Maniv Mobility, a venture capitalist company from Israel, recently announced they have closed a $100 million fund raising round that was backed by companies including BMW, Lear Corp., Hyundai, LG, Shell, Valeo, Aptiv, and the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance.
The company started back in 2016, but the company was getting investments in 2015 from Founder and Managing Director Michael Granoff and company partner Olaf Sakkers. During their first fund raising round in 2016 the company managed to raise $44 million.
“We call ourselves an accidental VC,” Sakkers said recently. Since the company started it has been focused on the changes happening with transportation and mobility and partnering with company founders to help develop these new technologies. “We’ve just realized that running a VC is the most effective way for us to do that,” he added.
Maniv Mobility is planning to grow across the world. Originally the company only helped mobility startups within Israel, but now the company has invested in the car security company Owlcam, the private car-sharing company Turo, the teleoperations company Phantom Auto, a self-driving car chip-manufacturer Hailo, the shared electric moped firm Revel, and a car software management company Aurora Labs. Maniv was also previously invested in Drive.ai before it was purchased by Apple.
With their news funds, Maniv has already begun investing into Bipi, a Spanish-based startup company focused on vehicle subscriptions. Three more investments were also announced, one food delivery company and the other an online insurance company, but their names have yet to be revealed.
The company is still focused entirely on mobility and transportation. As Maniv begins to invest across the world they are already cultivating new partners within North America, Europe, and hope to eventually move into the Indian and other Asian markets. These partnerships are key to Maniv's strategy and their efforts are have already yielded positive results with several new startups within Israel already doing very well.
“Mobility is a very global game,” Sakkers stated in a recent interview. “That’s something that we want to pursue, plus our network of investors actually want global exposure.”
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