Omri Casspi still remembers the date—January 27, 2024—when he hosted Cognition AI cofounders Scott Wu and Steven Hao at Chase Center in San Francisco for a game featuring his former Golden State Warriors teammates. That night, star point guard Stephen Curry put up 46 points in a double-overtime loss, but Casspi was captivated by the show taking place in his suite: Wu’s startup pitch for an AI coding agent that would allow other companies’ engineering teams to write code much faster.

“I grew up doing competitions as well,” Wu, who won three gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics as a teenage programming prodigy and was introduced to Casspi by mutual friends as the former NBA role player was establishing himself as a venture capitalist, says, somewhat tongue-in-cheek. “My whole thing was competitive math and programming—maybe a bit lesser known than the competitions that Omri was involved in. But you can really feel it from him that he just hates losing.”

Luckily for the 38-year-old Casspi, he has been on quite the winning streak. A stroll through Palo Alto with Wu the next morning led him to participate in Cognition’s seed round in early 2024, which valued the startup at $150 million. Today, it is one of the world’s fastest-growing AI startups, reportedly nearing a $1 billion funding round that would peg its valuation at $47 billion—and it is just one of eight billion-dollar businesses among the 20 companies in the portfolio of Casspi’s Swish Ventures, an impressive hit rate for a VC firm focused on early-stage startups.

On Thursday, Swish is announcing its latest big win: The Tel Aviv-based firm, which Casspi launched in 2024 after it absorbed his earlier fund Sheva, has raised its third and largest fund to date, drawing $250 million from backers including Sequoia Capital and several large U.S. pension funds and endowments. The fresh capital will push Swish’s total assets under management to about $800 million, with........

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