UpWest is a venture capital firm that funds and fast-tracks Israeli founders breaking into the US market.

UpWest

UpWest is a seed stage Silicon Valley fund investing in Israel’s most promising entrepreneurs.  UpWest is focused on a hands-on approach to supercharge the growth of its startups providing the essential ingredients for success: Seed funding, proximity and access to markets and capital, a supportive community of talented peers.
www.upwest.vc

vBrand

Contacts+

Airobotics

CyberX

Drippler

Javelin Networks

Waycare

VeedMe

Navmatic inc

Neura

ONDiGO

Peer5

Mobilize

Reactful

SecuredTouch

SentinelOne

Simpo

We’ve recently partnered with Caroline Maier who led a spectacular workshop for our portfolio founders at our latest Founder Connect. 🤝

Focusing on growth marketing strategies and building brand equity, the workshop emphasized the necessity of building an effective relationship between your marketing and sales functions, covering how to:

🔹Define and differentiate between lead-gen and demand-gen, and why starting with demand-gen is crucial
🔹Set actionable insights and the right performance benchmarks throughout your marketing funnel
🔹Avoid common pitfalls when deploying your inbound and outbound channels, and utilize practical frameworks for each (tech stack, CRM, website, email nurturing, content SEO, and more)
🔹Bring personalization into play in an AI-driven world, including leveraging AI in purchase data analytics, predicting buying patterns, sales opportunities, and market trends, as well as creating and automating personalized content

Keeping our Founder Connect’s emphasis on scaling GTM efforts, this was another fantastic opportunity for our founders to gain insight into making the best marketing investments, optimize for a stable growth engine, share their experiences, and support each other’s journeys.

We thank everyone who participated, and look forward to next time! 🙌

Curious to discover how early-stage investors think and operate?

Join our very own Lia Cromwell at this exciting panel as she takes you behind the scenes and shares how we evaluate investment opportunities at UpWest.

Learn how we:
👉 Choose the best-fitting opportunities
👉 Classify funding rounds as seed vs pre-seed
👉 Identify which AI solutions are fads and which are winners

📌 Register to join below 👇

https://lnkd.in/ghqEXxnd

We’ve recently teamed up with Jonathan Seroussi, who led an insightful workshop for our portfolio tech leaders. 👥

Focusing on building frameworks for evaluating employee performance and encouraging their growth, the workshop covered:

👉 Distinguishing between the high, average and under-performers
👉 Creating a correlation between high performance and company values
👉 Optimizing for many high performers, to create an ‘L’ curve rather than the common bell pattern
👉 Instilling processes to track and measure employee output to spot difficulties in real-time
👉 Empowering employees to grow and improve, and clearly defining how improvement looks for juniors, seniors, and management

Offering a wealth of tactical guidance in building a high-performance workforce, the workshop was also an opportunity for our community to come together in person, catch up, and share experiences and feedback with each other. 

Thank you to everyone who took part in this! 👏

Crops that can talk to farmers? 🥬🗣️

InnerPlant is on a mission to make farming more efficient, resilient, and sustainable.

Watch as Shely Aronov, Founder & CEO of InnerPlant, shares with CNBC how the company gives plants a technology-enabled voice, powered by the world’s first biosensor that emits a fluorescent signal to communicate their needs to farmers.

Creating a new and cutting-edge data source for the agricultural ecosystem, InnerPlant enables cost-effective monitoring of large-scale crops while managing individual plants, leading to 20% higher yields, 30% reduced input, and fewer chemicals in our food sources.


#Farming #Sustainability #AgriTech #Agriculture #Technology #Green #Plants #Voice #Innovation

https://lnkd.in/gHhj3i_s

3 reasons why Pre-Seed funding is returning and founders are embracing it:

1️⃣ Speed

Today’s markets are both global and technologically-driven, creating a significantly faster-paced and more competitive environment for founders looking to break into their target market. 🎯

Raising Pre-Seed funding enables early-stage founders to bypass financial limitations that slow their pace of execution and enter the market within their opportunity window, whether it’s developing technology, recruiting talent or building foundational capacity for scale.

2️⃣ Stability

Establishing stability early on gives founding teams the ability to gain full immersion into their roles, as well as prioritize effectively for the long-term. 🛣️

Pre-Seed funding is often the main contributor to founders’ abilities to depart from short-term “survival-based” thinking for long-term decision-making, placing the venture on a healthy growth trajectory from its earliest days. 

3️⃣ Impact

Great founders understand the importance of partnering with the right investors, and are striving to do so sooner rather than later today. 🚀

Pre-Seed funding allows founders to benefit from the variety of strategic value that investors bring surrounding the capital, such as access to expertise, connection to clients and expert guidance, giving them competitive advantages and growth feasibility earlier on.

At UpWest, we take pride in supporting early-stage Israeli founders, helping them fast-track their entry into the US market. 🏁

#preseed  #funding  #impact  #venturecapital  #vcs  #founders  #earlystage  #capital  #value  #speed  #innovation

We’re proud to see Zenity recognized at the forefront of the #Cybersecurity industry. Onwards!

https://lnkd.in/dvU42--8

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UpWest