Our final destination for speakers on our last day of the trek was a visit to the headquarters for Team8.  

Team8 is described as a foundry and unique venture capital group that works across a few domains, including AI, fintech, digital technology and cyber. We had the opportunity to listen to 5 different speakers across the entire ecosystem of Team8, including founders, partners, and executives.

Our first speaker, Rakefet Russak Aminoach, Managing Partner of Team8 Group, headed up the creation of the fintech domain. She spoke to INSEAD on the origins of Team8, detailing how she left 8200 in 2013 with the idea to build cyber companies by raising money to invest and cofound with entrepreneurs. The original Team8 was a foundry in the cyber space in 2014 with a smart team of 3 people from 8200. The company slowly became an enterprise software foundry. She believed their model for cyber could be duplicated to other domains and left to successfully develop the fintech side.

She shared that Team8’s basis for everything they do is the company building and that they are also an original VC that invests in everything they do across their domains.  

The second speaker, Dan Yadlin, was the co-founder and CTO for the startup Curve, which was acquired by Paypal for over $1M USD. Curve is the industry’s first cloud-based Institutional Digital Asset Wallet Service.  

The third speaker, Galia Beer-Gabel, is a partner in the Fintech domain at Team8. She was a mentee to Team8 Managing Partner Rakefet and spoke on the Team8 methodology. They can take entrepreneurs who don’t have a specific idea they want to pursue but have a skillset, and take them through an ideation process which allows access to various delegations of audiences, including banks, insurance, etc. This allows founders to test out ideas that are still a work in progress. Team8 provides a system that provides founders with a more academic method to achieve success in their developmental process and relieves the additional burden of other business needs such as marketing, HR, recruitment, etc. Team8 has a whole department dedicated to making sure their companies see the best of the their talent. Galia’s love for Team8 is in the ability to get her hands dirty, working more as a co-founder and building these startups from the ground up, rather than being on the sidelines.

The fourth speaker, Gal Tal-Hochberg, CTO and entrepreneur at Team8, gave an exhilarating presentation on everything there is to know about AI. He shared examples on where AI was already making impressive improvements in daily life but also identified areas where AI is lacking. The main takeaway was that there is still so much uncertainty about how AI works and what it could do in the future, but that there’s no longer a question on whether humans should be incorporating AI into their lives.

The fifth and final speaker from Team8 was a founder, Daniel Marcous. Daniel is the Co-Founder & CTO at April, which uses tech & data science to solve tax and save people time & money. They are currently focusing on the market in the US for taxes and will slowly expand their offerings. They shared the best advantage of partnering with Team8 is the ability to hyperfocus on the development of the product and tech offering, with Team8 taking care of everything else.  

A huge thank you to all the speakers at Team8 who shared their time and valuable insights with INSEAD on our final day.