A recent highlight for Merav Weinryb was her investment in SentinelOne, the US cybersecurity company. Despite cybersecurity being a crowded market with many established incumbents, Weinryb recognised the exceptional performance of the SentinelOne team and pushed hard for the investment. Qualcomm invested before SentinelOne had reached unicorn valuation, and less than two years later SentinelOne listed on the New York Stock Exchange as the highest-valued cybersecurity IPO up to that point.
“It was at the right time, in the right domain, the right product approach and I thought they
could win a significant part of the market,” says Weinryb.
She was also instrumental in Qualcomm’s investment in and eventual acquisition of Cellwize, the Singapore-based company that provides self-organising network software for mobile operators.
Weinryb came into corporate venturing after first working in corporate M&A and then venture capital firm Pitango. She worked at Intel Capital before joining Qualcomm Ventures in 2014.
Qualcomm Ventures’s Israel and Europe team is a tight-knit unit of three people but covers investments in everything from automotive technologies to internet of things, the metaverse and quantum computing. Weinryb is particularly interested in the potential for robotics.
“There’s a huge gap between what robots could do in offices, public locations, in industrial settings, and where the robotics industry is today.”
“There’s a huge gap between what robots could do in offices, public locations, in industrial settings, and where the robotics industry is today. We see more and more startups in this space, but the majority are is very early, except for some cleaning and industrial robots. I’m excited about the potential for innovation in this area, especially with the proliferation of 5G and AI.”
Deepening Qualcomm Venture’s operations in Europe — especially tapping into the deeptech expertise in the region — is high on Weinryb’s priority list for this year. In her spare time, she’s a passionate promoter of female entrepreneurs and founded the Women Founders’ Forum in Israel, which she has been running for the past seven years. The organisation provides mentor support for female tech entrepreneurs.
See the rest of our Top 50 Emerging Leaders for 2023 here.
