A new deep-tech investment firm seeking to help Israeli startups fundraise and collaborate with U.S. companies emerged from stealth mode on Tuesday, announcing the launch of its $150 million fund. 

Called Deep33 Ventures, the firm will be led by serial entrepreneurs and investors Lior Prosor, who has invested in companies including Via Transportation, Lemonade Insurance and Carbyne, and Michael Broukhim, the co-founder of FabFitFun, who has invested in companies such as SpaceX, Stripe and Hut8. 

The fund, which already secured $100 million in capital commitments from its first group of investors, will focus on deep tech — which includes quantum computing, advanced energy and autonomous systems. 

“There isn’t a deep tech fund focused on Israel’s ecosystem. One of our biggest differentiators is the overlap of being deep tech and concentrated on Israel,” Broukhim told Jewish Insider.

With offices in Tel Aviv, New York and Los Angeles, the firm aims to create what it calls a U.S.-Israel “allied infrastructure corridor” combining the two countries’ technological strengths to counter China. 

“There is a trillion dollars of data center spending happening in the U.S. over the next 18 months, all of the critical industries are reshoring here for the first time since World War II. There’s a very meaningful frontier tech war happening between the U.S. and China. That’s the global catalyst for meaningful innovation,” Prosor told JI. “It all starts on a much more global macro trend than anything specifically Israel related.”

Israel, meanwhile, “has always had the core ingredients in place — amazing academic institutions, conductor industry, an optics industry, radio frequency industry and now the defense industry has been catapulted forward,” following the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks, continued Prosor. 

The launch comes days after Israel and the United States signed a joint statement on artificial intelligence at the City of David in Jerusalem as part of the Pax Silica initiative.  

“That is what I would call the bilateral memorandum of understanding to what we’re doing on the ground on the investment side,” said Prosor. “We think there’s really only two major ecosystems, other than China, that have the ability to consistently produce companies in these spaces, and that’s the U.S. and Israel. Israel really becomes a crucial ally in the U.S. frontier tech war with China. That collaboration is going to get closer and closer and Israel is going to punch way above its weight in producing things that are incredibly valuable to the U.S.” 

But it also comes amid what Broukhim called a “macro pullback in the venture ecosystem” relative to peaks in 2020 and 2021. 

Some of that, he said, is due to international scrutiny that Israeli tech founders face compared to their counterparts from other countries. 

“We see that as an opportunity for us,” continued Broukhim.

“Being closer to the ground level, [we see] incredible resilience, incredible companies being built,” he said. “There’s almost an evaluation arbitrage between the same types of companies in the same stages in Israel versus what we’re seeing in the United States. We think of that as an opportunity to have much better returns based on a temporary dislocation market.” 

Joining the firm as chairman is Lior Susan, founder of Eclipse Ventures and a pioneer of the “deep tech revolution” in Silicon Valley. Additionally, it will draw on experts in quantum, energy, AI, government relations and autonomous robotics from some of Israel’s top technical and security fields, including Col. (res.) Joab Rosenberg, former senior official in IDF intelligence and quantum physicist from the Weizmann Institute of Science; Ori Amsalem, former technology investor at Arkin Capital; Maj. (res.) Yael Barsheshet, who served in technical leadership positions in IDF intelligence; Yarden Golan, former chief of staff to then-Minister of Strategic Affairs of Israel Ron Dermer; and Elram Goren, who served in significant roles in IDF intelligence and co-founded the robotics platform Fabric.

Broukhim, who is based on the West Coast and describes himself as an “Oct. 8 Jew” — someone who experienced re-connection with his Jewish identity following Oct. 7 — said that the attacks and rise of antisemitism prompted by the ensuing war in Gaza are what brought him “deeper into the Israel ecosystem and planted the first seeds of what blossomed into this fund.”

“We’re an outgrowth of the energy around post-Oct. 7 and making big bets on the future of the Israeli ecosystem,” he said.   

The name Deep33 is a nod to the number’s significance in Judaism’s mystical tradition of Kabbalah, where it represents growth and hidden truths. 

The holiday of Lag B’Omer, which is the 33rd day of the Omer, is “when the hidden truths of the universe become revealed,” explained Broukhim. “A lot of what we think we’re doing as a firm — and our founders are doing in their companies at the intersection of science and discoveries — is to [reveal] the truth of the world.”