F2 Capital: Barak Rabinowitz's Deep-Tech Seed Fund

F2 Capital is the Tel Aviv-headquartered early-stage Israeli venture fund led by managing partner Barak Rabinowitz. F2 operates a deep-tech thesis at pre-seed and seed — the earliest institutional check in most of its companies — and concentrates its portfolio in Israeli founders coming out of applied-research environments: academic labs, Unit 8200 and adjacent IDF technology units, and industrial R&D spinouts. The fund's specialization is the layer of Israeli venture that generalist seed funds systematically underweight: capital-intensive, hardware-adjacent, and technically-deep companies where the risk sits in science and engineering, not go-to-market.

What F2 does

F2 writes first-institutional checks into Israeli deep-tech companies at pre-seed and seed. The fund's stated thesis prioritizes companies where the underlying technical work is defensible on its own — proprietary IP, novel algorithms, hardware innovation, applied research from a university or defense lab — rather than companies where the value is primarily execution against a known market.

The distinction matters in the Israeli venture market because the country's most durable competitive advantages sit in the deep-tech layer: signal processing, cyber cryptography, computer vision, industrial autonomy, quantum sensing, and materials science. Generalist Israeli seed funds compete heavily for consumer, SaaS, and cyber founders. Fewer funds write the first check into a semiconductor spinout from Technion, a robotics team out of Rafael, or a computer-vision company built around a specific published paper. F2 targets that lane.

Barak Rabinowitz

Barak Rabinowitz is the managing partner. His background combines operator experience with venture-side pattern recognition on Israeli deep-tech founder profiles. Under Rabinowitz's lead, F2 has built a portfolio positioned across AI applied to physical systems, computer vision, and applied research commercialization — categories where Israel's technical talent density produces disproportionate company formation.

Portfolio character

F2's portfolio is technically-deep and category-broad rather than category-concentrated. The unifying trait is not sector but risk profile: companies where the fund is underwriting the science or the engineering, not the market. Portfolio companies span applied AI, autonomous systems, computer vision, industrial software, and applied research commercialization out of Israeli universities and defense labs.

Position in the Israeli venture stack

F2 sits in the Israeli deep-tech seed layer alongside Grove Ventures (Dov Moran), TLV Partners, and select academic-adjacent vehicles from the Weizmann and Technion technology-transfer offices. Grove operates larger fund sizes and takes deep-tech companies further into Series A and B. F2's positioning is earlier — pre-seed and seed — and its check size is calibrated to the first institutional round rather than the growth follow-on.

The seat F2 occupies is structurally scarce. Most Israeli seed capital flows to companies with immediate commercial signal. Deep-tech companies typically need capital before that signal exists. A fund willing to underwrite the earlier stage — where the science is right but the customer is theoretical — pulls proprietary access to a category of Israeli founder that other Israeli seed funds do not serve.

Primary Sources

F2 Capital corporate materials; Israeli technology-transfer disclosures from Yeda (Weizmann), T3 (Technion), and Yissum (Hebrew University); Israeli deep-tech venture reporting from Startup Nation Central and IVC Research Center.