“April” appears in one popular Tel Aviv angel round-up as a portfolio company of Shai Wininger, the Lemonade and Fiverr co-founder — sitting next to a real one, Empathy, as if the two were the same kind of fact.

They aren’t. There is no startup called April in Wininger’s tracked portfolio. There is an American venture capitalist named April Underwood — Slack’s former chief product officer, co-founder of the angel collective #Angels — who has nothing to do with Wininger, Lemonade, or Israel. A generated list scraped two names that happened to sit near each other in an unrelated sentence and published the result as research.

That’s the raw material a lot of “Tel Aviv angel investor” content is built from. So we ran this category through the same screen we’ve used on Tel Aviv’s micro VCs, the defense money map, and the Passport Funds series: does the entity actually write personal or pooled checks, is there a named person behind it, and can we find a dated, verifiable investment — not a bio page’s claim of one.

The Screen

A candidate qualified only if:

1. Real check-writing activity. A platform, syndicate or individual that puts capital directly into Israeli founders — not an accelerator, not a matchmaking directory.
2. A named person or structure, not an anonymous vehicle.
3. At least one dated, independently verifiable investment — via PitchBook, Tracxn, CB Insights or a primary-source report, not only the entity’s own bio page.
4. Active in 2024–2026.

We excluded anyone already profiled as an institutional fund elsewhere in this series, which removes several prolific personal names — covered below.

Thirteen survived a screen of roughly 25 candidates.

Answer First: The 13

Tier 1: The Platforms

Four structured vehicles where a check flows through a process, not a personal relationship.

1. OurCrowd — Jerusalem

Jon Medved’s platform has been named Israel’s most active venture investor by PitchBook and Startup Nation Central for eleven years running — 621-plus investments, checks from individuals starting at $10,000. OurCrowd itself claims $2.3 billion in investment commitments as of January 2025. Other directories disagree wildly, including one listing “approximately $60M in assets” — stale or scraped from the wrong line. Because the model runs deal-by-deal through SPVs, a single AUM figure never cleanly applies.

2. iAngels — Tel Aviv

Founded 2014 by Mor Assia, Shelly Hod Moyal and David Assia. What began as a curated angel platform now runs an EIF-anchored institutional fund; a second vehicle, iAngels Ventures 2, closed at $70M in early 2024 with $2–4M checks. Portfolio includes Oddity (Nasdaq IPO at a $2B valuation), Hello Heart and Immunai. Its own AUM claim sits between $300M and $550M depending on which current listing you read — genuinely unreconciled.

3. TechAviv Founder Partners — Tel Aviv

A private, invite-only founders’ club since 2007, gated behind a member recommendation and $1M in financing or revenue. In 2020 it launched a pre-seed fund writing $500K–$3M, reported at $75M to $80M depending on the source. Portfolio founders earn carry for helping vet each other’s companies. One flag: the fund’s own team page still describes Susan Wojcicki — who died in 2024 — in the present tense.

4. ExitValley — Tel Aviv

Founded 2014 by Shahar Shraga, Nir Mei Tal, Yaniv Shiryon, Yoel Etedgi, Yaron Adler and Oded Federbucsh, Israel’s first equity-based crowdfunding platform, operating under a statutory exemption in Israeli securities law rather than an accredited-investor model. Minimum investment roughly €1,000, a 7% management fee on funds raised, and nearly ₪500 million raised for more than 130 companies through the platform since inception — the only genuinely retail-accessible door on this list.

Tier 2: Solo Checks With a Record

Six individuals with a personal investment record independently trackable on PitchBook, Tracxn or CB Insights — not just claimed on a bio page.

5. Yossi Vardi

Co-founded, led or funded more than 85 companies since the 1990s, most famously as founding investor in Mirabilis — maker of ICQ — with a $75,000 stake in 1996 that returned via a $407M AOL sale nineteen months later. Chairs Cybertech Global Tel Aviv. No fund, no minimum check size — three decades of personal wires.

6. Shlomo Kramer

Co-founder of Check Point and Imperva, now CEO of Cato Networks, and — on the side — one of Israel’s most credible cyber angels. Wrote the first angel check into Palo Alto Networks, now valued north of $100 billion, and sat on its board. Tracxn records 24 companies, 6 unicorns and 10 exits, with a check as recent as March 2026. Asked on a podcast whether he’s moonlighting as a VC: “I’m just an angel investor… I’m not a professional VC.”

7. Marius Nacht

Co-founded Check Point alongside Kramer and Gil Shwed, and separately anchors aMoon, a $1B-plus healthtech fund — a distinct institutional vehicle from the personal checks profiled here. His personal portfolio count is oddly hard to pin down: 22 (Tracxn), 50 (PitchBook), 49 (a third tracker). Recent named checks include Fireblocks, WaveBL and GK8.

8. Zohar Gilon

Managing Partner at Tamar Technology Ventures, whose own bio claims “over 45” personal angel investments and 13 exits. CB Insights’ independently tracked count is lower — 26 investments, 10 exits — still one of the more active personal cadences here, with a check into Linguana’s $8.5M seed as recently as April 2025.

9. Avishai Abrahami

Co-founder and sitting CEO of Wix, who has also built a personal angel portfolio of 16 to 18 companies depending on the tracker — including an early stake in monday.com before it went public. Latest recorded investment: February 2026.

10. Benny Schnaider

Co-founded Qumranet (sold to Red Hat), P-Cube and PentaCom (both to Cisco), then Ravello Systems, sold to Oracle for a reported $450M in 2016. Now a Venture Partner at StageOne Ventures; his personal angel record is modest — 5 to 8 investments depending on the database, most recently in November 2025 — thinner than the reputation that puts him on nearly every “top Israeli angel” round-up.

Tier 3: Reputation vs. the Record

Three names where the press-bio portfolio and the independently trackable record don’t match.

11. Uri Levine

Co-founder of Waze (sold to Google for $1.1B) and first investor and board member at Moovit (sold to Intel for $1B), routinely described in speaker-bureau bios as having “co-founded or invested in dozens of startups.” Tracxn’s independently tracked angel record shows two: SeeTree and FairFly. Most of the rest are companies he personally founded and chairs — Pontera/FeeX, Refundit, Oversee — not checks into other founders’ companies. Both things can be true; they’re different claims, and most coverage of Levine collapses them into one.

12. Shai Wininger & Micha Kaufman

Wininger co-founded Fiverr and then Lemonade; Kaufman co-founded and still chairs and runs Fiverr, and separately sits on Cerca Partners’ advisory board. Both appear repeatedly on “top Israeli angel” lists, and both, on inspection, share essentially one dated, verifiable joint deal: Empathy’s $30M Series A in September 2021, alongside Sir Ronald Cohen. This pairing also produced the “April” mix-up that opened this piece.

13. New York Angels

America’s oldest major angel group, chaired for a decade by Brian Cohen (first investor in Pinterest), with 150-plus members and a claimed $200M invested across 300-plus startups. Cohen has posted publicly about traveling to Tel Aviv specifically to meet founders. What we could not find is a single named, dated Israeli portfolio company independently attributable to the group as a whole — a declared interest, not yet a verified deal, in exactly the tier Amex Ventures and IBM Ventures occupy in our New York piece.

The Ones That Didn’t Make It

Already institutional elsewhere in this series. Oren Zeev, Gigi Levy-Weiss and Adam Fisher are all prolific personal checks, but each already has a fund profiled in our West Coast piece — Zeev Ventures, NFX, Bessemer. Dov Moran’s five personal angel investments are dwarfed by his role running Grove Ventures. Re-listing any of them here would double-count the same conviction under two hats.

Adjacent, not an investor. ICON runs a well-regarded Silicon Valley immersion program for Israeli founders; its own materials state plainly it takes no equity.

Couldn’t verify activity. Israel Angel Investment Network presents itself as a matchmaking platform; we found no dated deal flow independently attributable to it.

How To Actually Use This

Match the structure to your access. A platform has a process; a solo angel runs entirely on warm intro.

Match the specialist to your vertical. Kramer is cyber and only cyber. Nacht’s personal checks skew healthtech and infrastructure. Gilon skews SaaS and enterprise.

A personal angel’s real product is speed and signal, not capital. None of the Tier 2 or Tier 3 names will lead or fill your round alone. Budget for that, not for check size.

Verify before you build an outreach list around a number. Levine, Schnaider and the Wininger/Kaufman pairing all show the same pattern: a credible operator whose press-bio portfolio count is larger than what any independent tracker confirms. Thirty seconds on PitchBook or Tracxn saves you from chasing a reputation instead of a check.

Retail investor? ExitValley, under Israel’s crowdfunding exemption, is the one door on this list actually built for you. OurCrowd and iAngels both run on accredited minimums.

Notes on the numbers

• OurCrowd’s scale metric keeps changing shape. “Investment commitments” ($2.3B, January 2025) is not the same thing as “assets under management,” which one directory lists at a clearly stale $60M.
• iAngels’ AUM has three live, unreconciled figures: $300M (2021 release), $400M (current LinkedIn), $550M (current Startup Nation Finder). We used the platform’s most current self-reported figure.
• TechAviv’s fund size is $75M or $80M depending on source — a small enough gap to be two different dates rather than a real contradiction.
• Personal-portfolio counts disagree across every tracker we checked, for every name on this list — not only the Tier 3 entries. Nacht alone ranges from 22 to 50 depending on which database you ask.
• Uri Levine’s press-bio portfolio and his tracked angel record measure different things. Most companies attributed to him as “investments” are ones he personally founded and chairs, not arm’s-length angel checks.
• The “April” error is real and traceable to a single sentence conflating Shai Wininger with an unrelated American investor, April Underwood. We’re not naming the source; the failure mode — names scraped from adjacent sentences and published without a human check — is the finding.
• New York Angels’ Israeli activity is a declared interest, not a verified deal, the same evidentiary standard applied to Amex Ventures and IBM Ventures in our New York piece.

Screened roughly 25. Thirteen survived. Data current to 28 August 2026. If we got something wrong, tell us and we’ll correct it in public. 💜

Previously in this series: Tel Aviv micro VCs · Israeli defense tech funds · The Passport Funds: New York · The Passport Funds: West Coast