Uri Levine, cofounder of traffic navigation app Waze, which was acquired by Google for $1.1 billion in 2013, is setting up a $40 million new venture capital fund. He is founding the fund with former Hanaco Ventures partner Pasha Romanovski, who managed the investments in companies like Lightricks, Redefine Meat, and Vesttoo, which is under investigation by the US authorities for fraud. Romanovski was a director of the company but is not under any suspicion in the affair. He left Hanaco last year after the affair blew up and after he was sued by the singer Omer Adam and investor Ran Nussbaum over allegations of deceiving investors at foodtech company Infarm.
Levine, who currently lives in Madrid, is a serial entrepreneur that raises money for his own companies. The new fund called Double Down Is also for investment in Levine’s companies and will focus on growth stage startups that have reached the revenue threshold of tens of millions of dollars, some of which are even operating profitably. “Globes” has learned that members of the new fund will not join the boards of directors of the companies following investments.
Launch of operations – towards the end of 2025
Double Down is an opportunity fund raising capital to support existing portfolio companies, and will not make investments in new companies. So far, it has raised, according to estimates, about $20 million of its target, and the launch of its operations is planned towards the end of 2025. Levine and Romanovski are not working to raise capital from institutions in Israel, but are focusing on private investors and wealthy families (family offices) in Europe, the US and South America.
Among the companies targeted for investment by the fund: Pontera (formerly FeeX), a pension plan management platform for agents and financial advisors in the US – which raised $60 million 18 months ago at a company valuation of $550 million, according to PitchBook; Oversee (formerly Fairfly,) which provides organizations with a platform that tracks changes in airfares for ticket purchased for employees and managers – and re-tickets when the price falls. Oversee has overcome challenges posed by the Covid pandemic and war, and is now a growing company.
Other investment targets are: the WeSki tourism platform, which organizes vacations at ski resorts and currently generates millions of dollars in revenue – in the ski tourism market worth $100 billion annually; Cahun Medical, which structures clinical knowledge for Gen-AI use; farming management company Citrii, which provides AI-based information on agricultural produce; software company Dynamo; and the parking app Pumba.
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Levine was Waze CEO on its founding, and later decided to relinquish the position in favor of hired CEO Noam Bardin, who ran the company until the sale to Google. He then served as president and shortly after the exit, left the company to found companies with young entrepreneurs and raise capital for them. Among other things, he was one of the early investors in Moovit and its first board member, before it was sold to Intel. Levine lectures on entrepreneurship at a university in Madrid, and he has written a book on technological entrepreneurship.
No response has been forthcoming from either Levine or Romanovski.
Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on August 12, 2025.
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