Dror Berman

Dror co-founded Innovation Endeavors with Eric Schmidt, MIT Innovation Fellow and former CEO and Executive Chairman of Google/Alphabet Inc., in 2010.

Dror invests in early-stage startups that are driving exponential rates of change in their industries — from agriculture and computational biology to fulfillment centers and satellites. He partners with creative thinkers and hard-core technologists who leverage data, compute and advanced engineering to bring their visions to life.

He led the firm’s investments in: Uber, which moves people and things around the world more efficiently; SoFi, which is taking on the banking industry and reinventing loans to be more data-driven; CommonSense Robotics, which is leveraging data science and robotics to re-architect the supply chain; Zymergen, which uses proprietary software and robotics to genetically engineer microbes to be used in things such as snacks and stealth bombers; Freenome, which combines AI, genomics and biology to non-invasively detect certain cancers early; Planet, which is collecting and analyzing massive data sets about the Earth from space; and Blue River Technology (acquired by John Deere), which builds machine learning and robotics technology into farm equipment to help farmers more accurately and safely administer chemicals.

Before becoming an investor, Dror was a team leader of R&D at NICE Systems (Nasdaq: NICE). He was also part of the elite Special Forces unit of the Intelligence Corps of the Israeli Defense Force.

Dror earned an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BS in Computer Science from Ben-Gurion University. He is an ML7 Associate at Creative Destruction Lab and a member of the Steering Committee of Israel Collaboration Network.

He lives in Silicon Valley with his wife and three young children, including a set of energetic twins, and frequently travels to Israel.