Merav Weinryb: investing in young AI startups, while supporting women

Name: Merav Weinryb

Title: Managing Director of Qualcomm Ventures

Notable facts:

• Member of Women’s Founder Forum, a group that both encourages and promotes female entrepreneurs in the field of high tech
• Has over 15 years of experience in high tech and VC fields
• Has helped smaller AI companies breakthrough the market, advancing tech sector
• Qualcomm Ventures invests in various AI fields, including vision, language and data AI
• Directed investments in Wekai.io, and Sentinel One
  

Merav Weinryb serves as the Managing Director at Qualcomm Ventures, which oversees investments both in Israel and in Europe. Weinryb is one of the few women in a leading position of a high tech giant’s venture capital arm, and has over 15 years of experience in the high tech and venture capital fields.

Today, Weinryb serves as a board member for numerous tech companies, including several that specialize in AI, including Weka.io, which is developing a file management system using AI, and well-known Sentinel One, which uses AI to defend against cyberattacks. She has also led investments in ScyllaDB, TabTale, OpenSignal, Excelero, and MediSafe. In the past, Weinryb has served as the Board Director for Magisto, Tapingo, Panoramic Power, and Corrigon, which were later purchased by larger tech companies, such as Vimeo, ebay, and Direct Energy.

Before Weinryb joined Qualcomm, she was a director at Intel Capital, and prior she served as principal at Pitango Venture Capital, Israel’s largest venture capital group. During her time there, she directed investments in Forescout, LiveU, Convergin, and Boxee. These were later acquired by other larger groups as well, such as Oracle and Samsung.

Qualcomm Ventures has helped smaller high tech companies make breakthroughs and stream new technologies into the market, by providing them with crucial funding that helps translate abstract ideas to actual products. In addition, Qualcomm supports several companies in the AI sector including the fields of visual AI, language AI, and data AI. Some of the companies which it invests in include ID Wall, SenseTime, UniSound, Clarfai, Extreme Vision, and Magic AI. Qualcomm Ventures believes in partnering with entrepreneurs and guiding them along the process, all while steering growing businesses toward innovation.

In addition, Qualcomm Ventures has a program dedicated to helping women move forward in an often male-doimnated field, by headlining the Female Founders Summit, where female-founded early-stage companies participate in early-stage funding. The fund has branches worldwide, including in the Bay Area, San Diego, China, South Korea, India, Europe, Latin America, and Israel.

Weinryb is a critical asset in the high tech field, and has also led buys of companies that dealt with digital health, the Internet of Things, connectivity, and other new developing technologies.

She holds an MBA from Institut Européen d'Administration des Affaires, a business school in Fontainebleau, France as well as a Bachelor’s of Science in information systems engineering from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology.

Weinryb also supports women’s issues by being a member of the committee of the Women’s Founder Forum, a group that both encourages and promotes female entrepreneurs in the field of high tech.