Yariv Adan

Yariv Adan is a Founding General Partner of ellipsis Ventures. He spent 17 years at Google, where he was part of the small founding team of what became Google Assistant and later gave it "eyes" with Google Lens, worked on privacy and emerging-markets products in Google's early Zurich days, and moved to Google Cloud to lead product for Conversational AI. From 2022 he led Applied Generative AI across Cloud AI, helping large enterprises adopt the first wave of generative models, and co-led the Google Zurich site. He left Google in 2024 as Senior Director of Product Management.

Before Google, Yariv spent about a decade in Israeli startups as a software engineer and engineering manager. He has invested in early-stage AI companies since 2023 and co-founded ellipsis with Matthias Dantone in 2024.

Investment interests

Defensible AI in the era of "commoditized magic", a phrase he coined; the agentic economy; and AI applied beyond software, in science, robotics and manufacturing. He is skeptical of thin wrappers and general-intelligence model labs, and drawn to teams with proprietary data and rare expertise.

Writing and talks

• Donkeys, Not Unicorns: the new rules of entrepreneurship in the era of commoditized magic, Towards Data Science, February 2026.
• Interview of the Week, The Innovator, February 2026, on why AI is rewriting the rules of what constitutes a good business.
• From 17 years at Google to venture, WhoIsRaising, November 2025, on defensibility and raising a first fund.
• Talking tech sovereignty with an AI optimist, Escape Forward podcast with Cristina Caffarra, July 2026, on European AI sovereignty and running an AI-native fund.
• Learning Session 001: Building AI agents, September 2026, why agents suddenly work and what that means for where value goes.
• Speaker at the World Economic Forum (AI House Davos), Google Cloud Next, Slush, the Delphi Economic Forum, Product Management Festival (curator of the 2025 AI track), the Zurich AI Festival and ETH Zurich's Launch programme.

Roles

• Founding General Partner, ellipsis Ventures (2024 to present).
• Board member and guild leader, SwissVC (2026).
• Founding board member, theartaward.ai.

Founders: send us your deck.