Yori Nelken

Yori Nelken is a General Partner at Cognitiv Ventures, He is a serial entrepreneur and investor with over 18 years of leadership experience driving startup companies from concept to success. With his deep experience in the trenches building multiple businesses from the ground up and through their exits, Yori has emerged a highly sought-after CEO coach, mentor, advisor and investor. Originally from Jerusalem, Yori was the founder and CEO of Banter, a pioneering natural language processing company. He successfully established the company as a leader in the call-center space, serving some of the largest US banks (including Wells Fargo and Bank of America), until its acquisition by IBM. After selling Banter in 2004, Yori joined the Mayfield Fund in Silicon Valley as entrepreneur-in-residence, where he provided deal flow and due-diligence support as well as portfolio mentoring. In 2005, Yori founded TimeBridge, a pre-cloud calendar management assistant, an early example of successful viral promotion within a corporate setting. With a corporate user base of millions of users, TimeBridge was acquired by MerchantCircle. Yori also co-founded Local Sciences, a local data-as-a-service provider, successfully engineering its pivot to become a broad data collection and analysis technology. Local Sciences quickly became the largest accurate local database for service businesses in the Health & Beauty and Automotive verticals, providing data to YP, Groupon and other industry leaders. Yori returned to Israel and joined OurCrowd as General Partner after living in the Bay Area for 14 years.