Former NBA player Omri Casspi is expanding his venture capital firm Swish Ventures with a $100 million Opportunity Fund, significantly enhancing its capacity to support portfolio companies beyond the seed stage.
The new fund brings Swish’s total assets under management to $300 million, building on its initial $63 million seed fund.
The Opportunity Fund is designed to allow Swish to double down on its highest-performing companies as they scale globally. It will target approximately eight investments across cybersecurity, infrastructure, and artificial intelligence (AI), deploying an average of $10 million per deal. Swish Ventures will continue its hands-on approach, working closely with founders on fundraising, recruiting, and business development.
Swish’s portfolio includes Cognition, EON, Upwind, Irregular, Applied Compute, and Tenzai. Since its launch in 2025, the firm’s seed portfolio has generated more than $20 billion in enterprise value, with four companies reaching unicorn status in under three years.
In November, AI-native cybersecurity company Tenzai emerged from stealth with a $75 million seed round. The company’s platform introduces an agentic AI penetration testing system that autonomously hacks, exploits, and fixes vulnerabilities at the speed of AI. Unlike conventional pentesting, which is typically episodic and manual, Tenzai’s system provides continuous, always-on offensive capabilities.
Founder-first philosophy
Casspi emphasized the firm’s founder-first philosophy in announcing the new fund.
“We have the privilege of backing exceptional founders who are building companies that will define the next decade in cybersecurity, AI, and infrastructure," he said.
"From day one, we built Swish around one principle: We stand behind our founders all the way. We’re not just writing checks – we’re in the trenches around the clock, helping with fundraisers, recruiting, opening doors, whatever it takes to build something great.
“This fund lets us keep doing that as our companies scale, leading follow-on rounds and creating more opportunities for our LPs," Casspi explained.
The Opportunity Fund’s limited partner base includes US pension funds, philanthropic foundations, and family offices. Casspi leads the firm as founder and managing partner, alongside associate Ori Striechman.
Swish Ventures’ expansion underscores its ambition to become a leading player in Israel’s venture capital ecosystem, with a concentrated strategy focused on backing a small number of companies and supporting them through multiple stages of growth.
Despite retiring in the summer of 2021, Casspi, the first Israeli ever to play in the NBA, told The Jerusalem Post that he began investing in 2018 and “fell in love with it.”
“I found the best job in the world,” he said. “I’m like a kid in a candy store.”
“It was natural to stay in the field of athletics, but I wanted a new challenge,” he noted. “I’m blessed to have been in basketball and I learnt about hard work and dealing with challenges.”
Casspi opened his first fund, Sheva, in 2022, focusing on the pre-seed and seed stage, raising $36 million in its first year.
One of his notable investments is the cyber company Upwind, which last week announced a strategic collaboration with NVIDIA to protect the rapidly expanding world of AI workloads.
The partnership combines Upwind’s runtime-first security platform with NVIDIA’s advanced AI compute and inference technologies, delivering real-time protection for GPU-powered environments.
Swish focuses on cybersecurity and AI companies in Israel and North America. Casspi believes that the cybersecurity market in Israel “has matured” with amazing infrastructure for businesses.
“The next $100 billion cyber company will come from Israel,” and while it is not investing in defense companies at the moment, “if there is a good opportunity in defense, we will go for it,” Casspi said.