Pasha Romanovski leaving VC firm Hanaco
The co-founder and General Partner is stepping down after eight years that included success stories and several recent scandals
Eight years after founding venture capital fund Hanaco Ventures, Pasha Romanovski announced his retirement from the day-to-day management of the fund.
Romanovski has been involved in the last few years with two companies in which he invested that created quite a few scandals. The first is the insurtech company Vesttoo, which reached insolvency, and its founders are suspected of fraud. The second company is Infarm, an agricultural unicorn that also went bankrupt.
In May of this year, a personal lawsuit was filed against Romanovski by singer Omer Adam and investment manager Ran Nussbaum on the grounds of misleading investors. According to them, Romanovski caused them to invest $750,000 in Infarm after presenting a "presentation full of lies."
Romanovski stated, "At the time, my partners and I teamed up to establish a new venture capital fund, one that emphasizes working with leading entrepreneurs in their field while fully committing to supporting their journey from the earliest stages of the company to managing large, growing companies.
“Today, after years of hard work to make this vision a reality, I have decided to embark on a new path. It has been a great privilege to be one of the founders of the fund, which has become a life's work for me, and I am proud of the joint and challenging work we have accomplished. In the coming period, I will continue to support the portfolio companies in the fund, and afterward, I will turn to my new project. As an investor in the fund, I am confident in the success and tremendous potential of the entrepreneurs and the fund. I will make myself available to them as much as they need, also in the future. On this occasion, I would like to thank everyone for the shared journey, the privilege of working with brilliant teams, and the successes that have been achieved and those that are yet to come."
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Alon Lifshitz, co-founder and General Partner, said on behalf of the partners: "I thank Pasha for many years of friendship and a significant partnership in which we together established one of the largest and most active funds in Israel. We are sorry for his departure, but at the same time, we wish him great success from the bottom of our hearts on the new path he has chosen."
