Today (Monday), VC fund Grove Ventures, which specializes in funding early-stage Deep Tech startups, announces that its adding Lior Handelsman as a partner. Handelsman founded Israeli solar energy giant SolarEdge, which has been a publicly-traded company on the NYSE since 2015 with a $7 billion evaluation.

From startup to IPO, now, it’s time to invest

The Handelsman signing comes after Grove announced in February that it had bankrolled $123 million for its second investment fund. Since then, the VC fund has put that money where their mouth is, with investments in env0 and Nucleai.

Handelsman jumpstarted his illustrious career by serving for over a decade in a variety of positions as part of the military intelligence’s technological unit. Following his move out of the army to citizen life, he founded SolarEdge along with four friends from his unit. Now after 14 years at SolarEdge, helping bring them to IPO in 2015, Handelsman is hanging up his startup boots and transitioning to the investor game.

In a conversation with Geektime, Handelsman talked about the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic saying “Despite the crisis, the fund still marked a record year, mostly due to the fact that we closed the financing for the second fund before the virus outbreak. We are continuing operations as usual. Like in every market, we made the adaptations according to government regulations.”

Handelsman noted that he will utilize his experience from SolarEdge when looking into Deep Tech startup investments in the energy sector: “As someone who comes from the founding team of a company that dealt in hardware, chips and cloud development, I intend on focusing on Deep Tech startups along with my investing companions.”  

Handelsman added: “I am very excited to join the Grove Ventures team. I was a venture partner in the fund for over a year, which gave me a closer look at the way that Grove pushes and backs the startup founders and their portfolio companies who are at the technological forefront in Israel and the world.”
Grove Ventures Managing Partner, Dov Moran said: “Grove Ventures is delighted to welcome Lior as yet another partner to this ever-expanding fund, which helps grow the leading Deep Tech companies in the world. We mainly look for game-changing technologies, those that are difficult to develop but also hard to copy, and we trust that our portfolio companies will benefit from Lior’s extensive experience just as much as we will.”