Today we’re announcing Vine Ventures Fund III: a $236M fund, above our $200M target.
Grateful to our LPs for trusting a young firm with ambitious goals, and to our founders for letting us be part of their story.
The full note is below. Onward. https://x.com/i/article/2119743907252633601
Vine Ventures III
Announcing Vine Ventures Fund III
Today we’re announcing Vine Ventures Fund III, a $236 million early-stage fund to back founders in the United States and Israel, above the $200 million we set out to raise. We are grateful for the renewed obligation this places on us to the founders who will build with it, and for the partners who entrusted it to us.
We started Vine six years ago believing we could build one of the next great venture firms. Our goal has always been a small, tight-knit team singularly focused on finding and serving the founders who will define the future. We meet daily and make decisions with rigor and conviction. We rely on the partner closest to the founder.
What we’re proudest of is the founders we work with. Some are already in the spotlight such as Eon (@@Eon_io_), Wonderful (@wonderful_ai), Ora (@oradotai) and Qodo (@QodoAI) in Israel and Ornn (@OrnnExchange), Maven (@mavenrobotics), Slide, Sail Research (@sailresearchco), Cognition (@cognition) and Trajectory (@trajectorylabs) in the US. Many more are still emerging or in stealth. They are an eclectic group, but most are building for the real world. Their customers must be able to rely on what they build, and failure has consequences. They do the real work and carry the real responsibility. We try to serve them with integrity, clarity and speed, and in return many of our best leads come from them.
We live in a time of uncertainty and ambiguity. It is also a time to invest behind trends that now look inevitable, driven by advances in machine intelligence and a changing world order. The surface area of the innovation economy is expanding fast: the autonomous enterprise, new consumer services, re-industrialization, and the new frontiers of warfare.
Despite the naysayers, we believe the technology partnership between the United States and Israel will only become more important. Vine is built to bet on that belief. The next decade of technology will be defined by reliable, tested systems that people must be able to trust. No ecosystem on earth is more conditioned to build them than Israel, and no market is better suited to scale them than the United States. Vine exists to compound that relationship and remove the friction between the two.
Vine now operates from four offices, with roughly half the investment team in each country:
- New York is our home and the center of the customer base our portfolio companies sell into.
- Tel Aviv gives us access to a tight-knit group of exited founders and alumni of the most elite IDF units.
- San Francisco keeps us close to the most curious minds and the frontier of AI and robotics.
- Boston is where we spend time on campus and with serial entrepreneurs.
Since our last fund, we’ve significantly strengthened our team and our right to win founders’ trust. Adam Valkin (@adamvalkin) joined to help lead the firm after fifteen years at General Catalyst (@generalcatalyst) and Accel London (@Accel). He joins a partnership that includes Dan Povitsky (@danpovitsky), Barak Kaufman (@barak_kaufman), Demren Sinik (@SinikDemren) and Alex Moskowitz (@amosk1120).
We’re supported by an exceptional group of leaders. Idan Tendler (@IdanTendler) was previously SVP of Code and Cloud Security at Palo Alto Networks. My father, Gary Reiner, spent two decades at General Electric, including as Chief Information Officer, and fifteen years at General Atlantic. Noa Argamani (@ArgamaniNoa) and Racheli Adler run our platform team. Naftaly Gluskin (@Naftalygl) is on the ground in Tel Aviv and John McIlree leads finance. Roni Tamary runs our Tel Aviv office and Kelly Frescas runs our New York office.
Plainly, here is what we do. Vine is an early-stage venture firm. We prefer to lead or co-lead a company’s first institutional round, typically at seed or Series A, and we keep investing through the company’s life. We are collaborative by design. We invest alongside, and increasingly ahead of, the world’s best funds. Roughly half of our last fund’s companies went on to raise from top multistage firms alongside or after us.
We’re hands-on in the ways founders actually need: customers, talent and future investors. We draw on our LPs, our CIO network, and PEF — Barak’s community of thousands of exited founders and operators. With them, we can usually put a founder in front of multiple buyers and experts before we invest. After that, we help with the hires, the follow-on rounds and the conversations that come after.
We also invest in the people who widen our community. Grapevine, our program backing emerging pre-seed managers, includes Genius (@geniusventures), Nova (@novaholdings), Holly Ventures and Netz amongst others. It gives us a peer relationship with that layer of the market rather than a transactional one. We’ve deeply enjoyed building our firm alongside these managers.
We’re immensely grateful to the partners who joined us in Fund III:
- some of the largest institutional asset managers in the world
- CEOs of some of the most consequential technology companies
- the Israel-aligned families and institutions who were with us when none of this was obvious
To all of our LPs, thank you for trusting a young firm with ambitious goals. To our founders, we’re under no illusion about whose story this is. It is the privilege of our working lives to be in it with you.
Trust compounds. Onward.
Eric Reiner, Founder and Partner