Tomer Michaeli

Tomer is a General Partner at Viola FinTech. He invests in Fintech, Insurtech, and Regtech companies and he serves on the boards of Planck (Israel), Inshur (US & UK), Tookitaki (Singapore), and Omnius (Germany). Prior to joining Viola, he was the co-founder (one of three) and VP of Operations at Fundbox, a leading global FinTech company in the credit and payments sector. As the VP of Operations, he built and managed several teams across two continents, including the payments operations, customer operations, compliance operations and collection operations teams and significantly improved the profitability of the company’s core product.

EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT: Maryse Bichler

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

• During Tomer’s time at Fundbox, the company raised over $100M in equity and debt financing from leading FinTech investors such as Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, NYCA and Vikram Pandit, amongst others and is listed amongst the 25 most promising global FinTech companies.
• Tomer served as a principal at Viola Ventures (formerly Carmel Ventures), where he spent 5 years building early-stage technology companies such as Wanova (acquired by VMWare), DesignArt (acquired by Qualcomm), LiveU (acquired by Francisco Partners), SundaySky and others.
• Tomer served in various technical and management positions for 10 years in an elite technology unit of the Israeli Defense Forces.
• Tomer earned his M. Eng. Cum Laude in Biomedical Engineering from the Technion, Israel’s Institute of Technology, his B.S. in Physics, Mathematics & Chemistry from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and his MBA from INSEAD. He is also a graduate of the extremely selective “TALPIOT” Elite Officers’ Training Program of the IDF.
• Tomer serves as an advisor to several entrepreneurs and sits on the advisory board of Curve, a UK-based FinTech company.

THINGS YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW ABOUT TOMER

•  Tomer considers his greatest achievement being a father of 2 daughters.
• He likes outdoor activities such as trekking (New Zealand, Kyrgyzstan), skiing and skydiving (he’s done more than 600 jumps!) He also like peaty whiskies, IPA beers and Israeli wines, and reading Haruki Murakami and Amos Oz.
• His father is a Holocaust survivor who hid with a Christian family while his mother hid in the woods.
• One of his biggest inspirations is his mother: “She raised three children while working full-time and earning a Master’s degree in Social Work. Although she’s nearing 80 she still works three times a week and commutes to work for over an hour!”
• One of his favorite mantras to invest by is “Invest in the 3 “ass’s”: smart-ass team, kick-ass product, big-ass market.” His tips for entrepreneurs are “choose your co-founders well” and “the idea is (almost) nothing. Execution is (almost) everything.”
• He taught high school Math and Chemistry for about 10 years!