Early stage VC UpWest raises $70m fourth fund

• Published date: 04 November 2021

UpWest's gain on SentinelOne's flotation was not reported, since its holding in the company was not substantial, but it is estimated to have been in the tens of millions of dollars on an investment of a few hundred thousand. UpWest's first fund, which amounted to $2 million, thus yielded its investors a handsome return.

SentinelOne was floated in late June, and quickly became one of the most successful Israeli flotations of 2021. Since the IPO, the company's share price has risen 58%, and with it the returns of the investors, some of whom are still in the lock-up period.

For a fund that invests in companies at the seed stage, when the investment is between a few hundred thousand and $4 million per company, $70 million is not a modest sum, and, considering that UpWest's third fund raised just $18 million, it represents a substantial jump.

"The size of the fund is right for our investment strategy, which so far has enabled us to be the first check in many companies that wanted to break into the US market at the pre-seed and seed stages, such as HoneyBook and SentinelOne," Ben-Artzy told "Globes". "This is despite the fact that there were much larger funds than us in the market at the time when we made our investments in these companies. Following the success of the portfolio companies, we received many applications to invest in the fund, but we decided to close at the current amount in order not to distract ourselves from the kind of companies that we look at and the stage at which they are."

UpWest has already made four investments from its fourth fund, from which it will invest in no more than 25 companies over the next three years.

You founded UpWest with the vision of bringing Israeli companies to Silicon Valley through an accelerator program, but that vision has been somewhat challenged in the past two years by the Covid pandemic, which has enabled Israeli entrepreneurs to work from anywhere. In...