Yair Snir is a managing director for Europe and Israel at Dell Technologies Capital (DTC), the corporate venture capital (CVC) arm of US-based computing technology producer Dell Technologies. DTC invests in excess of $100m annually focusing on early-stage developers of areas such as cloud, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, internet of things, storage, big data and open source.
Headquartered in Palo Alto, the unit has offices in Boston, Austin, and the Israeli city of Herzliya, where Snir has been based since he joined in October 2016.
Snir represents DTC on the board of directors at portfolio companies including car data exchange platform Otonomo, computer storage technology developer Vast Data, cloud infrastructure technology developer Lightbits Labs, data management technology provider Iguazio, as well as cybersecurity technology developers VDoo, Guardicore, Toka and SecureNative.
Before DTC, Snir was corporate director of business development and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) at software producer Microsoft, managing activities across Europe and Israel.
Snir said: “I knew the ecosystem very well from the perspective of the buyer, having worked with VC for five years. I wanted to take my experience of building companies and focus on where entrepreneurs create cutting-edge technology.
“At the beginning of my career, I had helped founding biotech and hi-tech companies and also did strategy planning – as a consultant and in-house – for several years, so the transition to CVC really brings together all strands of my experience – startup, corporate and investment.”
Regarding his unit’s success, Snir noted: “Last year, we had a good year with three unicorn IPOs (initial public offerings): [e-signature platform] DocuSign, [database software producer] MongoDB and [enterprise security software producer] Zscaler – with a collective market value of over $20bn.”
He added that in 2019, his region also had three exits: data recovery technology producer CloudEndure was sold to e-commerce and cloud computing firm Amazon, while cybersecurity technology provider Palo Alto Networks bought container security software developer Twistlock and internet technology provider Google acquired cloud data management technology provider Elastifile.
Snir started off at the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) – or as he described, “the world’s biggest tech incubator in many ways” before starting his degree in computer science and computational biology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and later acquiring an MBA at the IDC (Interdisciplinary Centre) in Herzliya.
