Dean Meyer, born in South Africa, left home at 14 to pursue a dream of playing professional soccer at Ajax Amsterdam. “Until the age of 17, I traveled around Europe with the club, far from family and friends”, Dean recounts. “I was seriously injured while playing in the UEFA Youth League for under-19s – an injury I carried for long months. After great difficulty, I returned to play, and had an important part in the team’s success that season before my final move to Maccabi Tel Aviv”.
Alongside his young sports career, Meyer enrolled in computer science studies in Israel and completed them with honors at the age of 20. “I grew up in a middle-class Jewish South African family with a grandmother who lost her entire family in the Holocaust. She left Poland for South Africa, but her heart was always in Israel. She instilled in me and my brother a deep commitment to Israel, which ultimately convinced me to prefer studying in Israel and give up on leading schools in the U.S.”.
Meyer joined Team8 fund, where he led investments in companies like Talon, Dig Security, and Classiq. About two years ago, he established the Israeli representation of Vine Ventures fund, one of the largest funds in New York for seed investments. Dean was appointed as the first Israeli partner in the global team of venture capital giant Sequoia Capital.
With the start of the war on October 7 and the disaster that befell his wife’s family, Dean invested great efforts in fundraising. “We were abroad on our honeymoon”, he recounts. “The next day we returned to the country and started working on various projects. Together with close friends, we initiated a fundraising campaign and managed to raise more than a million dollars in the first month of the war. In October and November, we stopped all investment activities at Vine in the U.S. and dedicated all our time and resources to assist in Israel”.
In addition to his activity as an investment manager, Dean was one of the founders of the SUNM – Start-Up Nation Mentorship organization – which connects non-Jewish student leaders on campuses worldwide with Israeli managers. Last December, SUNM organized a delegation of 20 leading student leaders to visit Israel, the Gaza envelope, and the families of the hostages.
