ZOOZ Strategy

ZOOZ Strategy

ZOOZ Strategy is the family office of Eyal Waldman, founder and former CEO of Mellanox Technologies, the high-speed networking chipmaker Nvidia acquired in a landmark $7 billion deal in 2020. The acquisition remains the second-largest tech exit in Israel's history and converted Waldman's founder equity into one of the country's most substantial personal fortunes. He set up the office to manage that liquidity pool, operating as a quiet, principal-only vehicle rather than an institutional platform. Waldman invests almost entirely in early- and growth-stage deep technology companies, favoring sectors where he spent his operating career: semiconductor interconnects, data-center infrastructure, AI acceleration hardware, and enterprise networking. His track record includes backing firms developing silicon photonics, next-generation switch fabrics, and composable infrastructure. Geographic focus is overwhelmingly Israel, with selective exposure to US-based enterprise infrastructure startups. Unlike the multi-stage deployment programs run by many tech-founders' family offices, ZOOZ's activity appears concentrated in Seed through Series B rounds, often alongside venture funds with whom Waldman built relationships during Mellanox's pre-acquisition growth. The office maintains a deliberately low profile. No public marketing materials exist, and ZOOZ operates without a visible investment team beyond Waldman and a small support structure. Through Mellanox, Waldman has personal ties to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, a relationship that likely influences deal-sourcing dynamics — particularly in the tightly networked Israeli semiconductor ecosystem that Mellanox itself helped catalyze. In May 2024, Waldman publicly re-engaged with the Israeli tech ecosystem through a series of mentorship initiatives tied to his former Mellanox network (per public record, 2024). ZOOZ's structural differentiator is Waldman's operating tenure. He built and scaled a publicly traded fabless semiconductor company from 1999 through its acquisition two decades later, surviving the 2008 downturn and multiple hostile takeover attempts. That gives him technical diligence capability that few individual allocators can replicate — he reads silicon roadmaps and data-center Requests for Quotation the way other family-office principals read placement memoranda. The office is essentially a proprietary extension of founder-level pattern recognition applied to capital deployment.