| Hi! It's Laura. Over the past few years deep tech investing has taken on a new shine, as companies such as Waymo, SpaceX and Anduril turn technical breakthroughs in research-heavy fields like autonomous driving, rockets and defense tech into commercial businesses. Now one emerging investment fund wants to back new deep tech startups with a twist: The startups' founders are likely to either be in Israel or have roots there while they operate in the U.S. Michael Broukhim, the co-founder of shopping club FabFitFun, has teamed up with Lior Prosor, a founding partner at Israel's Hanaco Ventures, to start a new investment firm focused on backing deep tech startups with Israel connections. The firm, Deep33 Ventures, is in the process of raising a $150 million fund focused on early startups in quantum computing, AI infrastructure, advanced energy and autonomous systems. Deep33 has raised $100 million and expects to raise the remaining $50 million by the end of this quarter, Broukhim said. The numeral in its name refers to a day of the year when, according to some interpretations of the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, the secrets of the universe will be revealed. Plenty of investment funds focus on Israeli tech founders. But Broukhim said he thinks there's room for one more because most back cybersecurity or software firms. Just 6% of private investments in Israeli startups were in quantum computing, energy, defense and space last year, while 60% went to cyber and organizational, or enterprise, software firms, according to a report from Israeli's tech investment agency, the Israel Innovation Authority. "As traditional software becomes increasingly commoditized, the biggest opportunities lie in the shift to much harder technical frontiers," said Broukhim. In Israel, "deep tech is still early, and it's rare to find venture firms that can genuinely support teams building at the scientific edge." Deep33 Ventures incorporated as a Delaware firm at the start of this month and now employs six people, including Broukhim and Poser, in Los Angeles, New York and Tel Aviv. It's also brought on Lior Susan, founder of Eclipse Ventures, a Palo Alto, Calif., firm that has backed battery recycling startup Redwood Materials and chip startup Cerebras, as chair and investor. The new firm already made a handful of investments. They include Particle, which is building miniature particle accelerators; CyberRidge, which aims to prevent breaches from hackers using quantum computing tools; Quamcore, which is developing hardware for a type of quantum computing; and DualBird, which is developing software to manage a type of customizable chip called FPGA. The new fund will focus on seed, Series A and Series B investments and write checks between $5 million and $15 million, Broukhim said. He estimates it will make about five to eight new investments a year. For most of the past two decades, many generalist VC funds avoided deep tech out of the concern that young startups building physical devices with cutting edge technology or other research-heavy products were more likely to fail, incinerating investors' money. To fill the gap, U.S. firms like DCVC and Lux Capital emerged. And over the past several years, larger firms such as Anduril-backer Founders Fund have backed more startups in these fields. Proser, who has spent most of his career investing in software and internet startups, says the AI buildout and a renewed interest in the U.S. in maintaining its technology leadership shows there are more customers for these startups than ever before. The firm will seek to invest in startups that have already proved their research and are four to eight quarters away from selling a commercial product. They will often have received funding from government agencies that can be a precursor to contracts. It aims to invest in companies that could be worth $10 billion or more in a decade. But its investment duration may be as little as two to three years. The firm's partners anticipate larger companies will snap up some of its portfolio companies as they're getting ready to commercialize their products. A wave of fill-in deals by larger companies—such as Nvidia's $20 billion licensing arrangement with chip designer Groq and Google's $5 billion agreement to buy power company Intersect—give them confidence that similar deals are likely. More generally, skyrocketing demand for AI resources means that model makers such as OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic, cloud computing providers Amazon and Google, and chip designers like Nvidia are all hunting for more ways to increase computing power and energy. And more talented technical workers are flocking to companies trying to achieve breakthroughs in these fields. "Hyperscalers and the world's largest companies need these technologies, governments need them, and now the best talent is going to these companies," Prosor said. "That trifecta leads us to believe deep tech is where the most value will be created. | 
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