KYIV. May 20 (Interfax-Ukraine) – Israeli GIZA Ventures Capital that has invested around $600 million in 106 projects via five venture funds over 22 years is mulling the creation of a separate fund to invest into Ukrainian venture and IT projects.
The founder and head of GIZA Ventures Zeev Holzman said at the New Ukraine investment conference in Kyiv this week that the partner of the company in the project is Ukraine’s Empire State Capital Partners (Kyiv) that organized the conference.
“The target of our future fund for venture projects is $20 million for the first closure. Then we seek to reach $50 million,” Managing Director and Head Capital Markets & Institutional Sales Department at Empire State Capital Partners Alex Bart told Interfax-Ukraine.
He said that the fund soon would start helping the development of the venture and IT eco-system in Ukraine.
Holzman proposed to Ukrainian authorities at the conference that up to 10 funds with seed capital starting from $30 million to invest in venture projects with foreign companies as partners should be created in Ukraine. He said later investors could buy the state-owned shares that could be up to 50%, with a markup.
He said that this program showed large efficiency in Israel and it would be helpful for the development of the domestic IT market and expanding its share of the global IT market.
Holzman said that GIZA Ventures has 14 active projects. The fund had 43 successful withdrawals from projects via selling them or holding an initial public offering (IPO) on exchanges. Among these projects are XtremIO (acquired by EMC), Soluto (Asurion), Actimize (NICE Systems), Prosight (Primavera Systems), Oplus (Intel), Precise (IPO NASDAQ, Veritas), Oridion (IPO Zurich, Covidien pending), Zoran (IPO NASDAQ, CSR), M-Systems (IPO NASDAQ, SanDisk), DSPG (IPO NASDAQ), Butterfly and Libit (TI), DSPC (IPO NASDAQ, Intel), Scorpio (US Robotics) and Telegate (Terayon).
Empire State Capital Partners is a full service investment company with Western roots headquartered in Ukraine. The company offers services in capital markets advisory, mergers and acquisitions, debt and equity underwriting, corporate finance, brokerage, asset management and structured products.
