London and Tel Aviv based VC firm 83North has closed out its fifth fund at $300 million, as we reported earlier. It last raised a $250 million fund in 2017 and expects to continue the same investment mix, while tracking developments in emerging areas like healthcare AI and autonomous vehicles.
In a conversation with general partner Laurel Bowden, the veteran investor shared a few further thoughts with Extra Crunch — talking about the tech scene in Europe vs Israel, what the firm looks for in a team and tips on scaling globally.
The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
TechCrunch: Is Europe starting to catch up to Israel when it comes to deep tech startups?
Laurel Bowden: We clearly think we have in our portfolio some deep tech. And in other VC portfolios too — there’s clearly some deep tech [coming out of Europe]. And then on the reverse side you’ve seen more consumer-related stuff coming out of Israel. But still if you take a blanket look, we see more data infrastructure, security, storage coming out of Israel than we see in Europe — that’s for sure.
