It started with an old T-shirt tucked away in a closet that read: “Find a way, or make one.”
For Lior Elkan, Founding Managing Partner of M-Fund, it became more than a quote — it became a philosophy, shaping a relentless mindset that would later redefine how he builds, invests, and backs founders.
For years, Lior worked behind the scenes of Israel’s tech ecosystem — sourcing breakout deals, advising family offices, and watching companies he’d once scouted grow into unicorns. Yet, without a fund of his own, he remained invisible on the cap table.
So, true to his motto, he decided to make his own way. That way became M-Fund — a dual-engine investment platform that merges the agility and intimacy of an angel club with the discipline of a top-tier venture fund.
Launched out of necessity and refined through conviction, it has evolved into one of Israel’s most distinctive early-stage engines, backing visionary founders before their categories are even recognized — and proving that in venture capital, true innovation isn’t about chasing hype, but about having the courage to act before the crowd arrives. That’s how M-Fund was born — out of necessity, obsession, and the belief that superior returns shouldn’t depend on a legacy brand or hundreds of millions in capital.
The 360° Mindset: Bridging Disciplines to Rethink Venture
Before founding M-Fund, Lior’s career was a study in connecting unlikely dots — from physics and electrical engineering to finance, corporate innovation, and venture capital. He began his professional path in an elite technological unit within Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office, where he developed a rare ability to combine analytical rigor with creative problem-solving.
As a Principal at Glilot Capital, he gained first-hand experience in institutional venture investing. Later, as an Investment Manager at Hyundai Motor Company, he expanded his expertise into large-scale corporate innovation. Alongside these roles, he advised family offices and early-stage startups, cultivating a holistic, 360-degree view of how capital meets creation.
Armed with four academic degrees — in Physics and two in Electrical Engineering from Tel Aviv University (all with distinction) and an MBA in Technology Management from the Technion — Lior Elkan combines technical precision with strategic foresight in his approach to venture investing. An alumnus of international programs for emerging fund managers, VC Lab and Coolwater, he has channeled this multidisciplinary foundation into building M-Fund.
Spotting Giants Before They Stand Tall
M-Fund was born from a simple belief: the best founders don’t always fit the mold, and the best opportunities aren’t always obvious — at first.
What started six years ago as an angel club — a small circle of investors betting early on unconventional founders — has grown into a distinctive venture platform that continues to operate with the same conviction and agility that defined its early days.
Focused primarily on B2B software and AI, M-Fund leads rounds at the pre-seed and seed stages but remains sector-agnostic. Some of its most successful bets have come from seeing value long before others did — like backing Spines, an AI-powered publishing platform, before ChatGPT even launched, or leading early rounds in Fetcherr just before it became a commercial success and later attracted top-tier investors such as Battery Ventures and Salesforce Ventures.
That instinct — to spot the signal before the noise — has defined M-Fund’s edge. Over the past six years, it has quietly outclassed top-decile benchmarks while staying accessible to a broad network of accredited investors.
What truly sets M-Fund apart is its dual-engine platform: a hands-on angel club for those who prefer deal-by-deal exposure, and a synergistic venture fund for investors seeking diversified access to the firm’s most promising startups. The result is a platform that can move fast, double down on winners, and ensure no opportunity slips away.
But beyond capital, M-Fund is built on relationships. Lior Elkan and his team work shoulder to shoulder with founders — offering guidance, connections, and long-term backing through every stage of growth. It’s a model that rejects legacy structures and institutional rigidity, proving that an emerging manager with conviction and creativity can still punch well above its weight.
Building His Own Seat at the Table
For years, Lior Elkan worked behind the scenes — advising family offices and spotting the early signals of breakout companies — yet without a fund of his own, he was invisible on the cap table. So he built his own seat. From scratch. He began organizing SPVs, one by one, to back unconventional founders others underestimated. It wasn’t glamorous, but it worked.
A pivotal milestone came with winning an Israel Innovation Authority tender, which gave M-Fund both validation and momentum to scale. Six years on, the angel club has led over 20 SPVs and this year expanded into a synergistic venture fund with nine portfolio companies already — bridging early believers and institutional capital in one model.
The lesson, Lior says, is simple: you don’t need to follow the standard VC playbook to win — especially when you back founders with early proof, long before the market takes notice.
As a solo GP, Lior runs M-Fund with founder-level agility — fast, decisive, and deeply personal. The model recalls independent investors like Oren Zeev, proving that a hands-on, conviction-driven approach can rival institutional capital — without the bureaucracy that often comes with it.
By building a model that serves both angel investors and institutional capital, M-Fund isn’t just bridging the funding gap — it’s reshaping how early-stage innovation gets backed.
Evolving the Venture Model — Brick by Brick
A long personal journey reshaped how Lior Elkan builds and invests. He always felt drawn to venture capital, but getting there wasn’t a straight line. Momentum took years to build. In his early career, he was helping others build their track records — while still waiting for the chance to prove his own.
He came close several times — with anchor LPs ready to commit between five and twenty million dollars — but either the timing was off or the terms didn’t feel right. Some opportunities faded; others he turned down. Lior refused to compromise just to raise, choosing instead to keep building — brick by brick — until something real took shape.
Eventually, he stopped waiting for permission and started building momentum on his own terms. One SPV at a time, he proved he could deliver results. Over 160 investors joined, and across them, M-Fund has consistently delivered performance well above top-decile venture benchmarks — while remaining accessible to accredited investors.
Scaling a platform on SPVs alone was tough. The economics were thin, the infrastructure demanding, and sustaining it long-term without backing was nearly impossible. That challenge pushed Lior Elkan to evolve the model. The turning point came when M-Fund won a tender from the Israel Innovation Authority, alongside matching capital from 15 trusted partners, which provided both validation and momentum to scale. It allowed Lior to formalize the angel club’s structure, invest in internal systems, and lay the groundwork for long-term growth.
That’s when the second part of the model emerged: a synergistic venture fund designed to give investors diversified access to M-Fund’s most promising — and often oversubscribed — deals. The synergy between the fund and the angel club made the platform more robust, flexible, and founder-friendly.
Today, the venture fund includes nine portfolio companies — most of which were first backed through the angel club and are led by Israeli founders. Three of them — Fetcherr, qbiq, and Spines — were recently named among Israel’s Top 10 Most Promising Startups for 2025 by Calcalist, with Lior serving as a board director on all three.
This next phase isn’t about reinvention; it’s about scaling what already works and making world-class performance accessible to more investors.
Two Engines, One Mission: Redefining Early-Stage Access
In venture capital, success hinges on access — to the right founders, the right timing, and the right networks. M-Fund was built around that principle, giving investors a dual gateway to capture the strongest early-stage opportunities and double down on winners.
| M-Fund Club | M-Fund VC | |
| Who it’s for | Accredited investors seeking direct, hands-on exposure to early-stage innovation. | Investors seeking diversified exposure and guaranteed access to M-Fund’s highest-conviction startups. |
| What it offers | Access to a carefully curated pipeline of early-stage startups, each vetted through deep due diligence. | A professionally managed venture fund that often leads rounds, secures early allocations, and provides the angel club with co-investment opportunities. |
| How it works | Investors choose their own check sizes and participate in decisive early rounds — combining flexibility with high-conviction deal flow. | By pooling capital, the fund enables investors to participate in a broader, risk-optimized portfolio while benefiting from M-Fund’s sourcing edge and hands-on founder support. |
| What makes it unique | A close-knit network of experienced angels — the “Winners Club” — sharing insights, access, and co-investment opportunities. | A synergistic structure where the fund and the angel club reinforce each other — creating a virtuous cycle of access, insight, and acceleration across the portfolio. |
This dual-engine structure gives investors the best of both worlds — the agility of angels and the discipline of venture capital — optimizing risk, amplifying returns, and opening top-tier opportunities to a broader base of accredited investors.
The Disruption of Doing the Real Work
Lior Elkan didn’t set out to disrupt venture capital — he simply set out to do the work properly in an industry that sometimes forgets what that means. Too many funds optimize for fundraising, branding, and headlines instead of focusing on what really matters: sourcing, evaluating, and backing the right founders.
M-Fund was built differently — lean by design, conviction-led, and focused on early-stage startups that show early signs of product-market fit. It’s not about chasing trends but about leading rounds where the team can truly add value. In today’s venture landscape — where hype often overshadows execution — that kind of discipline is surprisingly rare.
“If more VCs focused less on raising the next fund and more on making the current one perform,” Lior Elkan says, “our ecosystem would look very different.”
At M-Fund, the results speak louder than the headlines — proving that real disruption comes not from noise, but from doing the work well.
How to Win with One Hand Tied Behind Your Back?
Venture capital is inherently risky — but the greater danger lies in building a platform that can’t sustain itself. M-Fund never had the luxury of operating like a legacy firm with unlimited resources — so every move had to be intentional, every process lean.
M-Fund innovates where it matters most: discovering overlooked founders, designing flexible investment vehicles, and supporting companies post-investment. Early on, Lior realized that the real risk wasn’t taking bold bets — it was building an unsustainable business. Running both an angel club and a venture fund without massive capital meant engineering smart infrastructure that scales — efficient systems, selective deployment, and relentless prioritization.
What grounds M-Fund is its north star: generating meaningful returns for investors. Innovation only matters if it compounds into performance. As the platform evolves, the focus remains on refining what works — proving that in venture capital, being early is good, but being right, repeatedly, is what makes you durable.
Finding the Fault Line in Every Opportunity
Lior Elkan approaches risk not as a threat to avoid, but as a fault line to map and understand. To him, risk is data — a signal waiting to be decoded. Every startup, he says, has one or two critical points of failure, and the work begins by finding them early.
At M-Fund, due diligence goes far beyond checklists. Each process is built around the company’s unique vulnerabilities — whether technical validation, team dynamics, pricing strategy, or product adoption.
Take GrowthSpace, for example: the momentum was there, but the real question was scalability — could they build a model for long-tail coaching that combined enough expert supply with sustainable enterprise pricing? Once M-Fund gained conviction that this could be solved, the decision became clear.
For Lior Elkan, risk management doesn’t end at investment — it keeps unfolding, reshaping itself with every decision and every stage of growth. His team stays close, working with founders to tackle the same challenges spotted early on — adapting, testing, reinforcing. Because in venture, risk never disappears; it just changes shape. And so do they.
Betting on the Founders Who Refuse to Fold
One of M-Fund’s most rewarding wins didn’t start with perfect products — it started with founders who won’t quit.
Lior Elkan first backed GenieLabs, a GenAI platform for mobile game studios, at the pre-seed stage — betting not just on a nascent field, but above all on two young founders whose grit, humility, and rapid learning curve set them apart from day one.
The path wasn’t smooth. When the first products failed to gain traction last year, the team hit a wall that would have ended most startups. Instead, they went back to the users, tore everything apart, and rebuilt from the core — the same technology, but a sharper focus.
Seeing that mindset, M-Fund didn’t step back — it doubled down, backing conviction with capital when the company was running on fumes. Today, GenieLabs has scaled rapidly, crossing the two-million-dollar ARR mark — proof that conviction and trust in resilient founders matter long before the results do.
Winning by Leading the Overlooked
In early-stage venture, competition isn’t what most people — or even institutional LPs — imagine. Big names don’t necessarily mean sharper vision, and at the earliest stages, speed, proximity, and clarity of judgment matter far more than brand. While many smaller players prefer to sit on the fence, join syndicates, or wait for social proof, M-Fund does the opposite — forming conviction early, leading rounds, and showing up before others do.
Lior Elkan doesn’t try to predict hype cycles. He stays close to founders, close to users, and listens to the market’s early signals — even when they’re still faint. The firm’s dual-engine structure — venture fund plus angel club — provides both reach and agility, helping M-Fund spot opportunities early and act decisively when it matters most.
The Leader Who Spots Leaders
Lior has never seen himself as the loudest voice in the room. His job isn’t to be the hero — it’s to find and back the heroes early, then give them the space to lead. In venture capital, leadership means spotting it before it’s obvious. Across the boards he sits on, Lior has learned that real leadership isn’t about charisma or credentials — it’s about ownership. He looks for founders who are independent thinkers, radically transparent and accountable to themselves before anyone else — and he applies the same philosophy when building his own tight-knit team.
Inside M-Fund, there’s no micromanagement. The core team aligns around three simple values: curiosity, clarity, and execution. Once those are in place, trust takes over. Lior chooses partners who operate with a founder’s mindset — people who take initiative, challenge assumptions, and act with integrity. To him, true leadership isn’t about being followed. It’s about recognizing potential early — and standing behind it fully.
The Unwavering Discipline of No Plan B
For Lior Elkan, M-Fund’s endurance comes down to one principle: he holds himself — and his team — to the same standards he expects from founders. Relentless work ethic. Deep commitment. No Plan B.
When there’s no fallback, you build differently. You stay scrappy, disciplined, and laser-focused on making every decision count. That mindset has been wired into M-Fund from day one — and it’s what continues to drive its performance today.
When Performance Does the Talking
M-Fund’s growth didn’t come with fanfare — it came from patterns too strong to ignore. One by one, its companies began gaining traction, raising follow-on rounds from major investors, and earning recognition across the industry.
That consistency became its signature. What started as quiet conviction turned into measurable results — the kind that speak louder than any pitch ever could. In a business driven by perception, M-Fund built its reputation the old-fashioned way: by performing, again and again.
From Grassroots to Growth Engine
M-Fund began as a grassroots angel initiative — one deal at a time, built on conviction rather than capital. Over time, it evolved into a structured, scalable platform serving close to 200 investors through its dual-engine platform.
This growth didn’t come from chasing trends, but from consistency — identifying and backing founders who redefine their categories, and standing by them through every stage. That discipline led to key milestones: launching a venture fund to complement the angel club, and supporting multiple portfolio companies now ranked among Israel’s top emerging startups.
These achievements — across both company performance and investor engagement — reflect the same long-term mindset that has guided M-Fund from day one. The foundation is solid, but the story is still being written. For Lior Elkan, “finding a way or making one” was never just a motto — it became the method. M-Fund is the proof.
Key Takeaways:
- Spot early.
- Build conviction.
- Back resilience.
- Scale consistently.
- Decode risk.
- Lead quietly
