Oberlin College Invested $1.2 Million in Israeli Companies in 2021, Investigation Finds
An investigation by the Review identified more than $52 million of Oberlin College’s investments in 22 countries around the world.
This article originally appeared in The Oberlin Review.
In 2021, Oberlin College’s fund managers invested more than $1.2 million in Israeli companies, a Review investigation found. The findings come in the wake of numerous campus protests for divestment from Israel since 2023, and repeated calls for endowment transparency going back at least as far as 2002.
The Review’s investigation identifies more than $52 million of the College’s investments in 69 entities around the world. Its publication represents the public’s first access to the details of those investments, which have previously been kept private by the College’s fund managers.
The four Israeli companies — Fireblocks, MobiLesson, Orca Security, and Cyber Hunters — are all part of the Israeli tech sector. Two — Orca and Cyber Hunters — specialize in cybersecurity. MobiLesson Ltd., which does business under the name Connecteam, makes a brand of HR productivity software. Fireblocks maintains software infrastructure for cryptocurrency and digital financial transactions, largely serving as a backend for other financial technology apps like Revolut. None of the four appear in a list of companies specifically targeted for divestment by the 2024 student petition.
In April 2024, Oberlin students submitted proposals calling on the Board of Trustees to divest from companies involved in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. A parallel proposal in 2025 called for divestment more broadly from all arms manufacturers. The Board rejected calls for divestment on both occasions and has never publicly acknowledged any such investments.
In its response to the 2025 divestment proposal, the Board cited grounds for rejection including its fiduciary responsibility to maintain the financial health of the endowment and the College’s use of external funds to manage its investments.
The Review’s investigation found that, in 2021, all investments in Israeli companies in the College’s portfolio were made through two funds managed by the same firm: Stripes Management. Among the 25 firms that made investments on the College’s behalf that year, only Stripes invested in Israeli companies. Stripes invested a total of $2.1 million on the College’s behalf, of which 60 percent ($1.2 million) went to Israeli companies. The remaining $0.9 million went to four companies in Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom, respectively.
Stripes V Offshore appears in lists of shareholders reported by Fireblocks, MobiLesson, and Orca in their 2025 annual reports to the Israeli Business Registry. Cyber Hunters reported Stripes as a shareholder as of its most recent report in 2023.
Oberlin Director of Media Relations Andrea Simakis did not answer questions from the Review as to whether Oberlin retains its financial stake in the four Israeli companies, or in any entity detailed in this investigation.
“Regardless of how investments are reported in tax filings, we generally do not comment on, or provide additional detail about, specific holdings within the endowment because of our legal contracts with the endowment’s external fund managers,” Simakis wrote in an email to the Review.
The Review’s investigation draws on previously unreported documents uncovered in a publicly available database maintained by the Internal Revenue Service. The documents, which appear as an appendix to the College’s 2021 990-T exempt organization business income tax return, include 154 pages of disclosures filed under Treasury regulation 1.6038B-1(c), which requires businesses to disclose investments in foreign-controlled entities.
“The addenda to the 990-T are not required to be made available for public inspection,” Brian Mittendorf, H.P. Wolfe chair in accounting at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, said in an interview with the Review. “I’m not sure why those particular ones have been made available to the public, whether that was on purpose or not, but they certainly didn’t do it in other years.”
Nonprofits are required to inform the IRS of transfers of property to foreign entities, Mittendorf said, but those disclosures typically remain private. While the Pension Protection Act of 2006 requires that nonprofits, including colleges and universities, release the primary text of tax form 990-T, it makes no such stipulation for attachments like those uncovered by the Review.
Simakis did not answer specific questions from the Review regarding the origin of the documents or the reason for their publication.
Details for the four Israeli companies reported in the documents match those appearing in articles of incorporation filed with the Israeli Business Registry. Records from the Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR and IAPD databases show that the two funds handling Israeli investments, Stripes V(A) Offshore and Stripes IV Offshore, are both managed by Stripes Management LLC. The two share a mailing address in New York City.
The possible existence of Israeli investments has remained a contentious issue on Oberlin’s campus for more than 20 years. In 2002, Oberlin Students for a Free Palestine published an open letter calling on the Board to “to make public its investments and financial holdings in Israel.” In 2015, the Board rejected an SFP proposal for divestment from companies “that benefit from Israel’s occupation of Palestine,” citing insufficient evidence that the student body was united on divestment as a course of action.
The College’s investment portfolio gained renewed attention following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel. In March 2024, representatives of the Oberlin SFP and Jews for a Free Palestine met with then-Board Chair Chris Canavan, OC ’84, along with representatives of the College and the Board’s Investment Committee, to discuss a renewed student proposal for divestment from Israeli companies. At that time, both Canavan and Oberlin Chief Investment Officer Jun Yang described themselves as unable to disclose the College’s investments due to agreements with the College’s fund managers, who consider such details their intellectual property.
In October 2025, a student protest for divestment from Israel outside a Board of Trustees meeting at the Hotel at Oberlin escalated to a physical confrontation with Oberlin Police officers. Students who attempted to forcibly enter the building were met by uniformed officers who responded with pepper spray. At least one student was later taken to the hospital with a concussion.
The College invested at least $4.6 million in software and tech ventures, and at least $1.4 million in cryptocurrency and stock trading platforms. Three of the College’s investments that year — ADA Support ($192,594), Synthesia Limited ($167,368), and Svava ($133,450) — now market generative AI services as their primary product.
In June 2021, the College’s fund managers invested $873,406 in Paper Education Company, Inc — a Canadian startup that promised to provide K-12 students with one-on-one virtual tutoring. The company has since been accused of misleading customers, after an investigation by Chalkbeat showed that tutors spent much of their time working with multiple students at once as a cost-saving measure.
Among the College’s other notable investments are the period-tracking app Clue ($161,483) and Rei Do Pitaco Limited ($159,806) — a Brazilian sports-betting app.
A database of Oberlin College and Conservatory’s foreign investments is available below.