43 former and present executives from Amdocs have raised several million dollars and formed AfterDox, an angel group targeting early stage enterprise software and telecom companies. The group explicitly expressed that they will not invest in medical devices or hardware companies. The angel group has already met with 70 prospect companies and is getting ready to make its first investment.
The group of veterans plans to take active roles as mentors, board members and consultants, in order to help build the portfolio companies and raise additional rounds of investments, leveraging their experience and personal rolodex.
AfterDox’s is led by Menachem Shalgi, former VP business development at Amdocs. Other members of the team include Amdocs co-founder Boaz Dotan, VP Eli Gelman, SVP Amir Goldstein (co-founder of Cellcom Israel Ltd. ), Arie Offner, Yossi Ben-Dov (CEO of Schema)and some other high caliber Israeli execs. According to IVC online, other managers of the group include Zvi Avron and Gary Sapir.
There are a few other Angel groups in Israel. The prominent ones are Israel Angels, the Angels Club (sponsored by “The Israel Export and International Cooperation Institute”) and Silicom Ventures. In addition, there are hundreds of non-grouped angels who invest privately in high-tech companies. One of the most known is Mr. Yossi Vardi (founder of ICQ) who invests in early stage internet companies.
The reason for the recent buzz around angel investments in the Israeli market is the rising wave of investments in the tech industry in the last two years. As posted here a couple of days ago, high tech investments peaked in the second quarter of 2007, which caused high net worth individuals to consider venture investments as another asset in their portfolio.
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I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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