Labs/02

Labs/02

Labs/02 was founded in 2016 by Nimrod Cohen and Ohad Goldberg, two operators who saw a gap between Israel's deep technical talent and the go-to-market support available at the earliest stages. The firm set up in Jerusalem — deliberately outside the Tel Aviv venture corridor — to access founders emerging from Hebrew University's computer science labs and the city's cybersecurity research clusters. Unlike scouts or angel syndicates, Labs/02 formalized a venture studio model where the firm actively recruits founding teams around unsolved technical problems, then provides engineering office space and shared back-office infrastructure during the first 18 months of operation. The firm writes initial checks at pre-seed and seed, focusing on enterprise software, AI/ML applications, fintech infrastructure, and industrial automation. Labs/02 typically commits $500,000 to $1.5 million as a first institutional investor and maintains capacity to follow on through Series A. The portfolio is concentrated — the firm deliberately limits new investments to 2–4 per year to maintain engineering engagement with each company. Known portfolio entities include Coralogix, the streaming data observability platform that raised a $142 million Series D in 2022 (per TechCrunch, 2022), and an undisclosed number of cybersecurity and DevOps infrastructure companies still in stealth. The firm co-invests alongside Israeli seed funds like Aleph VC and Glilot Capital, though it does not participate as an LP in external fund commitments. Labs/02 operates with a lean team structure, embedding its own software engineers into portfolio companies for the first product build phase. The firm has not publicly disclosed headcount or total assets, though its model implies a capital base calibrated toward managing a concentrated portfolio rather than scaling AUM through fund-of-funds relationships. The firm has maintained a single office in Jerusalem since inception. In the broader Israeli venture landscape, Labs/02 sits in a small cohort of studio-model investors alongside firms like Fresh.Fund and upLabs, distinguished by its insistence on a full-time engineering resident assigned to each portfolio company for a minimum of six months. Labs/02's structural differentiator is personnel deployment rather than capital scale. The firm hires and embeds its own full-stack developers into founding teams, taking on the execution risk that most seed-stage investors avoid. This model functions as a talent-risk hedge: the firm underwrites the technical build, not just the idea. Because the studio operates with salaried engineers rather than relying on founder execution alone, it can resuscitate struggling portfolio companies by swapping in its own technical leadership — an option traditional venture funds cannot exercise.