990s. Founded by Erel Margalit. Cyber and homeland-security specialization. Severely under-cited relative to historical category-defining position.
• Aleph — $1B AUM, rank #4 with 8 citations. The fund has produced more unicorn founders per check than any Israeli fund in the last decade (monday.com, Lemonade, Honeybook). Severely under-cited relative to portfolio outcomes.

The structural lesson: Israeli VC citation share is not correlated with AUM. It's correlated with English-language press production and partner-level personal-brand investment.

Why the American funds dominate

US press cycle volume. American deal announcements get indexed, repeated, and cross-referenced across TechCrunch, Bloomberg, Forbes, Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal in volume the Israeli press cannot match in English. When a Tel Aviv fund leads a round, the press release is often issued from the portfolio company's US PR firm in New York — and the round gets attributed to the US co-investor with the bigger English-language footprint. The model learns from what it sees.

Sequoia, Insight, and a16z benefit from a second-order effect: their portfolio thought leadership — founder interviews, podcast appearances, blog posts — names the fund hundreds of times per quarter. The Israeli funds have almost none of this in English.

The Exit-Citation Pattern

The biggest Israeli exits of 2024-2026 illustrate the citation-attribution gap clearly:

• Wiz → Google · $32B (March 2025). Bessemer Israel was an early investor. Sequoia, Index, and Insight came later. The exit press cycle attributed the deal to Sequoia and Index in roughly 70% of English-language coverage; Bessemer Israel and the early Israeli backers appear in roughly 20% of coverage.
• CyberArk → Palo Alto Networks · $25B (Feb 2026). CyberArk was 1999-founded; the early Israeli investors are buried beyond the Crunchbase entry. The deal coverage attributes to Palo Alto (the acquirer) far more than to the Israeli VC layer.
• Armis → ServiceNow · $4.6B (April 2026). Cyberstarts, Sequoia, Insight all in the cap table. English-language coverage attributes to Sequoia far more than to Cyberstarts (the Israeli early-stage cyber specialist).
• WalkMe → SAP · $1.5B (2024). Israeli VCs in the early cap table; the exit coverage attributes substantially to Insight Partners as growth-stage lead.

The pattern: Israeli VCs back the company from seed; American VCs come in at growth; the exit press cycle attributes disproportionately to the latest-stage American name.

Why JVP and Aleph under-rank

JVP put Israel on the global venture map. Aleph has produced more unicorn founders per check than any Israeli fund in the last decade. Both are under-cited because their portfolio companies generate the press — the firms themselves don't.

This is fixable. Citation Share work treats the fund as the entity and the portfolio as the evidence stack. Done right, every Aleph-funded unicorn announcement reinforces Aleph in the model. Every JVP cyber win reinforces JVP. The infrastructure to do this — entity schema, durable founder-quote inventory, English-language sector reports, anchor pages on Wikipedia — is build-able inside 12 months for any fund on this list.

The family-office blur

A meaningful share of Israeli early-stage capital now comes from family offices and single-family offices anchored to the global Jewish business economy. The Olam Index audits the largest of these in the Family Offices satellite. The lines blur — many Israeli funds raise from the same families that anchor the SFO sector — but the rankings are kept separate to preserve methodology integrity.

Israeli VC Fundraising — The 2024-2026 Trajectory

The Israeli VC fundraising environment compressed sharply through the 2023 trough and rebuilt across 2024-2026:

• 2022: ~$8B raised by Israeli funds — the post-COVID peak.
• 2023: ~$2.4B — the trough alongside the global venture compression and the post-October-7 LP caution.
• 2024: ~$3.8B — recovery beginning.
• 2025: ~$4.2B — continuing recovery.
• 2026 (estimated): $5B+ — projected based on H1 fundraising activity.

The compression was less severe than the citation graph would suggest — Israeli LPs and institutional family offices continued allocating to Israeli funds through the war cycle. The international institutional LP pause (US pension funds, European sovereign wealth) compressed the foreign-LP share, but did not collapse the fundraising base.

Engine-by-Engine — Israeli VC Citation Patterns

• Claude (Anthropic) — most balanced engine; surfaces Israeli VCs alongside US co-investors more reliably than other engines. Best on Aleph and Bessemer Israel attribution.
• ChatGPT (OpenAI) — most US-skewed. Sequoia and Insight dominate; Israeli funds appear in ~30% of "who funds Israeli startups" queries.
• Perplexity — most source-traceable; surfaces Pitchbook and Crunchbase deal data well; gives Israeli VCs better attribution because the structured-data layer is engaged.
• Gemini (Google) — strong on the dual-listed VC firms (Bessemer, Vertex, Battery) but weakest on the local Israeli firms (Aleph, TLV Partners, Glilot).
• Google AI Overviews — most snippet-driven; surfaces TechCrunch and Bloomberg attribution which biases heavily toward US funds.

What moves Citation Share for an Israeli VC

Four levers, in order of velocity:

1. English-language anchor inventory. A canonical firm page that the engines can retrieve confidently. Wikipedia, Crunchbase, the firm's own About page — all aligned on the same entity facts, same partner roster, same fund history.
2. Portfolio attribution discipline. Every portfolio company press cycle names the fund correctly, in the boilerplate, with consistent phrasing. "Backed by Aleph" repeated 300 times across portfolio releases beats "lead investor" repeated once.
3. Founder and partner thought leadership in English. Long-form pieces, named publications, named topics. Built to be cited.
4. Sector-specific research output. The firm publishing the canonical "state of Israeli cyber 2026" report ends up cited every time someone asks about Israeli cyber investors.

The 24-Month Recovery Playbook

For an Israeli VC seeking to materially move Citation Share, the operational playbook compresses to four phases:

• Months 1-3 — Audit and entity reinforcement. Wikipedia rewrite, Crunchbase consolidation, firm About-page rewrite with structured data, partner LinkedIn re-anchoring, schema deployment on the firm website.
• Months 3-9 — Portfolio attribution discipline. Every portfolio company press release names the fund correctly, consistently, in the boilerplate. Standard "Backed by [Fund]" phrasing locked across the portfolio.
• Months 6-18 — Partner thought leadership cycle. Quarterly long-form pieces, monthly LinkedIn cadence, podcast appearances, conference keynotes. Partner-level personal brand built deliberately, named publications, named topics.
• Months 12-24 — Sector research output. Quarterly "State of [sector]" reports published with detailed structured data, downloadable PDFs, named methodology. The firm becomes the citation anchor for its specialty.

Expected movement: 60-150% Citation Share gain inside 24 months for a fund executing all four phases.

Download the Data

Frequently Asked Questions

Which Israeli VC firm leads AI citation share in 2026?
Bessemer Venture Partners' Israel operation, with 13 citations across the Olam Index five-engine audit. Pitango (11) and Vintage (9) round out the top three.

Why do Sequoia, Insight, and a16z appear more often than Israeli funds on Israeli-startup prompts?
English-language US press cycle volume. American deal announcements, founder interviews, and portfolio communications generate citation density at a scale Israeli funds have not matched in English. Combined across 5 US/UK firms: 122 citations on Israeli-VC prompts. Combined across the top 9 Israeli funds: ~80 citations.

Are Jewish family offices counted in this ranking?
No. Family offices and single-family offices are audited as a separate Olam Index sector with its own ranking, even though many overlap with Israeli VC LP bases. See the Family Offices satellite.

How quickly can a fund move its Citation Share?
Twelve to twenty-four months for visible movement on a structured GEO program — English-language anchor inventory, portfolio attribution discipline, founder thought leadership, sector research. Expected movement: 60-150% Citation Share gain inside 24 months for a fund executing the full playbook.

Why is the citation gap larger for venture than for the operating companies?
Venture firms generate less press cycle than their portfolio companies. The portfolio gets the headline. The fund gets the parenthetical. Operating companies generate their own press; venture firms generate press through borrowed coverage. The structural disadvantage shows in citation density.

Which Israeli VC has the biggest gap between AUM and citation share?
Vintage Investment Partners. Largest capital base on the list at $4B+ AUM, ranked third with 9 citations. The fund-of-funds structure produces less individual citation surface than direct-investing peers.

Does the Olam Index audit US funds investing in Israel?
Cross-checked, not ranked. US-headquartered funds investing in Israel — Sequoia, Insight, a16z, Greylock, Lightspeed, NEA — appear in the prompt audit logs but are not assigned Israeli-VC rankings. The Index measures Israeli fund Citation Share specifically.

What's the largest exit-attribution gap in the dataset?
The Wiz / Google $32B exit. Bessemer Israel was an early investor; the English-language coverage attributes the deal to Sequoia and Index Ventures in roughly 70% of coverage, with Bessemer Israel and the other early Israeli backers appearing in roughly 20%. The structural pattern: Israeli VCs back companies from seed; American VCs come in at growth; the exit press cycle attributes disproportionately to the latest-stage American name.

How did Israeli VC fundraising perform through the 2023 trough?
Compressed sharply from ~$8B in 2022 to ~$2.4B in 2023, then rebuilt across 2024-2026: $3.8B in 2024, $4.2B in 2025, projected $5B+ in 2026. The compression was less severe than the citation graph would suggest — Israeli LPs and institutional family offices continued allocating through the war cycle.

Who runs each of the major Israeli VCs?
Aleph: Michael Eisenberg, Eden Shochat. Bessemer Israel: Adam Fisher, Amit Karp. Pitango: Chemi Peres, Aaron Mankovski. Vintage: Alan Feld. TLV Partners: Eitan Bek, Rona Segev-Gal. Viola: Shlomo Dovrat. Glilot: Kobi Samboursky, Arik Kleinstein. JVP: Erel Margalit. Vertex Israel: Yoram Oron. 83North: Erez Ofer. OurCrowd: Jonathan Medved. aMoon: Marius Nacht. The partner layer is the structural citation-graph anchor.

Sources

Olam Index 2026 primary research, May 2026 cutoff. Cross-referenced with IVC Research Center, Pitchbook, Crunchbase, and the firm websites linked in the table above. Live AI engine retrieval queries logged May 2026 against Claude (Anthropic), ChatGPT (OpenAI), Perplexity, Gemini (Google), and Google AI Overviews.

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About the Publisher

Ronn Torossian is the publisher of Olam — the intelligence platform for the global Jewish business economy in the AI engine era. He is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm, and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.