Shlomo Kalish

Shlomo Kalish was born in 1952 in Haifa, Israel to Issacher Dov and Haya Kalish- both Holocaust survivors.[4] Kalish served as a fighter pilot from 1971–1975, which included the Yom Kippur War.[5]

In 1977, Kalish received a B.Sc. in Mathematics from Tel Aviv University.[4] He completed an M.Sc. and a PhD at MIT's Sloan School [6] In 1981 he began teaching at the University of Rochester. In 1985 he joined the Management Faculty of Tel Aviv University,[4] and established a hi-tech consulting business.[5]

In 1999 Kalish founded Jerusalem Global Ventures, a Jerusalem-based VC. Kalish also served as General Partner of Concord Ventures I, LP from 1997-1999.[6] Kalish led investments in Saifun Semiconductors, Oridion Medical, Oren Semiconductors, Creo, QXL, Mellanox Technologies, Picturevision and Galileo.[7] In 1999, Kalish also founded Yazam.com, one of the first accelerators aimed at internet projects in Israel.[5] Yazam was later sold to U.S. Technologies.

In 2007, Kalish was ranked number 39 on the Forbes Midas List,[8] and first for the Israelis on the list by Forbes Magazine. Kalish was a Managing Partner at Vaizra Israel from 2010-2016,[1] a division of Vaizra Investments. Vaizra was founded by Yitzhak (Viatcheslav) Mirilashvili, a former founder of VKontakte.[7]

Shlomo Kalish is a board member at the charity Shalom Beineinu, which he founded.[9] He is also on the Board of Trustees of the Jerusalem College of Technology and the Technion Israel Institute of Technology.[8]