Angel Interviews: Ehud Israel and the “funding gap” at Drexel University
Introducing Angel Interviews, a series dedicated to debunking the assumption that entrepreneurs need to look outside of Philadelphia for angel and early stage investment. Every so often we’ll interview a local angel and ask him or her about investment criteria and how to get in contact. If you’re an angel investor that deals primarily with technology companies or you have any suggestions about how we can improve this series drop us a line.
Ehud Israel wasted no time admitting that he was new to angel investing.
The 43-year-old is one of the mentors at Drexel’s Baiada Center for Entrepreneurship, a business incubator that caters exclusively to the Drexel University community, and it was in that role that he decided to invest in one of the Center’s companies: Async Interview.
“There’s a gap in our support [at the Center] of the students in respect to funding, so I’ve been trying to fill that gap,” says Israel. “It just so happens that, as a mentor, I’m in the ground floor at these ideas.”
Now in an operational role at as Async’s CFO and CTO, Israel has also invested in one other company and is keeping his ears open for other deals, though he says he is not actively pursuing companies.
We ask Israel what he looks for in a company, how to get started as an angel investor and the reason for the misperceptions about Philadelphia’s angel community.
