Protego Ventures, a two-year-old Tel Aviv firm, has closed its debut fund at $125 million to back Israeli defense-technology startups whose products have already been tested in the field — stopping deliberately short of the $150 million it had targeted.
The fund closed in two stages, an initial $70 million close followed by an additional $55 million, according to people familiar with the raise. Protego writes checks of $5 million to $50 million into early-growth companies that are already selling proven, often battlefield-tested technology, rather than funding earlier-stage bets. Its anchor backer is Ares Management, which committed $30 million as a limited partner; the private equity firm is said to have helped bring the fund's two founders together in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, betting that new technology would be central to the country's defense needs.
Filling a Gap Founders Complained About
Protego was founded by Lital Leshem, who spent 11 years in Israeli intelligence and the military before co-founding the emergency-response technology company Carbyne, and Lee Moser, a venture executive with a background at BlackRock who also served as chief of staff to a former Israeli ambassador in Washington. The pair describe Protego as the first and largest venture fund dedicated solely to Israeli defense technology.
"Many of the best defense companies in the world are being built right now, in Israel, under real operational demands."
Lital Leshem, co-founder, Protego Ventures
"What we kept hearing from founders was that generalist investors didn't understand their business, and defense-focused investors didn't understand the Israeli security ecosystem."
Lee Moser, co-founder, Protego Ventures
The fund's existing portfolio includes autonomous-systems maker XTEND, which Protego backed with a $70 million Series B and which listed on the New York Stock Exchange at a valuation of roughly $1.5 billion — a position Protego's founders have called a potential "fund maker" on its own. Other holdings include ASIO, which builds GPS-independent navigation systems and has partnered with Anduril; Prisma Photonics, which applies fiber-optic sensing to infrastructure monitoring; and Rilian, an AI company focused on cybersecurity operations.
Protego is already planning a second, larger fund for the first quarter of 2027, which its founders say will lean more heavily on Israeli institutional investors alongside at least one large U.S. commitment, and will widen its mandate to include early-growth defense companies based in the United States.
