Jon Medved, OurCrowd
Jon Medved is a pioneer of Israel’s venture capital industry and founder of OurCrowd, an online global venture investment platform for family offices, individual investors and institutions. Medved, a native of California, moved to Israel in his 20s. There he successfully built and exited several startups before establishing OurCrowd to democratize investment in early-stage, emerging technology companies. Crain Currency talks with Medved about the latest VC trends from family offices.
How does OurCrowd differentiate itself from other platforms?
We have skin in every investment we make – more than $100 million of our money is invested in the $2.2 billion of committed funds. We choose our investments rather than taking a sliding fee from companies. Our business model is to take a management fee and carried interest from our investors. We put our investment on the same terms as those who join us, and we then bring it to the crowd, who are accredited investors and family offices.
What’s OurCrowd investing in now?
We are agnostic, in that we invest in everything from cybersecurity to food tech to space to quantum, across sectors, stages and geographies. We have licenses all over the world and invest globally.
We recently invested in Quidnet Energy, which uses oil and gas technology to pump water underground, collecting renewable energy during the day and using the pressure of the Earth to squeeze it back up to utilize it at night. They’ve already got their first $30 million contract and a $10 million contract with the Department of Energy.
We were introduced to the deal by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which was started by some of the wealthiest people in the world – including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, who felt that they needed to create a venture fund focused on true breakthroughs in energy. They’re the best energy investor in the world, in my opinion. We’ve done five deals with them with investing in green hydrogen, green steel, smart energy utilization and energy storage.
We’re also doing a deal with a company called Zipline, which uses high-performance drones to deliver blood in rural Africa. Co-investors are Sequoia, Goldman Sachs, Andreessen Horowitz and Fidelity. It’s like a who’s who of people you’d like to invest with.
How do you compete with the demand for direct investing?
It’s wonderful if you live in Silicon Valley. It’s pretty good if you live in Austin or Boston. You can find deal flow in London and certainly Tel Aviv. But the rest of the world – there are rich people everywhere looking for deal flow. Everybody wants to be exposed to innovation, so it’s very competitive to source deal flow directly. All the deals on our platform are vetted and run through our investment committee. We participate in every deal.
Even the smartest family offices, the ones who have a big portfolio already, are surprised we don’t charge an upfront fee for deal flow. Last year, we did over 130 deals, approximately two to three deals a week – which includes new deals and follow-ons, which are investments in our existing portfolio.
What’s the minimum investment look like for your clients?
Minimum investment is $10,000 per company or $50,000 per fund. We lead about half the transactions, and the other half, we work with over 1,500 venture funds who we sit on boards with, so it’s a huge community. We have an annual summit with thousands of delegates from more than 80 countries. Half of our investors are in North America, half are based throughout the rest of the world, and less than 5% are in Israel. Our clients include family offices, individual investors and institutions.