At Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the Cactus Capital student venture fund and Cactus Academy have become a unique hands-on model for entrepreneurial education and early-stage investment. 

As part of the program, students are selected for the Cactus Academy, where they undergo intensive training to become startup analysts, learning how to evaluate ventures, markets, and founders. They then continue to a year-long internship within the fund itself, applying their knowledge in real investment processes and ultimately helping decide which student ventures receive funding. The top-performing participants advance to leadership roles within the fund’s management team. 

The fund , chaired by Prof. Carmel Sofer, a seasoned investor and industry expert, has supported 35 startups to date, with 14 receiving follow-on investment. Approximately 200 student ventures apply for funding each year — reflecting both the scale of entrepreneurial activity at BGU and the growing reputation of the program within Israel’s innovation ecosystem.

At Yazamut 360, the entrepreneurship center of Ben-Gurion University, an unprecedented investment in student entrepreneurship education has been underway for the better part of a decade. 

Inside Ben-Gurion University’s Cactus Capital fund, undergraduate students, some barely into their twenties, are entrusted with something most people their age never encounter: real responsibility. Not simulations. Not classroom exercises. Actual venture investing. 

Yet ask the people who built and led the fund what they remember most, and the money quickly recedes into the background. Rather than finance, they speak about trust, opportunity, improvisation, and permission to build before anyone says they are ready, to lead before graduation, and to operate inside rooms they were never supposed to enter so early.

“The point was never that people arrived already understanding venture capital,” said Adi Azulay-Eliram, a former CEO of Cactus who today works in AI entrepreneurship and strategic initiatives. “Honestly, none of us really knew venture capital when we entered. What mattered was finding students with a spark.”

Roy Kimchi, Cactus Capital’s founding CEO and today an investor at Square Peg, still describes his own arrival as almost accidental. Back in 2018, he was a student at Ben-Gurion University, working at Intel, and planning a future in data science. Evidently, venture capital was not part of his plan.

“At the time the field felt incredibly gatekept, like a closely guarded secret,” he recalled. “You didn’t see LinkedIn posts saying, ‘We’re hiring junior VC people.’ Everything happened by word of mouth.”

The opportunity emerged through a conversation with Dana Gavish, the Head and Founder of Yazamut 360, around an initiative by Adv. Menachem Tulchinski and promoted by the university President: creating a student-run investment fund operating with real capital. However, Kimchi misunderstood the offer entirely.

“I told her, ‘Okay, I’ll help you find people for this,’ and she basically answered: ‘no, I’m offering YOU the job,’” he recalled with a laugh. “I genuinely didn’t know what I was getting into,” he adds. “But I understood there was enormous room for creativity.” A sense of creation that quickly became Cactus Capital's defining culture.

Kimchi remembers the early years less as a formal investment fund and more as a collective of students continuously inventing roles for themselves. “One person started helping with deal flow, another built platforms connecting entrepreneurs, and someone else entirely focused on branding and photography,” he said. “Nobody came in with some extraordinary expertise; it was just people with enormous hunger to create.”

The organization gradually developed a clear path: students entered through an academic program introducing venture capital, entrepreneurship, and the Israeli startup ecosystem, then moved into analyst roles, into management, and, in some cases, eventually led the fund itself.

For many students, it became something larger than an extracurricular activity. Yael Goldstein, the fund’s current CEO and a fourth-year industrial engineering and management student, knew about Cactus Capital before arriving at Ben-Gurion. “I actually read about it before enrolling,” she said. “It genuinely made me want to come to the University.”

A point which matters more than one might think, since Cactus Capital increasingly functions as something unusual in Israeli academia: a reason to choose the institution itself. “Students today want more than just the degree,” Goldstein asserts. “They're looking for personal development, professional growth, or simply doing something beyond studies.” Yet even she underestimated what the experience would become.

“I thought I’d take the course, gain some tools and leave afterward,” she admitted, but instead, she arrived in the aftermath of October 7, after a prolonged reserve-duty period, and at a time when universities across Israel were struggling to regain routine. “And honestly,” she said, “it felt like oxygen.”

Suddenly, there was something practical and future-facing at the center of campus life - a space connected directly to the work world she wanted to enter. “It felt like a huge gift,” she said. “personally and professionally.”

Former CEO Uli Konstantino tells a similar story. Today, a data scientist at a startup, he nearly missed Cactus Capital altogether, applying on the final possible day. “I just thought: ‘Sounds interesting,’” he recalled, and plain curiosity became a campus commitment, as years later, after moving through every stage of the organization, he left an engineering role at Apple to lead the fund.

“I completely fell in love with it, not just the work – the feeling that it mattered.” For Konstantino, that feeling emerged partly because Cactus Capital offered something academia often did not. “Israeli students come to university after military service with ambition and maturity,” he said. “And then academia often tells them: sit quietly for four years and focus on one thing, while Cactus Capital gave people permission to run loose.”

That freedom came with another unusual advantage: access.

“Being a student gives you privileges that disappear later,” Kimchi said. “You can approach top VC investors in the world and ask for their opinion or their help and get a serious reply."

Students approached founders, investors and executives they might never have reached later in their careers. Alumni who retained emotional ties to Ben-Gurion University and Beer- Sheva became mentors and partners. “There’s something people carry with them from Beer-Sheva,” Kimchi said. “People want to stay connected.”

The result was an unusual level of access, even by startup standards. Students held intimate sessions with senior figures from Israel’s tech ecosystem. “The groups were twenty or thirty people,” Kimchi recalled. “In almost no university setting do students get access like that.”

Looking back, he believes those moments changed trajectories. Without Cactus, he said directly, “I would never have ended up where I am today.”

Konstantino agrees, reflecting on how the ability to reach people, build relationships, and understand ecosystems directly shaped his career. “I even got in touch with the company I work at today through connections that came from Cactus Capital,” he noted.

Yet for Azulay-Eliram, the most important lesson was not access but trust, which became foundational to her own leadership. “The University trusted very young people with real money,” she said. “And that's huge, it's the confidence they gave me that shaped how I lead people today,” she said.

Over time, the relationships Cactus Capital students foster during their tenure evolved into informal recommendation networks spanning startups, venture firms, and technology companies. “People leave with much more than a degree,” Azulay-Eliram asserts. “Someone can actually say: I worked with this person, I know what they can do. This access to human capital is everything."

That philosophy shaped one of the most consequential decisions during her tenure. At the time, Cactus maintained a separate track dedicated to impact investing and social entrepreneurship. The arrangement reflected a genuine commitment to social ventures, but Azulay-Eliram questioned whether the separation carried an unintended message.

“If impact startups are separate,” she explained, “it implies they aren’t truly entrepreneurship."

The worry was that social ventures might be seen differently. “There was a fear that social startups would vanish," she remembered.

However, the opposite occurred. Cactus kept investing in companies addressing women’s health, education, and other social issues, applying the same standards as with any startup.

While Azulay-Eliram's challenge centered on what venture capital should prioritize, Goldstein's leadership has been shaped by a more immediate concern: war. As the academic year began amid uncertainty, inside Cactus, a difficult decision needed to be taken: continue operations or pause. "There was concern people wouldn’t have the emotional capacity," Goldstein explained. Students were worn out, often switching between civilian and military roles.

The safer choice might have been to delay activities, but Goldstein chose to press on.Timelines were extended, recruitment methods evolved, and more consideration was given to reservists. Reassuringly , startup applications came in at levels close to those of normal semesters. A lesson she says she inherited from Konstantino: “Cactus always delivers.”

Leadership, she argues, often means choosing before certainty exists. “You make decisions without knowing where they’ll lead,” she said. “At some point, you choose, take responsibility and then do everything possible to make reality align with that choice.”

Years later, that creativity survives not only inside the fund itself but through the ecosystem that formed around it. Through the Cactus Capital alumni organization, former participants remain connected across venture firms, startups and technology companies. Recommendations flow informally through alumni networks. Analysts continue calling former managers years later.

When asked for advice for future students entering the program, the responses resembled mission statements more than they did career advice. “Do something nobody before you has done,” said Azulay-Eliram, while Kimchi pointed to the alumni ecosystem now spanning Israeli tech. “Anyone who knows how to use it can build something enormous.”

Konstantino offered simpler advice: “Always take projects slightly beyond your abilities.”

Goldstein, in turn, looked toward the future. “Cactus Capital has to evolve with the changing tech,” she said. “We need to understand how the world is changing and adapt so we don’t fall behind.”

For an organization built entirely around temporary student leadership, reinvention may not be a challenge at all – it may be the model.