Elron Ventures, a venture capital fund which invests in early-stage tech startups in the cybersecurity and B2B software space, unveiled on Tuesday the CyberFuture alliance that brings investors and prominent CISOs from leading brands to entrepreneurs.
The alliance currently manages hundreds of thousands of dollars invested by the CISOs in early-stage cybersecurity startups.
The alliance aims to empower security practitioners to vet and influence investment decisions, as well as support the selected early-stage companies. CyberFuture Alliance members represent a wide range of industries across the globe, such as banking, tech, retail, travel, healthcare, pharma, and more. Alliance members include Vijaya Kaza, Chief Security Officer, Head of Engineering for Trust & Safety at Airbnb, Gerard Eschelbeck, former CISO at Google, Jairo Orea, Global CISO for Royal Caribbean Group, Al Ghous, CISO for Snapdocs, Yaron Levi, CISO for Dolby Laboratoriesת and Ilan Abadi, Global CISO at Teva Pharmaceuticals.
CyberFuture aims to help companies move forward without having to compete with other companies who are vying for CISO attention. Elik Etzion, Managing Partner at Elron and former Global CISO for Israel’s largest financial institution, Bank Hapoalim, is familiar with the CISO-to-investor gap.
“We intentionally kept this alliance to a smaller, high-quality group, allowing each involved CISO to be active in decisions and work as a team,” said Etzion. “At Elron Ventures, we are not only financial backers but fellow practitioners who want to see today’s most viable early-stage solutions succeed.”
Elik believes that the alliance will generate a unique value for the supported startups by crystallizing the product offering, networking, and design partnership opportunities, and navigating the go-to-market motion in global markets.
