# The Challenge Fund

> The Challenge Fund is a VC fund in Tel Aviv backing Software and Internet. See 31 investments, check sizes, portfolio and contact details. Updated Aug 2026.

- Type: VC Fund
- Location: Tel Aviv, Israel
- Total investments: 31
- Last investment: Apr 2022
- Lead investor: 6%
- Fund size: $161M
- Last fund: Jan 2001
- Last updated: Aug 2026
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-challenge-fund-edgar-lp/about/
- Website: http://www.challenge.co.il

The Challenge Fund is a VC fund in Tel Aviv focused on Software and Internet. The Challenge Funds are two Delaware limited partnerships focused on equity investments in Israel-related privately held and publicly traded companies.

## Contacts

5 contacts available for The Challenge Fund. Shizune tracks 4 team members at The Challenge Fund. Sign up free to unlock them: https://app.shizune.co/sign-up/investor-profiles/find-team-emails/the-challenge-funds?utm_source=investor_profile

## Round sizes

| Stage | Round size |
| --- | --- |
| Series B | $3M–$20M |
| Series C | $9.5M–$15M |

## Investment focus

### Industry

| Industry | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Software | 8 | 26% |
| Internet | 5 | 16% |
| Mobile | 2 | 6% |
| Hardware | 2 | 6% |
| E-Commerce | 2 | 6% |

48 industries tracked in total.

### Stage

| Stage | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Series B | 7 | 23% |
| Funding Round | 6 | 19% |
| Series C | 4 | 13% |
| Series D | 4 | 13% |
| Series A | 3 | 10% |

9 stages tracked in total.

### Country

| Country | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| United States | 15 | 48% |
| Israel | 4 | 13% |
| The Netherlands | 1 | 3% |

## Team

| Name | Title | Investments | Profile |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Saul Reichman | Executive Vice President | 0 | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/saul-reichman |
| Tamar Ciehanover | Managing General Partner | 0 | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/tamar-ciehanover |
| Yossi Ciechanover | Founder and Consultant | 0 | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/yossi-ciechanover |
| Yossi Pastel | CFO and Vice President | 0 | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/yossi-pastel |

## Investments

| Company | Description | Amount | Stage | Date | Website |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Sprints | Sprints graduates exceptional techies, not just to be employable locally, but to compete globally At Sprints, we promise a "Guaranteed-Hiring" learning journey where learners only pay when hired. With a community of 100K+ techies, Sprints is the ultimate platform for employers to assess, hire, and pay their global tech talents! | $1.2M | Seed | Apr 10, 2022 |  |
| EarlySense | EarlySense develops signal-processing technology. The company's lead product, EverOn, a contact-free early detection patient supervision system that measures, records, displays, and alerts heart and respiration rates, as well as bed entries and exits, patient motion, and quality of sleep from under the mattress. EarlySense Ltd. was founded in2004 and is based in Ramat Gan, Israel with a research and development facility in Israel; and marketing offices in Boston, Massachusetts. | $13M | Series C | Jul 23, 2010 |  |
| Crescendo Networks | Crescendo Networks accelerates and optimizes delivery of business-critical Web applications through the market’s best-performing application delivery controllers. A purpose-built hardware design with a massively parallel architecture enables Crescendo’s ADCs to outperform competing products under peak load with all features turned on, allowingservers to serve user requests even under massive HTTP traffic or extreme load. The company’s products are used by many of the world’s most sophisticated and fastest-growing Web properties to ensure usability, facilitate rapid business growth, lower IT costs and capture additional revenue. | $5M | Series D | Aug 01, 2009 |  |
| OnPage Corporation | OnPageTM is a disruptive technology and application that leverages today's technology and smartphone capabilities for priority mobile messaging. With a top notch history of ensuring uninterrupted communication for businesses and critical response organizations, OnPage is once again poised to pioneer new mobile communications methodology forbusiness and organizational use. OnPage is a mobile priority messaging and paging application that lets important communications Rise above the ClutterTM with continuous alerts, message delivery and read notifications. OnPage Service supports iPhone®, iPad® and BlackBerry® devices and also plans on rolling out other smartphone device versions to capture the growing smartphone popularity. It was created with the busy executive, healthcare provider and first responder in mind to address the need for urgent, immediate and reliable message delivery. The recent launch of OnPage Service points to the company's current accomplishments in mobile technology integration and innovation. It allows individuals and businesses to send and receive priority messages without a dedicated paging device or IT involvement. Simply download the app to your iPhone® or BlackBerry®, register, login and use. Onset Technology is headquartered in Waltham, MA., For more information, visit www.onpage.com. | $3M |  | Mar 05, 2009 |  |
| Crescendo Networks | Crescendo Networks accelerates and optimizes delivery of business-critical Web applications through the market’s best-performing application delivery controllers. A purpose-built hardware design with a massively parallel architecture enables Crescendo’s ADCs to outperform competing products under peak load with all features turned on, allowingservers to serve user requests even under massive HTTP traffic or extreme load. The company’s products are used by many of the world’s most sophisticated and fastest-growing Web properties to ensure usability, facilitate rapid business growth, lower IT costs and capture additional revenue. | $9.5M | Series C | Jul 30, 2008 |  |
| Sense Networks | Sense Networks applies big science to mobile location data for predictive analytics in advertising.The company’s technology platform, MacroSense®, builds proprietary mobile user profiles which incorporate over 1,000 behavioral attributes that are extracted from location data. MacroSense receives streaming location data from mobile phones inreal-time, processes the data in the context of billions of historical data points, and analyzes it to better understand human activity and apply the insights to mobile advertising. MacroSense currently processes 170 billion location points per month into profiles. More than any company other than Google or Facebook.Sense’s AdMatch™ real-time bidding ad platform targets and serves the ads through mobile ad exchanges, acting as a Demand Side Platform (DSP) with brand and agency clients. The integration of rich MacroSense profiles provides a built in Data Management Platform (DMP) to deliver extremely sophisticated and effective mobile ad targeting “beyond place.”Sense Networks was founded in 2003 and incorporated in early 2006. The founding team is composed of top computer scientists from MIT and Columbia University.Sense Networks won the 2009 AlwaysOn OnMedia Top 100 Award, was named by Gartner as one of its 2009 Cool Vendors in Context-Aware Computing, and was proclaimed one of “The World’s Most Intriguing Startups” by Business Week. CEO David Petersen has been featured by Forbes magazine in their series of Forbes Insights profiles of Thought Leaders changing the business landscape. | $3M | Series A | Apr 01, 2008 |  |
| Expand Networks | Expand Networks is a technology company that helped pioneer the Wide Area Network (WAN) Optimization market. Founded in 1998, Expand Networks has grown to be the leading provider of "Virtual Proximity" solutions over the Wide Area Network. Expand Networks has more than 3,500 customers with over 40,000 units deployed and boasts theindustries largest installation of over 3,000+ devices.Expand Networks "Virtual Proxmity" Experience is available Gloablly via our Network of Expand Certified Resellers, System Integrators, MSPs & OEM Partners. | $33.7M |  | May 02, 2007 |  |
| Voltaire | Voltaire, Inc. designs and develops server and storage fabric switches and network virtualization software for mission-critical applications. It offers host communications adapters, multi-service switches, integrated gigabit Ethernet and fiber channel routers, and I/O virtualization gateways. The company's products comprise Grid DirectorSwitches, which provides computing fabrics for data centers, high performance computing, and cloud environments; server adapters that supports various host interfaces, InfiniBand rates, and upper-layer protocols; server software, which is used for high performance computing, clustered databases, server virtualization, low latency messaging, and database applications; and Unified Fabric Manager, a platform for managing scale-out computing environments. Voltaire offers solutions for financial services, media and entertainment, research and education, government, manufacturing, energy, life sciences industries. The company was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in Billerica, Massachusetts. Voltaire, Inc. operates as a subsidiary of Voltaire Limited. | $10M | Series E | Feb 28, 2007 |  |
| Mercado | Mercado provides a commerce-specific search engine for online retailing. The company provides software used to manage e-commerce operations, including merchandising, searching, catalog management, and browsing functions. Mercado provides eCommerce professionals with a platform on which to execute merchandising strategies and drive revenue growth. | $11.5M |  | Dec 14, 2006 |  |
| Flash Networks | Flash Networks is a global provider of intelligent mobile Internet solutions that enable operators to improve quality of experience, reduce network operational expenses and manage and monetize the mobile Internet. Providing a faster, safer, richer and more personalized user experience, Flash Networks' Internet services gateway helps operatorsachieve significant cost savings through intelligent data traffic optimization, and applies intelligent policies for targeted marketing and charging. With offices in Europe, Asia and North America, Flash Networks' installed base of top-tier mobile carriers includes O2, Orange, SingTel Group, T-Mobile, Telefonica, Telenor, Verizon Wireless, Vodafone and Wind. | $11M |  | Jun 12, 2006 |  |

10 of 31 investments shown.

## Co-investors
- [Vertex Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/vertex-ventures) — VC Fund, 10 deals together
- [Vertex Ventures Israel](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/vertex-ventures-israel) — VC Fund, 7 deals together
- [Pitango VC](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/pitango-venture-capital) — VC Fund, 6 deals together
- [Tamir Fishman](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/tamir-fishman-ventures) — VC Fund, 5 deals together
- [Giza Venture Capital](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/giza-venture-capital) — VC Fund, 4 deals together
- [Apax Partners](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/apax-partners) — VC Fund, 3 deals together

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## FAQ

### What does The Challenge Fund invest in?

The Challenge Fund invests primarily in Software, Internet and Mobile startups, most often at Series B and Funding Round stage. Most of the 31 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in United States. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.

### What is The Challenge Fund's check size?

The Challenge Fund typically joins rounds of $3M–$20M at Series B and $9.5M–$15M at Series C. These ranges are 10th–90th percentile round sizes calculated from confirmed public funding rounds, so they are a realistic guide to the rounds The Challenge Fund participates in.

### How do I contact The Challenge Fund?

Public channels for The Challenge Fund include LinkedIn and the website linked on this profile. For a verified work email and phone number, create a free Shizune account — contact data is searched across 20+ sources and validated before delivery, so your outreach lands in the right inbox.

### Who are the partners at The Challenge Fund?

The team at The Challenge Fund includes Saul Reichman (Executive Vice President), Tamar Ciehanover (Managing General Partner) and Yossi Ciechanover (Founder and Consultant). The Team section lists each member with their title, investment count and links.

### Is Shizune's investor data accurate?

Yes — every stat on this profile is calculated from confirmed public funding rounds monitored across hundreds of sources since 2020. This profile was last refreshed in Aug 2026 and is updated monthly. Spotted something off? Use the “Suggest an edit” link near the top of the page.

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