Israeli venture capital platform OurCrowd raises $25M from SoftBank Vision Fund 2; PitchBook says OurCrowd has invested in 280+ companies and 30 funds
The Israeli venture capital platform will also enter into a strategic partnership with SoftBank Investment Advisers to consider investment opportunities
Context & Ripple Effects
OurCrowd has spent a decade climbing from retail equity crowdfunding toward institutional scale — its $72M Series C in 2016 funded global expansion and co-investment capital on top of its investor base, and it later spun up dedicated vehicles like the $100M Cognitiv Ventures AI fund. PitchBook now counts it at 280+ companies and 30 funds, which makes this $25M check less about the amount than about who wrote it.
For SoftBank, this is a familiar playbook in a new form: after backing Cybereason directly in 2015 and co-leading AnyVision's $235M round months before this deal, Vision Fund 2 is now buying structured access to Israeli dealflow through a local platform rather than chasing startups one by one.
First-order effects
- OurCrowd gains both capital and a standing pipeline arrangement — the partnership with SoftBank Investment Advisers means its 280-company portfolio gets a systematic route to SoftBank's much larger cheques at later stages.
- SoftBank Investment Advisers effectively acquires a curated screen of Israeli startups without building a local team, using OurCrowd as its origination layer.
Second-order effects
- Other Israeli platform firms competing for syndicate seats now face a co-investor that can follow on with outsized capital — Team8's later $500M raise from Microsoft, Cisco, and others shows the same race toward scale among Israeli VCs.
- OurCrowd's original retail crowdfunders are diluted in influence: allocation decisions increasingly sit with institutional partners like SoftBank rather than the crowd.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Israeli venture capital stratifies into large multi-stage platforms backed by strategic LPs and corporates, with earlier crowdfunding-era structures absorbed or marginalized — Cyberstarts' employee-liquidity fund points to the same consolidation of specialized capital roles.
The trend: SoftBank is moving from one-off bets on individual Israeli startups to buying portfolio-wide access through local VC platforms, accelerating the institutionalization of Israeli tech investing.