Hasso Plattner Ventures – Team
Eran Davidson
Managing Partner
Eran has been Managing Partner of Hasso Plattner Ventures since its foundation in
2005 and is mainly involved with B2C deals.
From 2002 to 2005 he served as CEO for ProSeed Capital Fund in Tel Aviv. Under his auspices the Technion Technology Incubator was taken over and privatized and went on to become the most successful technology incubator in Israel. Before that Eran served as the Managing Partner at Eurofund 2000 LP in Israel. From 1996 to 2000 he was Vice President at Inventech Industrial Ventures in Tel Aviv. ProSeed, Eurofund and Inventech are venture capital suppliers that invested in early-stage high-tech companies and most of the investments have since developed into fully mature enterprises and some are being traded on the NASDAQ and other international stock exchanges. From 1995 to 1996 Eran served as Vice President of Open Sky Ltd. and from 1991 to 1993 he headed his own law company.
Eran received a degree in Law from Tel Aviv University and holds an MBA.
Dr. Rouven Westphal
Partner
Before joining Hasso Plattner Ventures in 2006 Rouven served on the executive board
of a start-up dealing with high-performance cluster computing.
From 2000 to 2003 he built up the most successful Business Angel network from scratch in Germany. During this time he brokered startup capital for the formation of more than 50 companies with a total volume of over EUR 50m and has privately invested in ten IT companies. Some of these companies are already being traded on US and European stock markets. Together with other recognized Business Angels he also participated in several investments, two of which have already proven their success. From 1997 to 2000 Rouven worked as a Consultant for Andersen Consulting (now known as Accenture). He is in charge of B2B deals and also lectures on Entrepreneurship to students at the Hasso Plattner Institute.
Rouven holds a M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Business Administration.
Yaron Valler
Partner
Yaron Valler joined Hasso Plattner Ventures in January 2010, bringing with him more than fifteen years of valuable experience in IT and venture capital.
In his previous position Yaron was a partner at Giza Venture Capital responsible for investments in the enterprise software field. Yaron's investments during his tenure at Giza include Yadata (sold to Microsoft), e-Glue (sold to Nice systems), and Soluto. Prior to that, Yaron was part of the management team of the Technion incubator Israel's leading venture accelerator. In this capacity he was involved in the creation of over 20 startup companies. Before becoming a venture capitalist Yaron was the Vice President of business development and a co-founder of Excedo Technologies a leading provider of supply chain monitoring technologies. As an engineer Yaron led an enterprise systems group at Intel where he was also a member of the team that developed the Pentium processor.
Yaron holds an MBA from the INSEAD in France and a B.Sc. in Information Systems Engineering from Ben-Gurion University in Israel.
Yair Re'em
Investment Manager
Yair has been working as an Investment Analyst for Hasso Plattner Ventures since 2010 and became Investment Manager in 2011.
From 1996 to 2009, Yair fulfilled a variety of managerial roles in the defense sector. In his last position, he focused on technology scouting and the identification of market trends, specializing in the development of investment strategies for emerging technologies.
Yair holds a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology and an Executive Master in Public Management from the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. He is also a graduate of the Advanced Management Program at Wharton Business School.
Dr. Jens Schmidt-Ehmcke
Investment Analyst
Jens Schmidt-Ehmcke joined Hasso Plattner Ventures in July 2011, bringing with him more than six years of experience in technology and innovation policy consulting, project management, market analysis and econometric programming.
From 2009 till 2011, Jens worked as a Personal Advisor to the President of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) in Berlin. In his last position, he focused on providing scientific policy consultation services to several ministries of the German Government and private foundations.
Jens holds a M.A. in Economics from the Free University of Berlin in 2003 and a PhD in Economics
from the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder) in 2009.
Danielle Shapira
Personal assistant to Eran Davidson
Dana Droigk
Personal assistant to Rouven Westphal
Diana Stephan
Personal assistant to Yaron Valler
