Yoav is a General Partner at Almaz Capital based in Silicon Valley. He spans over 25 years of venture capital, corporate development, and tech entrepreneurship.

Yoav joined Almaz after a tenure at Meta Platforms, where he led M&A and inorganic growth strategy development in several verticals. Earlier, Yoav was Managing Partner at StageOne Ventures, where he led early stage VC investments on the US-Israel bridge, focusing primarily on AI and cloud/SaaS software infrastructure. Notable exits from Yoav’s StageOne portfolio include Epsagon (acquired by Cisco), Apprente (acquired by McDonalds), and Apolicy (acquired by SysDig).

Prior to joining StageOne, Yoav was Vice President of Corporate Development at Cisco, where he engaged in over 20 company acquisitions totaling over $10 Billion, and managed an investment portfolio of close to $1 Billion, including over 40 direct minority investments, as well as hands-on LP positions with over 20 venture capital funds worldwide. Among others, while at Cisco Yoav helped ideate and create Almaz Capital’s first fund where Cisco was the defining anchor LP.

Before Cisco, Yoav helped establish Pitango Venture Capital’s Silicon Valley presence, and was involve with multiple investments including Clearforest (acquired by Reuters), RADLAN (acquired by Marvell), and Breach Security (acquired by Trustwave). Yoav had earlier operational experience as the founding Head of Engineering and General Manager at Colordesk, a software company in the imaging space, and in engineering leadership positions with Electronics for Imaging and other technology companies.

Yoav is a graduate of the Israeli Defence Force’s elite 8200 intelligence unit, where he was an officer in charge of numerous communications related advanced technology projects. Yoav holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, as well as BS and MS in Computer Science from the Hebrew University.