Yuval Ariav

Yuval Ariav is a first-check investor and an entrepreneur with over 15 years of experience in growing startups from zero to one and navigating them as they mature into large, complex, successful companies. He is currently the Founder and Managing Partner of Symbol, a $50M first-check sector-agnostic venture capital fund backing exceptional Israeli founders building pre-consensus companies. Yuval is the first investor in companies such as NextSilicon, Fundguard, Assured Allies, Sightful, and Approve (acquired by Tipalty). Before founding Symbol in 2021, Yuval was a General Partner at LionBird, and the co-founder and CTO of Fundbox, a pre-IPO fintech company backed by Khosla, Spark Capital, and Jeff Bezos. Prior to Fundbox, he headed Product and Engineering for Onavo, acquired by Meta for $200M. Yuval began his career in the Israeli Military Intelligence where he became an Israel Defense Prize laureate (Israel's equivalent to the Medal of Freedom). He is an adj. Prof at Columbia University, where his course Data Driven Dollars is consistently bid top 3 in the Business faculty. Yuval spends his time between Tel Aviv, New York, and SF and has a solid view of these ecosystems. He loves being a sounding board for entrepreneurs from all backgrounds thinking through venture ideas, with a soft spot for non-conventional domains considered to be hard to crack.