The top 50: David “Dede” Goldschmidt, vice-president and managing director, Samsung Catalyst Fund
David “Dede” Goldschmidt is head of Samsung Catalyst Fund (SCF), an evergreen multi-stage venture capital fund of South Korea-headquartered Samsung Electronics.
Goldschmidt has been in the venture capital ecosystem for more than two decades. SCF hired him in 2015 as an Israel-based managing director to oversee investments in the country as well as in Europe, covering areas including datacentre and cloud, artificial intelligence, networking and 5G, sensors, automotive, quantum and other frontier technologies. Samsung then appointed Goldschmidt to run the US-based SCF at the beginning of 2021.
Goldschmidt said: “At Samsung Catalyst, we are committed to driving innovations and new businesses by working with, and investing in brilliant entrepreneurs with disruptive ideas.”
The fund has made over 60 investments to date and has in the past 12 months participated in the expanded $105m series C raise for high performance cloud computing platform Rescale, as well as in the $57m series A round for Landing AI, a machine learning platform for the manufacturing industry. SCF was also an early investor in Ring, a manufacturer of internet-connected home security equipment which was acquired by Amazon for more than $1.2bn in 2018, as well as Habana Labs, developer of AI acceleration technology acquired by Intel for $2B and other successful companies such as Credo, IonQ, Graphcore and Sambanova.
Previously, Goldschmidt was founder and general partner of Valley Venture Capital, as well as managing partner and CEO at Mofet Technology Fund. He holds a master of science in solid-state physics and a bachelor of science in mathematics and physics from Tel Aviv University.
