ICI Fund

ICI Fund is an American venture firm built around one bet: that some of the best deep-tech founders are Israeli, and that what they most lack is a bridge into the US market. Founded in 2017 as the Israel-Colorado Innovation Fund (ICI now reads Innovation, Community, Intelligence), it leads pre-seed and seed rounds, takes a board seat, and plugs founders into an American network through partners like the Israel Innovation Authority and the Fort Collins accelerator Innosphere Ventures. It is a generalist deep-tech investor, not a water specialist.

ICI sorts everything it backs into three buckets, and water lives in the one it calls Saving Resources, alongside agriculture and climate monitoring. The water shows up as data and sensors, not pipes and pumps: the two water companies (don't) Waste Water tracks in ICI's book are both Israeli, both about reading water rather than moving it. Kando runs a wastewater-intelligence platform that listens to sewers through sensors; Viridix makes a buried soil-moisture probe, the RootSense, that tells a farm exactly when its crops actually need watering.

Across all its themes, ICI had backed 13 companies and counting from its $50 million second fund as of mid-2025, with plans for at least fifteen more by the end of 2026, and two have already exited (Eureka Security to Tenable, Suridata to Fortinet). Inside that book, water is a thin but deliberate slice: Leviathan, the database I keep on water raises, has logged 2 ICI water companies across 3 deals, with ICI leading roughly a third of the rounds it joins.

What makes ICI worth a water investor's attention is exactly that it does not wave the water flag. Its water bets are a tell for where deep tech and water quietly overlap: sensing, data, and AI laid over old infrastructure, sourced from Tel Aviv and scaled from Colorado. The thing to watch is whether Saving Resources keeps pulling ICI back to water as it deploys the rest of Fund II.