Ronen Nir

Ronen Joined Viola Ventures in February 2008 and currently serves as a Senior Advisor. His investment areas of focus include SaaS, AI, and datacenter infrastructure.

Ronen is currently a board member in Redis Labs, CodeFresh, Mov.AI, Pliops, Syte and Verbit. He also served as a board member at ironSource (stake acquired by CVC), Samanage (acquired by SolarWinds), Perfecto (acquired by Perforce), Shunra (acquired by HP), Amadesa (acquired by Live Person), Kampyle (acquired by Medallia) and Cloudyn (acquired by Microsoft).

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

• Before joining Carmel, Ronen was VP of Product Management at Verint Systems, and director of project management at ECtel (NASDAQ:ECTX), where he led the delivery of large scale, multi-million dollar projects in North and Latin America.
• Ronen served for 13 years in an elite Israeli Defense Forces Intelligence Unit where he still holds a rank of Lieutenant Colonel (Res.).
• He holds a B.A. (Com Laude) in Economics and Middle-East history from Tel Aviv University, and an M.Sc in Technology Management from the University of Maryland University College (UMUC).

THINGS YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW ABOUT RONEN

• He has nick-named his investment areas of focus as “ABCD”: (A) AI, (B) Big Data (C) Cloud and Cyber, (D) Dev/Ops, (mostly in companies that adopt a SaaS business model).
• He has been playing the piano since he was 8 years old. “A year ago, I started learning to play the bass and play in an amateur band on a weekly basis.”
• He’s been playing badminton for the past ten years: “Yes, the one with the feathers” 🙂
• He lives in Modi’in (“I love it, terrible commute though”) but was born and raised in Herzeliya: “I also lived in Washington DC for 2 years and served at the Israeli Embassy there.”
• His favorite historical character is Henry Kissinger: “I’ve read everything he has ever written. A survivor of the Nazi regime, he was a self-made immigrant who made it to the top. He was a thought leader and a practitioner, with an impressive knowledge of history and what we can learn from it. I think he was a unique combination between a modern Plato and a modern Machiavelli.”