The Founders Kitchen
Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel
Overview
The Founders Kitchen is an investment fund, led by Uri Levine, with the goal of building startups.
- Total investments
- 3
- Lead investments
- 0
- Investments · 12mo
- 0
- Active investors
- 0
Sector focus
- Business Development
- Financial Services
- Venture Capital
Investment portfolio
- Pontera
Participated · Equity · Dec 2023
Pontera is a fintech platform that enables financial advisors to analyze, rebalance, and report on workplace retirement account assets, including 401(k)s and 403(b)s. The platform is designed to work across the vast majority of retirement plans and to integrate with existing portfolio management tools to help advisors improve clients' financial outcomes. Pontera collaborates with Dynastym Benjamin Edwards, OneDigital, Savant and Wealthspire, and has launched integrations with Addepar, Envestnet and Morningstar. Led by Uri Levine, Yoav Zurel, Eyal Halahmi and David Weisz, the company intends to use the new funds to expand operations and its business reach. The company raised $60M in the latest round, bringing total funding to $160M. The round was led by ICONIQ Growth with participation from Blumberg Capital, Collaborative Fund, Hanaco Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and The Founders Kitchen. Pontera (formerly FeeX) provides a platform that enables financial advisors to securely report on, manage, and trade clients' held-away accounts such as 401(k)s, 403(b)s, and HSAs. The company says its product integrates with existing advisor technology and has announced partnerships with Orion Advisor Solutions, Advyzon, Carson Group and others to make holistic advisor service easier. Pontera rebranded from FeeX to reflect the evolution of its flagship product and its mission to be a "bridge" to better retirements. The firm serves thousands of financial advisors across single-advisor practices and large institutions and reports it has grown more than threefold in each of the past three years. Pontera is hiring across departments as it continues to scale its advisor-focused retirement offering. FeeX provides a free service that connects to users' investment accounts and uses algorithms to identify hidden costs such as account maintenance fees, asset-based fees, and mutual fund expense ratios. It generates reports that include fee breakdowns and suggests lower-cost alternative financial products. One of its products, the 401K Rollover Center, analyzes fees in inactive 401(k)s and advises users on whether to keep or roll over accounts, using plan disclosures and user-uploaded documents. FeeX monetizes by receiving payments from IRA providers when new users sign up through its platform. The company plans to expand its product to identify fees in other financial services, including bank accounts, credit cards, and insurance, and intends to draw on investor expertise to do so. FeeX was founded in 2012 by Yoav Zurel, David Weisz, Eyal Halahmi, and Uri Levine (Waze founder). FeeX uses algorithms to identify and reduce hidden advisory, investment, and expense-ratio fees in retirement and investment accounts. It analyzes account types including IRAs, 401(k), 403(b), 457, and brokerage accounts. The company says fees can claim a third or more of retirement savings and that the average American household pays $155,000 in hidden 401(k) fees over the lifetime of the account. FeeX reports more than 60,000 users who hold over $1 billion in assets and says it has found $277 million in hidden fees. The company was founded in August 2012 by Yoav Zurel, David Weisz, and Uri Levine (the founder of Waze) and launched in the U.S. in March 2014. Financially, FeeX has now raised a $6.5 million Series B, bringing total funding to $9.6 million. FeeX built a crowdsourced financial-intelligence platform that connects to users' bank accounts, analyzes fees, and benchmarks those fees against comparable users to surface overpayment via a "sucker meter." The product is intended to increase transparency and enable consumers to renegotiate or switch providers. The team of four Israeli cofounders includes Waze cofounder Uri Levine; Yoav Zurel is CEO. FeeX launched a pilot in Israel that it says has already saved users over $2 million and plans a U.S. release in a month or two. The company intends to expand into more categories of fees and use new funding to open offices in New York City. FeeX positions itself as a consumer-focused alternative to opaque financial services, aiming to reduce what it estimates are hundreds of billions in annual fees paid by Americans.
- Kahun
Participated · Seed · Sep 2022
Kahun has built an AI engine that performs clinical reasoning by applying a proprietary map of over 30 million evidence‑based medical insights to generate patient‑specific, referenced recommendations. Its first product is a clinical assessment chatbot that asks tailored questions, completes a 3–5 minute assessment, and delivers a clinical summary with recommendations for further evaluation. Insights produced by the engine are traceable to originating peer‑reviewed and academic literature to improve physician trust and transparency. Kahun positions its tool as a gold‑standard clinical assessment to save interview and documentation time and help address physician burnout and provider shortages. The company also supplies evidence‑based illness scripts to the NEJM Healer education application. With the new funding, Kahun plans to expand beyond primary care into additional sub‑specialties and scale go‑to‑market efforts, particularly for telemedicine organizations.
Team
No current team members are available.