Grove Ventures

Grove Ventures is an Israeli venture capital firm founded in 2015 with over $500 million under management, whose leadership includes veterans of Israeli Occupational Forces intelligence and military units who maintain active reserve duty ties.

IOF Military Connections

Grove Ventures' founding and leadership team is drawn from multiple branches of the Israeli Occupational Forces:

Dov Moran: Managing Partner & Co-Founder

Dov Moran served in the Israeli Navy for over seven years and was commander of its microprocessor department. He founded Grove Ventures in 2015.

Lotan Levkowitz: Managing Partner & Co-Founder

Lotan Levkowitz served as a commander in an Israeli Air Force intelligence unit prior to co-founding Grove Ventures.

Lior Handelsman: General Partner

Lior Handelsman spent 11 years in Unit 81, the IOF Intelligence Corps' technology unit. He holds the rank of lieutenant colonel in Unit 81 and has been on extended reserve duty since October 7, 2023, receiving a promotion during the genocide in Gaza. Handelsman has described witnessing soldiers and engineers developing war technologies on the front lines and has actively promoted the wave of war tech startups founded by IOF reservists returning from the battlefield.

Renana Ashkenazi: General Partner

Renana Ashkenazi is a graduate of Unit 8200, the IOF's signals intelligence and cyberwarfare division, which has been implicated in mass surveillance of Palestinian civilians and the development of AI systems used to target civilians in Gaza.

Investing in Unit 8200 Ventures

Grove Ventures actively funds companies founded by IOF intelligence veterans. In October 2025, Grove co-led a $14 million Series A in Onfire, a data surveillance startup whose CEO, CTO, and CPO are all Unit 8200 alumni. The company monitors public forums to track and identify individuals and their employers.

Web Summit Boycott

On October 13, 2023, the CEO of Web Summit, Europe's largest technology conference, posted on social media criticizing Western leaders for failing to condemn Israel's war crimes in Gaza and the genocide carried out by Israeli Occupation Forces. In response, Grove Ventures joined a coalition of Israeli venture capital firms issuing a joint statement announcing their boycott of the conference.

We, members of the Israeli high tech community, have made the decision to cancel sponsorship and will not attend the upcoming Web Summit. We cannot, in good conscience, participate in a conference whose leadership blames Israel for war crimes while Hamas terrorists committed one of the worst terror attacks in modern history,

Despite the CEO of Web Summit's statement presenting factual observations within the context of the atrocities — later unequivocally confirmed by the UN — Israeli venture capitalists demanded unwavering support for their state, which was already engaged in the mass killing of civilians at the time.

These statements led major tech companies such as Siemens, Google, Intel, and Stripe to withdraw from the conference.

Sources:

• +972 Magazine 'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing spree in Gaza
• Calcalist The biggest global VCs are secretly battling over Israeli defense-tech startups
• Calcalist Google Withdraws from Web Summit; Israeli VCs Unite in Joint Conference Boycott
• Grove Ventures Lior Handelsman
• Grove Ventures Lior Handelsman on The Rise of Defense Tech Startups and The Role of VCs (Hebrew)
• Grove Ventures Renana Ashkenazi
• IL Leadership Lotan Levkowitz
• TechChurch Israeli intelligence vets raise $20M to track developer buying signals
• UN OHCHR UN Commission finds war crimes and crimes against humanity in Israeli attacks
• X PaddyCosgrave

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