Jonathan is a General Partner at Viola Growth. He is a private equity veteran with over 20 years of experience in launching international investments, raising capital, achieving exits and actively running public companies.

Jonathan has served as Chairman, CEO and Director in over 60 public and private companies in Israel and North America. He is adept at structuring complex, cross-border and cross industry business and financial transactions with leading investors and bankers, and has an extensive global relationship network.

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

As a former Co-Founder and CEO of Claridge Israel (1986-1997), the private equity fund grew from $50 to $700 through a series of highly successful exits, including Teva Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: TEVA), ECI Telecom (NASDAQ: ECIL), Osem (TASE:OSEM) and Optrotech.

Jonathan is the former CEO of the billion-dollar company Koor Industries where he steered the holding company through a very complex boom-bust-rebound period (1998-2006) and implemented a comprehensive restructuring plan that helped rejuvenate Koor Industries, and led a successful exit to IDB, Israel’s largest conglomerate.

THINGS YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW ABOUT JONATHAN

He likes to invest in technology companies “that displace traditional business models but are easy to understand and relate to.”

His favorite hobby is the study of military history, and also visiting sites around the world that relate.

He has served as Chairman of the Friends of Tel Avi Medical Centre (Ichilov Hospital) for about 20 years: “This year, I raised $25M from a single private donor, which will be matched by the Ministry of Health to build a much larger and more modern emergency ward; this gift has been the highlight of my philanthropic career!” Jonathan has also been a director of the Peres Centre for Peace and Innovation, from the outset.

He grew up in Montreal, Quebec, “but I had a grandfather who moved to Palestine before the First World War, so I have a lot of roots in Israel as well.”

Great statesmen/women inspire him: “The kind who tell the people what they need to hear and not what they want to hear (Shimon Peres; Bill Clinton; FDR and the like…)”

His favorite mantra to live by (from his father) is “Life isn’t a dress rehearsal… it is the actual play!”