Partner at Israeli VC firm Pitango steps down amid sexual harrassment claims

Venture capitalist Rami Beracha, a managing partner at Pitango Venture Capital, one of Israel’s largest VC funds with over $2 billion under management, has temporarily stepped down from his role at the company in the wake of accusations of sexual harassment aired on Channel 2’s investigative program Uvda.

Beracha, 56, has decided to take “time out from his activities at the fund and take a vacation, so as to focus on clearing his name,” Pitango said in an email statement on Thursday.

The TV program, aired on Wednesday night, said that Beracha hired a private investigator firm to virtually stalk women he had sexually harassed. It said Beracha sexually harassed a number of women entrepreneurs who met with him in restaurants to raise funds for their businesses.

The program claimed Beracha tried to touch and kiss them. He also employed the services of the investigation firm to gather information about the women, collecting online data on them and also activating an avatar profile of a woman to penetrate closed online forums.

In the statement on Thursday, Pitango, founded in 1993 by Chemi Peres, the son of the late President Shimon Peres, and Rami Kalish, said that the fund had never received any complaints regarding Beracha’s behavior toward women. “Should we have received such complaints, we would have dealt with them with zero tolerance, according to law, decisively.”

Beracha made it clear to the firm that he has been dealing with “a personal and organized persecution campaign against him in recent months,” the statement said, and he told the firm there was no foundation to the claims of the women.