Former NBA Player Omri Casspi Raises $250 Million Fund
Tel Aviv venture capital firm Swish Ventures has completed fundraising for its third fund, totaling $250 million, increasing its assets under management to approximately $800 million. Investors include Sequoia Capital, U.S. pension funds, U.S. university endowments, family offices, and Israeli institutional investors.
The new fund plans to invest in about 12 companies, with an average investment of approximately $20 million per deal, primarily focusing on seed and Series A rounds, typically co-leading or following another fund. The sectors covered include cybersecurity, tech infrastructure, physical AI, defense, industrial AI, and government technology. The firm also has an opportunity fund that can follow investments from seed to growth rounds.
Founder Omri Casspi is the first Israeli player to enter the NBA, playing for ten years and winning a championship with the Golden State Warriors. He initially managed about $36 million with Sheva Capital in 2022, and after merging with Swish in 2024, he raised about $63 million for a seed fund, followed by another $100 million opportunity fund by the end of 2025, increasing check sizes from $5 million to $7 million to an average of $10 million, and now to about $20 million in this round. Casspi remains the sole managing partner, with Ori Streichman joining in 2024.
The public portfolio includes about 20 companies with a total valuation exceeding $60 billion, of which 8 have become unicorns. A flagship project is Cognition: in early 2024, Casspi participated in the seed round after hosting co-founders at the Warriors' home, when it was valued at $150 million; three months ago, the company raised $1 billion at a valuation of $26 billion, with reports suggesting a new round could raise about $1 billion at a valuation of $47 billion. Eon was valued at $4 billion last December, Applied Compute, founded by former OpenAI personnel, was valued at $1.3 billion in April this year, Wonderful raised $550 million this week at a valuation of $5 billion, and Upwind raised $300 million at a valuation of $3.8 billion. The list also includes Glow, Tenzai, PointFive, Irregular, Long Lake, and Turnout.
In its early Sheva phase, the focus was on fintech and Web3, but after Swish was established, it narrowed down to cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, and AI. Sequoia has been an anchor investor since the previous fund, and this round sees U.S. pension funds and university endowments entering, transforming the athlete-led single-brand fund into a configurable institutional asset.
Buyers are looking to enter the flow of Israeli security and AI projects as dollar LPs, while sellers are general partners converting past unicorn rates into the scale of new funds. The event-driven aspect comes from the valuation jumps of Cognition, Wonderful, and Upwind, with funding shifting from small follow-on checks to larger early concentrated positions. Beneficiaries are founders who can absorb $20 million seed checks and Swish's management fees, while pressured are local funds still writing small checks in the same sectors but unable to make it onto the co-lead list.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Omri Casspi's investment path has evolved from Sheva's broad checks to Swish's sector-focused fund, using founders from the portfolio to become LPs. Ophir Ehrlich from Eon, Amiram Shachar from Upwind, and the co-founder of PointFive have transitioned from being invested to becoming investors, with Sequoia following from the anchor seed fund to the third fund. This is not about the athlete career transition story; the core is connecting the Israeli intelligence unit and cybersecurity founder network with entry tickets to Silicon Valley AI projects, as evidenced by the Cognition seed round being completed during walks in the arena and Palo Alto.
Money is being mobilized from both ends. On one end, U.S. pension funds and university endowments are shifting allocations from star funds to specialized small funds with hit rates; on the other end, the opportunity fund internalizes follow-on rounds for already invested companies, avoiding dilution from rising valuations of Cognition, Eon, and Upwind. The strategic motive is that if early checks are not large enough, one cannot retain negotiating power in Series A, hence increasing the average investment from millions directly to $20 million. The resource delivery method is through co-leading rather than pricing alone, with Sequoia providing brand endorsement and Swish offering sources for Israeli projects.
A comparable example is the few surviving specialized samples among former athlete or celebrity funds, closer to Israeli funds like Cyberstarts that productize security circle products, rather than generic entertainment celebrity LPs. The industry phase is one of expansion: the inclusion of physical AI, defense, and government technology in the third fund's prospectus indicates that the cybersecurity premium is extending to "models entering the real world" and sovereign procurement, rather than remaining in cloud backup and runtime protection.
Structurally, this represents capital concentration. The mechanism is: unicorn density is used to justify the rationale for concentrated bets, with LPs exchanging $800 million in managed scale for the right to enter the same batch of founders; the pricing power in the early market shifts from small funds casting a wide net to structures capable of writing $20 million checks at once and sustaining through opportunity funds. The higher the hit rate, the less the next fund needs to tell a story, only needing to write larger checks.
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