Mossad to Invest in High-Tech Startups

The Mossad is looking for some high-tech help, and is willing to pay for it. The spy organization recently opened its own venture capital fund to provide money for startups that specialize in areas that it wants to develop advanced solutions for. Among those are financial technology, personality profiling, machine learning, robotics, big data, artificial intelligence, data science, 3D tech, drones and more.

The Libertad Fund, the Mossad said, will provide funds even to early stage startups, without requiring a dilution of other shareholders through partial ownership. In exchange for its investment, the Mossad receives a non-commercial and non-exclusive license to use the developed intellectual property, while the company retains ownership of it. As a result, the company could develop alternative products or services based on that technology and sell it commercially.

Libertad, the Mossad said, “is derived from the Latin word for freedom, which is at the heart of the fund. On the one hand, the freedom of companies and entrepreneurs in the startup nation to create frontier and breakthrough technologies with a little help from us. On the other hand, it relates to the Mossad’s freedom to create a bridge between it and these innovative technologies. Libertad is also the name of a ship that carried Jewish immigrants setting sail from Bulgaria in June 1940 and anchoring on the shores of soon to be born Israel a month or so later.”