Today is a big day for us. For most people, it’s just another day in the office, but for us at Viola it’s the first day of something new.

First, we are announcing our new fund. Fund V is a $200M fund focused entirely on early stage Israeli tech companies. As we are wrapping up our fund IV investments, we are quite happy to have fresh capital to continue supporting great Israeli entrepreneurs.

But the new fund is only part of the story. After years of operating as “Carmel Ventures, a member of the Viola group”, we decided to fully embrace the Viola brand. As of today, we are no longer Carmel, but simply “Viola Ventures”, and our new fund is Viola Ventures V.

In many ways, the new fund is the same as the past. We are still focused on finding the best companies in Israel, and we are 100% focused on early stage: Seed, A rounds, sometimes B round. We want to be active, supportive and be part of the long entrepreneurial journey. In addition, we strongly believe, more than ever, that Israel can and will produce $1bn companies. We are already involved in some of the best Israeli startups, companies like Payoneer and IronSource, Outbrain and Redis Labs, Playbuzz and enSilo. These are large companies that indicate the potential of Israeli tech.

Although the strategy is the same, there are many changes coming with Viola V. As we announced in the past, we are expanding the team. We are now 7 partners: Ronen, Shlomo, Avi, Itzik and myself together with 2 new partners: Zvika Orron, founder of Lifebeam, and Omry Ben-David, until recently with Goldman Sachs in NYC. Zvika and Omry are truly great guys, fun to work with, and already adding a new level of excitement and energy to the team.

Together, all of us are pushing forward our brand. With the new “Viola ventures”, we hope that our portfolio companies will find it easier to network with each-other across the entire Viola, creating a much strong community.

Finally, and most important, we are very excited about the potential in Israeli tech. It’s not only the scale that I mentioned before. In our new fund, we will be focusing our energy on 4 key areas: Fintech, Next-gen enterprise, Frontier tech, and consumer services. All these will be powered by underlying trends such as AI, machine learning, and big data. Although it all sounds a bit buzzwordy, it’s based on the belief that Israel is in a unique position in the global tech arena. With the new fund, we are happy to be part of it as well.