: Eye On Israeli Tech
EYE ON ISRAELI TECH
Israel: From “Start-up Nation” to “Scale-Up Nation”
Have you used instant messaging lately? What about VOIP technology? Been protected by a firewall, or plugged in a flash drive? Then you’ve used an Israeli invention. And there are many, many more to come, because the Israeli tech sector is roaring. Israeli tech firms raised more than $26 billion last year, up 147 percent from the previous year—considerably faster than the U.S. tech growth rate.
Israel has long boasted more start-ups per capita than any other country, but only a few years ago Israel-watchers fretted about whether companies in the tiny Middle Eastern nation could get beyond seed rounds. Today the “Start-up Nation” would be better known as Scale-Up Nation, or perhaps Unicorn Country. In 2021 the number of Israeli unicorns—private companies valued at over $1 billion—more than doubled to 53, according to Start-up Nation Central, a nonprofit focused on Israeli innovation. The number of financing mega-rounds have more than tripled, creating a handful of “decacorns” valued at $10 billion or more.
Not much bigger than the state of New Jersey and with just 9 million people, Israel now has more unicorns than all of Europe. Last year investment more than doubled in its strongest areas including enterprise and data infrastructure, cybersecurity and fintech. But Israel is also making a real impact in sustainability, thanks in part to the challenges it has faced etching a first-world nation out of the desert. The country that invented drip irrigation is at the forefront of areas including biological pest control and water conservation.
How does Israel manage to consistently rank near the top in global business innovation and entrepreneurship rankings? Perhaps it is the fact that most citizens serve in its high-tech, high-stakes, highly collaborative military. Perhaps it’s the cutting-edge educational system, which has produced the world’s highest concentration of engineers and PhDs. Perhaps it’s systematic government support for innovation—including risk-free grants to entrepreneurs—or the thriving tech ecosystem. Or perhaps it’s something more intangible: If you know Israelis, you’re probably aware of their boldness and confidence embodied by the Yiddish word chutzpah.
Whatever the reason, Israel is unique first and foremost because of its people. As our list of “100 Israeli Tech Leaders You Need to Know” demonstrates, Israeli entrepreneurs have long been moving seamlessly from large corporations to start-ups. Now they’re turning those start-ups into major players themselves, disrupting fields in almost every industry. Israel is still a small country, but it’s making an increasingly big impact on a global stage.
Company
Eynat Guez
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Location
Herzliya
Sector
HR Tech
Website
Description
With 20 years of experience in global workforce management, Eynat Guez is a leading expert in global workforce management. She holds a bachelor’s from The Open University in Israel in business administration and international affairs. She served as COO at LR Group, a global holdings group, and founded Relocation Source, a DSP and global mobility solutions provider, and Expert Source, an Asian PEO organization.
In 2016, Ms. Guez co-founded Papaya Global, becoming its CEO. Papaya–one of Israel’s fastest growing start-ups–has raised over $450 million from investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, Insights Partners, Scale Ventures and Tiger Global, and has a valuation now standing at $3.7 billion. It has more than 400 employees, with revenue growing 300% year-over-year.
Papaya offers a total people, payroll, and payment management solution supporting all types of global employment (payroll, EoR, and contractors) in more than 160 countries. The automated, cloud-based SaaS platform provides a unified solution from onboarding to ongoing management and cross-border payments. The platform integrates with all existing HRIS management tools, provides real-time business intelligence, and eliminates errors. It gathers all employee information into one place, creating a highly visible system for tracking payroll spending. The platform ensures GDPR and SOC compliance to maintain the highest standard of security.
Ms. Guez puts great value on diversity, both by maintaining diversity within the company– including a 50% ratio of men to women–and by volunteering at the Israel-Palestinian Economic Initiative, led by the World Economic Forum.
Company
Matan Bar
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Fintech
Website
Description
Matan Bar is the co-founder and CEO of Melio. Before starting Melio, Mr. Bar was the general manager of PayPal’s consumer R&D center in Tel Aviv and led PayPal’s Consumer Peer to Peer Payments Group globally, responsible for more than $50 billion in payment volume annually. He joined PayPal through the acquisition of his first company, The Gifts Project, by eBay in 2012.
Melio’s mission is to keep small business in business, helping them improve their cash flow and workflow, gain more control over their finances and optimize their financial health. Mr. Bar founded Melio alongside CTO Ilan Atias and Ziv Paz in 2018 with headquarters in New York and an R&D center in Tel Aviv. Melio also selected Colorado for its western U.S. headquarters and has begun recruiting for 250 new jobs in the state.
Melio’s smart B2B online payment solution is tailor-made for small businesses’ needs. It is a free, simple, and secure solution that allows small businesses and their suppliers to transfer and receive payments quickly and easily.
The company has raised $506 million to date, with the latest funding round valuing the company at $4 billion.
Company
Ornit Maizel
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Fintech
Website
Description
Ornit Maizel co-founded and helped build the buy now, pay later brand Sunbit, where she currently leads the company as its chief technology officer. Ms. Maizel’s portfolio of experience includes more than 15 years leading R&D and technology at Intel, WhipClip and SuperDerivatives. She has been recognized as a top female entrepreneur by the Female Entrepreneurs Institute, LA Tech Watch and other outlets around the world.
Ornit received an MBA in finance from Tel Aviv University and a bachelor’s in information systems engineering from Ben-Gurion University, where she ranked first in her class and graduated summa cum laude.
Sunbit is the preferred buy now, pay later technology for everyday needs and services. Sunbit eases the stress of buying everyday things by offering access to fast, fair and transparent payment options to people everywhere. Our technology is offered in-store and online in more than 10,000 locations, including nearly one in three auto dealership service centers, optical practices, dentist’s offices, veterinary clinics and specialty healthcare services. All loans are made by Transportation Alliance Bank, which determines qualifications for and terms of credit.
Company
Yoni Assia
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Location
Ramat Gan
Sector
Fintech
Website
Description
Yoni Assia is the co-founder and CEO of eToro, the world’s leading social investment network. Mr. Assia co-founded eToro in 2007 with the vision of opening the global markets so that everyone can trade and invest in a simple and transparent way.
Mr. Assia showed an interest in finance and computer science from his youth and so decided to merge his passions. It was this very passion along with the social revolution which led to the founding and development of eToro’s investment network, where users connect, share, trade and invest in the world’s financial markets.
Mr. Assia is widely acknowledged as a fintech leader and a crypto pioneer, having co-written the Colored Coins whitepaper with Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin in 2012.
Today, eToro is a multi-asset investment platform that empowers people to grow their knowledge and wealth as part of a global community of successful investors. The platform has more than 27 million registered users from more than 100 countries and enables people to invest in the assets they want, from stocks and commodities to crypto assets.
eToro provides a variety of free tools to help educate users about the financial markets and acts as a bridge between the old and new worlds of investing. eToro’s global community enables users to share their investment strategies, and anyone can follow the approaches of those who have been the most successful. Due to the simplicity of the platform users can easily buy, hold and sell assets; monitor their portfolio in real time; and transact whenever they want.
eToro has more than 1,700 employees across more than ten locations globally and is considered one of Israel’s leading fintech companies.
Company
Tomer Bar-Zeev
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Ad Tech
Website
Description
Tomer Bar-Zeev is the co-founder and CEO of ironSource (NYSE:IS). Over the past decade, Mr. Bar-Zeev, together with ironSource’s tight-knit group of co-founders, has overseen the company’s growth through a combination of organic and inorganic growth. Today ironSource has thousands of customers worldwide–app developers and telecom operators who use the ironSource platform to power their businesses–as well as 900 employees in offices across four continents.
Prior to co-founding ironSource, Mr. Bar-Zeev was vice president of business development at Payoneer and a board member at Partner (NASDAQ: PTNR). Mr. Bar-Zeev is currently a member of the Young Entrepreneurs Council, sits on the board of the IATI, and is a board member of Hagal Sheli, a nonprofit for at-risk youth. He was named one of the 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs by Goldman Sachs three years running. He is also an active investor in technology startups.
Company
Dr. Aya Soffer
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Location
Haifa
Sector
Enterprise Tech
Description
For 50 years, the IBM Research Lab in Haifa has been in the forefront of technological innovation,expanding knowledge in strategic areas including artificial intelligence, hybrid cloud, security, blockchain, the future of health, and quantum. As the Lab’s director, Dr. Aya Soffer sets its overall strategy and focus areas, building on the unique skills and expertise of its researchers and encouraging their passion for innovation that matters. She is also responsible for the lab’s position in the Israeli high-tech ecosystem, which includes academic and research institutes, multinational corporations operating in Israel, and Israeli corporations with a global presence as well as VC-backed startups. The lab enjoys wide collaboration with academic and industry organizations outside Israel, in particular Europe.
In her role as vice president of AI technologies at IBM Research, Dr. Soffer focuses on natural language understanding and conversational systems and their application in enterprise applications. In this role, she is responsible for setting strategy and working with IBM scientists around the world to shape their ideas into new AI technology and with IBM‘s product groups and customers to drive research innovation into the market.
In her 21 years at IBM, Dr. Soffer has led several strategic initiatives that grew into successful IBM products and solutions in the big data and AI spaces, including the original Watson system and more recently Project Debater. She has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed papers, filed over 15 patents, and served as an invited speaker in numerous conferences.
Dr. Soffer’s personal philosophy: “Conversation is a distinctive human trait. Anyone who has tried to ‘talk’ to a digital assistant knows what happens once you get off the pre-programmed script. One of the most important challenges today is understanding natural language and enabling humans to communicate with computers like they do with other humans–not only understanding words or commands but sentiment and intent, humor and sarcasm. Once we acquire these capabilities in AI, we will enter a new dimension in human-machine interaction. This is my goal.”
Company
Hani Goldstein
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Location
Tel Aviv / New York
Sector
Enterprise Tech
Website
Description
Hani Goldstein is CEO and co-founder of Snappy, a global gifting platform. Snappy removes all the friction from the process of sending gifts–turning it into a simple, stress-free experience for gift givers and a fun and special experience for gift recipients.
Before co-founding Snappy, Ms. Goldstein earned three degrees in business administration with majors in finance, law, and psychology from Tel Aviv University and IDC Herzliya. Prior to university, she served in the Israeli Defense Forces as an infantry instructor and commander and later worked in the district attorney’s office in Israel as an attorney before founding Snappy in 2015.
Snappy makes sending great gifts simple and personal, allowing senders to send one gift or 10,000 at the touch of a button. It works with over 700 gift suppliers to curate top-trending gifts into themed collections and delivers them through fun, personalized experiences that recipients love. It currently serves over 2,000 enterprise customers including Microsoft, Comcast, Zoom and Uber, and has sent more than 2 million gifts to happy recipients in more than 75 countries. Snappy is headquartered in New York and employs more than 250 people, with teams across four countries. Snappy was named Inc.’s 2021 fastest growing company in the New York region and the 15th fastest growing company in America with a 3-year revenue growth of more than 18,700%. It was also included in Inc.’s “Best Places to Work” and in Fortune’s “Best Small & Medium Workplaces” and has an active give-back program as part of its fundamental mission to make people smile.
Company
Ofer Bengal
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Infrastructure/Cloud
Website
Description
Ofer Bengal is an Israeli serial entrepreneur and a multi-disciplinary inventor. He is the co-founder and CEO of Redis, a data management platform company based in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Mountain View, Calif. Mr. Bengal started his career as an officer in the engineering division of the Israeli Air Force where he was engaged with the design and development of military aircraft modifications and installations, flight tests, and wind tunnel tests.
In 1983 he founded Tiltan Aero Projects, an aerospace consulting firm that was engaged in designing and developing the weapon carriage system of the Israeli Lavi aircraft. In the late 1980s he invented several toy ideas and sold toy concepts to Coleco, Milton Bradley Company, and Tomy. In 1989 he founded RiT Technologies, a provider of data communications network management systems, which he took public at NASDAQ in 1997 and managed as CEO until 2000.
In 2000 he founded Mobile Economy, a provider of mobile internet technologies, which was sold to SchlumbergerSema in 2003. In the following years, he served as CEO of two startup companies, Edge Medical Devices and Scent Detection Technologies.
In 2011 he co-founded Redis, the home of the world’s most popular open-source database and commercial provider of Redis Enterprise, the real-time data platform, and has served as the company’s CEO ever since. In April 2021 Mr. Bengal announced an investment of $110 million in the company at a valuation of more than $2 billion led by Tiger Global Management with the participation of Softbank Vision Fund II and TCV.
Company
Ron Yekutiel
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Location
Ramat Gan
Sector
SaaS
Website
Description
Ron Yekutiel is a high-tech entrepreneur, mentor, and investor that has started and led companies in the U.S., Canada and Israel. Mr. Yekutiel has been leading Kaltura (Nasdaq:KLTR) as its chairman and CEO since co-founding the company in 2006. Kaltura is a global leader in the enterprise video market with a mission of “powering any video experience, for any organization.” Among Kaltura’s customers are leading media and telecommunication companies, more than half of U.S. research universities, and more than 25% of US Fortune 100 companies.
Mr. Yekutiel was named one of the “100 most intriguing entrepreneurs” by Goldman Sachs, one of the “top 25 visionaries, innovators, and producers” by the Producers Guild of America, and one of eight “top web innovators” by Esquire magazine.
Mr. Yekutiel has written about Israeli entrepreneurship in publications such as Entrepreneur Magazine and has held volunteer positions as the executive vice president of the Canada-Israel Chamber of Commerce and as chairman of the Israeli Business Forum in Canada. Ron holds an MBA with honors from The Wharton School of Business and is a former IAF helicopter pilot.
Kaltura’s mission is to power any video experience for any organization. Our Video Experience Cloud offers live, real-time, and on-demand video products for enterprises of all industries as well as specialized industry solutions, currently for educational institutions and media and telecom companies. Underlying our products and solutions is a broad set of media services that are also used by other cloud platforms and companies to power video experiences and workflows for their own products. Kaltura’s Video Experience Cloud is used by leading brands reaching millions of users at home, at school and at work for communication, collaboration and training,
Company
Dr. Doron Myersdorf
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Location
Herzliya
Sector
Auto Tech
Website
Description
Doron Myersdorf co-founded StoreDot in 2012 with the mission to develop extreme fast charging (XFC) battery technology using nanoscale metalloids and proprietary compounds to overcome a major barrier to electric vehicle adoption: range and charging anxiety. Prior to founding the company, he served as senior director of SanDisk SSD business unit (NASDAQ: SNDK), establishing and managing the division in Israel, resulting in sales to leading laptop makers amounting to over $100 million in revenue in under three years. Dr. Myersdorf holds a doctorate in R&D management (1994), a master’s in information systems (cum laude, 1991) and a bachelor’s in industrial engineering management (cum laude, 1989), all from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.
StoreDot is a pioneer of XFC batteries that overcome the critical barrier to mainstream EV adoption–range and charging anxiety. The company has revolutionized the conventional Li-ion battery by designing and synthesizing proprietary organic and inorganic compounds, making it possible to fully charge an EV in just five minutes–the same time it takes to refuel a conventional combustion engine vehicle. StoreDot’s battery technology is optimized for the best driver experience with XFC in Li-ion batteries, as well as future technologies for extreme energy-density.
StoreDot’s strategic investors include VinFast, BP, Daimler, Samsung Ventures and TDK. In 2019, the company achieved a world first by demonstrating the live full charge of a two-wheeled EV in just five minutes. In 2020, the company demonstrated the scalability of its XFC batteries for other industries by fully charging a commercial drone in five minutes in another world first. Moving XFC battery technology from the lab to a commercially-viable product for the first time, StoreDot has launched engineering samples of its first-generation batteries that are designed to be manufactured at scale on traditional Li-ion production lines.
Company
Dvir Cohen
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Location
Or Yehuda
Sector
Med Tech
Website
Description
Dvir Cohen is the co-founder and CEO of Memic Innovative Surgery, a medical device company focused on transforming robotic surgery with its Hominis Surgical System. Memic is well-positioned for the rapid commercial adoption of the Hominis system, which received FDA De Novo marketing authorization for use in various benign transvaginal gynecologic surgeries in February 2021. In April 2021, Memic closed a $96 million Series D financing.
Hominis is the only FDA authorized surgical robot small and flexible enough to enable surgical procedures otherwise considered unfeasible and represents a significant advancement in the growing $56 billion robotic surgery market. In addition to its unprecedented capabilities, Hominis requires a much smaller footprint and costs significantly less than conventional robotic systems, making it possible for more hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers to acquire the system and offer more patients the benefits of less invasive robotic surgery.
Looking to the future, the Hominis platform has significant potential for additional indications, and Memic plans to pursue applications in multiple surgical specialties including general, urologic, thoracic, colorectal and ENT.
Mr. Cohen’s previous experience includes developing innovative robotic technology for the Israeli Ministry of Defense. After turning his focus to the medical device industry, he built a highly experienced leadership team with more than 70 years of combined experience in the surgical robotic sector, including Dr. Maurice R. Ferré, the former founder and CEO of Mako Surgical Corp.
Memic is based in Or Yehuda, Israel with a wholly owned subsidiary in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Company
Vered Levy-Ron
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
E-Commerce
Website
Description
Vered Levy-Ron is a seasoned executive with extensive business development and general management experience. She is formerly vice president and general manager of Taboola News at Taboola (NASDAQ:TBLA), vice president of business development at nanotechnology incubator Landa Labs, CEO of HumanEyes Technologies, CEO of Yalicoo and vice president of the prepaid products group at IDT Telecom (NYSE: IDT).
Ms. Levy-Ron holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a bachelor’s in economics and French literature from Tel Aviv University.
Syte is the world’s first product discovery platform for retail. We use visual AI to create intuitive search and discovery experiences for all types of shoppers.
Our solutions include visual search, advanced text search, automated product tagging and personalized recommendation carousels. By leveraging unique visual data, we make it easy and intuitive for shoppers to find and buy what they’re looking for, improving customer experience and driving revenue.
Syte is proud to power product discovery experiences for more than 100 of the world’s leading brands and retailers, including Prada, Farfetch, PrettyLittleThing, Coleman Furniture and Baycrew’s, improving key e-commerce metrics and building long-term customer loyalty.
Company
Gideon Argov
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Venture Capital
Website
Description
Over three decades, Gideon Argov has pieced together an unusual and impactful series of achievements as both CEO and investor. Based in the U.S. but operating with equal ease in Israel, he spent over 20 years leading global companies in the industrial technology space. Over the past decade he has been an advisory director at Boston-based Berkshire Partners.
Throughout his U.S.-based roles, Mr. Argov had stayed close to his roots in Israel. He is a ninth-generation Israeli whose family has had a long and deep involvement in the history of the country. Mr. Argov founded what has become a preeminent leadership training program at Reichman University, the country’s top private institution of higher learning. Among other activities, he chaired the board of Fundtech, a publicly traded financial software company.
In 2015 Mr. Argov and his wife moved their family to Tel Aviv for two years. During this time, he actively integrated into the Israeli tech sector and personally invested in a number-of promising young Israeli startups.
When president Shimon Peres and his son Chemi suggested the idea of an investment company that would combine the prospect of funding some of Israel’s leading tech entrepreneurs with a focus on ESG (environmental, sustainability and governance), Mr. Argov was ready to commit. He and Ran Simha, President Peres’ former economic and technology advisor, founded New Era Capital Partners in 2017. Today, New Era manages two funds with approximately $250 million under management, top quartile returns, and portfolio companies such as Papaya Global, Optibus, Variantyx, Workiz, Assured Allies and more.
Company
Amit Bendov
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Location
Ramat Gan
Sector
Enterprise Tech
Website
Description
Amit Bendov has over 20 years of experience building global, high-growth technology companies including leading R&D, marketing, and sales organizations. Currently he is the co-founder and CEO of Gong, the revenue intelligence pioneer. Prior to Gong, Mr. Bendov was the CEO of Sisense and CMO of Panaya and earned a bachelor’s in computer science from Tel Aviv University. He is a popular speaker at industry events with numerous features in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, Huff Post and more. He has a passion for music and can often be found playing rock tunes on his collection of guitars.
Gong unlocks reality to help people and companies reach their full potential. Gong empowers customer-facing teams to take advantage of their most valuable assets–customer interactions, which the Gong platform automatically captures and analyzes. Gong then delivers insights at scale, empowering revenue and go-to-market teams to determine the best actions for winning outcomes. More than 3,000 innovative companies like Morningstar, Paychex, LinkedIn, Shopify, Slack, SproutSocial, Twilio, and Zillow trust Gong to power their customer reality.
Company
Dr. Haim Amir
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Location
Herzliya
Sector
Security Tech/Healthcare
Website
Description
“When I see more and more seniors aging in their homes with our technologies, and when I meet more and more patients leaving the hospitals to return to their communities, I know that we are enabling a better life. I am delighted that we can ensure peace of mind for them and their families.”
The visionary entrepreneur Dr. Haim Amir founded Essence Group in Israel almost 30 years ago, one seed of what would become the “Start-Up Nation” of the modern world.
Under Dr. Amir’s leadership, Essence has developed a protective shield of sensors that utilize cloud-based artificial intelligence in the fields of security, safety and healthcare. Its multiple, award-winning breakthrough technologies are capable of detecting and preventing intrusions and keep people safe and healthy by creating a multi-layered iron dome that protects our loved ones.
Essence has become a world tech leader with systems that protect millions of homes and businesses. Their advanced platforms are deployed in 46 countries across the globe. The company’s numerous breakthrough technologies have gained worldwide recognition for innovation.
Recently, Essence Group was named a CES 2022 Innovation Award honoree for two of its recent developments: the MyShield 5G-connected comprehensive smoke-generating intruder prevention system and the VitalOn seamless remote patient monitoring platform.
Dr. Amir is not only a business leader, but also a communal activist. The Amir Foundation, which he runs with his wife Rivka, provides technology educational opportunities to underprivileged children and youth, giving them the chance to integrate into the world of entrepreneurship and innovation.
“My true pride is that our innovative technologies save lives every day, all over the world, and that our solutions and services provide peace of mind to homes and businesses across the globe,” Dr. Amir says.
Company
Evelyn Landman
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Location
Haifa
Sector
AI/Electronics
Website
Description
proteanTecs is a deep-data company that monitors the health and performance of advanced electronics from production to the field. The company serves the datacenter, automotive and communications markets with customers ranging from chip and system vendors to car OEMs and cloud hyperscalers.
Co-founders Shai Cohen, CEO, and Evelyn Landman, CTO, are entrepreneurs with vast experience in building technology companies from the ground up. Prior to founding proteanTecs in 2017 they co-founded Mellanox (acquired by Nvidia), a global leader of end-to-end InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnect solutions for servers and storage. Ms. Landman served as vice president of backend and product engineering, responsible for IC backend design and production, systems and cables product engineering, and leading the company’s research on assembly and optical technologies. From 1989 to 1999, both Mr. Cohen and Ms. Landman worked at Intel, where they were senior staff members in the Pentium and processors departments.
proteanTecs combines the fields of chip design, data science and cloud software to provide a multi-disciplinary solution for predictive monitoring. Their cloud-based analytics platform applies machine learning algorithms to measurements extracted from on-chip monitoring agents, delivering actionable insights and automated feedback deployment. Service providers gain alerts on faults before failures for resilient uptime and predictive maintenance as well as performance optimization during system operation. In production, manufacturers gain advanced detection of latent defects while increasing product competitiveness and profitability.
With proteanTecs, electronics are able to report on their own health at any given stage, advancing a more reliable future for us all.
Company
Jon Medved
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Location
Jerusalem
Sector
Venture Capital
Website
Description
OurCrowd is the online global venture investing platform that empowers institutions and individual accredited investors to invest and engage in emerging technology companies at an early stage. Acclaimed by PitchBook as the most active venture investor in Israel, OurCrowd vets and selects companies across all sectors and stages, invests its own capital, and provides its global platform of over 180,000 registered members from 195 countries with unparalleled access and freedom to co-invest from as little as $10,000 in the companies and funds of their choice.
Founded by CEO Jon Medved in 2013 with the vision of democratizing world-class venture capital investing, OurCrowd has grown rapidly into the world’s leading online venture investing platform and as of 2021 has received over $1.8 billion in commitments, and deployed capital into more than 320 portfolio companies and 35 funds across five continents. To date, OurCrowd’s startups have recorded 56 exits including several stock market listings: Beyond Meat, Lemonade, Innoviz, Hub Security; and numerous high-profile acquisitions: JUMP by Uber, BriefCam by Canon, Argus by Continental, Crosswise by Oracle, Replay by Intel, Corephotonics by Samsung, CyberX by Microsoft, and Kenna Security by Cisco.
OurCrowd builds value for its portfolio companies throughout their lifecycles, providing mentorship, recruiting industry advisors, navigating follow-on rounds and creating growth opportunities through its network of multinational partnerships.
Company
Orr Danon
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Semiconductor
Website
Description
As CEO and co-founder, Orr Danon leads Hailo’s mission to make edge devices more intelligent by empowering them with AI. By rethinking traditional computer architecture and delivering a high-performance AI processor with record size and power efficiency, Hailo’s device offering can transform industries by facilitating AI solutions that are more powerful, versatile, responsive and secure.
Since founding the company over four years ago, Mr. Danon first focused on bringing Hailo’s first product–the Hailo-8–to market, which he did successfully in 2019. Since then the company has been growing its product portfolio and customer base. The company is working with multiple customers and partners to deliver AI products in a variety of market segments including smart cities, Industry 4.0, smart retail and automotive.
In a nutshell, Hailo’s technology enables getting much more from traditional sensors such as cameras which are key in applications such as smart transportation, public safety, autonomous machines, factory automation, cashierless stores and advanced driver assistance systems. Just a few months ago the Hailo-8 was selected as winner of the 2021 Edge AI and Vision Product of the Year awards for “Best Edge AI Processor.”
Under Mr. Orr’s leadership, Hailo continues to grow in size and impact and stays focused on its mission to create the foundational AI processor for generations of smart edge devices.
Company
Alan Feld
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Location
Herzliya
Sector
Venture Capital
Website
Description
Alan Feld is the Founder and Managing Partner of Vintage Investment Partners.
Vintage Investment Partners is a leading venture fund of funds, secondary fund and late stage co-investment team. The firm today manages $3 billion through 13 active funds and is based in Israel.
Vintage today has over 200 primary and secondary investments in US, European and Israeli venture funds and in Israeli PE funds and direct holdings in over 250 technology companies.
Vintage tracks over 2,700 venture funds and 14,300 private technology companies. In addition, Vintage provides a free service assisting technology innovators among the “Global 10,000” companies to identify innovative technology solutions that can help their businesses.
Prior to founding Vintage in 2002, Alan Feld was a general partner at Israel Seed Partners and at Vertex Ventures. Prior to Vertex, he was the managing director of Evergreen Capital Markets/Robertson Stephens Israel. Before moving to Israel in 1994,he was at Goodman’s (Toronto), one of Canada’s leading corporate law firms.
Mr. Feld is the founding chairman of the Power In Diversity Israel Initiative, focused on bringing more women and minorities into the Israeli high tech industry. He was also founding chairman of StartUp Jerusalem, a non-profit organization run by Israeli and Palestinian businesspeople helping to foster job growth in Jerusalem. He served as chairman of the steering committee of the Be’eri project, an initiative of the Hartman Institute, and is also a former board member of the Israel Democracy Institute and the Jewish Funders Network (US).
Alan received an MBA from York University in Toronto, a law degree from Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto and a bachelor’s in commerce and finance from the University of Toronto.
Company
Lilac Bar David
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Fintech
Website
Description
Lilac Bar David is the co-founder and CEO of Lili. With 20 years of experience in banking and payments management, Ms. Bar David is a leading expert in the fintech ecosystem. She holds her bachelor’s in economics and accounting and her MBA from Tel Aviv University. Prior to Lili, she founded Pepper–the first digital bank in Israel–and served as its CEO.
Lili is the all-in-one banking app designed for freelance workers. Combining banking services with real-time expense tracking, tax tools and financial insights, Lili empowers independent workers with the tools they need to stay in control of their finances while saving time and money.
Launched in 2020 and headquartered in New York and Tel Aviv, Lili is backed by top-tier venture capital firms and serves freelancers across dozens of industries and all 50 states.
Company
Zeev Farbman
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Location
Jerusalem
Sector
Consumer Tech
Website
Description
Zeev Farbman is an Israeli entrepreneur and the CEO and co-founder of Lightricks.
Lightricks is a pioneer in innovative technology that leads to breakthrough moments throughout the creation process. On a mission to push the limits of technology to reimagine the way creators express themselves, the company brings a unique blend of cutting-edge academic research and design to every user experience.
Lightricks’ suite of apps has over 500 million downloads worldwide and has won numerous prestigious awards, including Apple’s App of the Year, the Apple Design Award, and both Apple and Google Play’s Best of the Year.
Mr. Farbman had planned on a career in academia, studying computer science for his bachelor’s, master’s and eventually doctorate at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Lightricks’ co-founders; Zeev, Yaron, Nir and Amit created Lightricks with the vision of illuminating the path for the world to create.
Lightricks’ mission is to push the limits of technology to reimagine the way we create and express ourselves. We believe that anyone with an idea should experience the magic of bringing it to life. That’s why our products and services push the limits of technology to give our community new ways to express themselves. By removing barriers to creation, they can follow their curiosity to discover the magic.
Company
Dovi Frances
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Location
California
Sector
Venture Capital
Website
Description
Dovi Frances is a financial services entrepreneur and the founding partner of Group 11, a venture capital firm based in Los Angeles. Over the course of his career, Mr. Frances has invested over $550 million in some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent and disruptive financial technology companies including Tipalti, TripActions, Next Insurance, Papaya Global, HomeLight, Sunbit, Masterschool, EquityBee, Venn, and Lili to name a few.
Group 11 invests in revolutionary software companies that are redrawing the landscape of the financial services industry. As fintech continues to gain momentum and disrupt the traditional industry value chain, Group 11 has positioned itself as a partner of choice to provide capital and guidance to entrepreneurs that are creating the world’s next generation of financial services industry leaders.
Prior to launching Group 11 in 2012, Mr. Frances worked for nearly a decade in the financial services industry, having managed an independent financial advisory firm as well as serving as a vice president at Deutsche Bank AG Private Bank (NYSE: DB).
Mr. Frances currently serves on the boards of Tipalti, HomeLight, Papaya Global, Sunbit, EquityBee, Lili, Venn, Masterschool, Sorbet, SMBX, Insurights, and Fintastic. He is also an advisor to TripActions, a member of the advisory council of Leumi Bank U.S., and a member of the steering committee of the Israel Collaboration Network (ICON).
Company
Neta Rozy
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Insurance Tech
Website
Description
Neta Rozy is the co-founder and CTO of Parametrix Insurance. She developed a cutting edge system which monitors SaaS, PaaS and IaaS systems around the globe for downtime events such as cloud outages, network crashes, and platform failures. The millions of data points that the system collects daily are the basis for the company’s insurance products, which are the first to incorporate the parametric model into tech insurance. Ms. Rozy has a background in developing enterprise software and robust monitoring systems. She’s driven by a passion for creating innovative solutions powered by novel technology in order to solve tough problems.
Parametrix, a first-of-its-kind insurtech company, ensures that businesses with mission-critical services that depend on the cloud can quickly recover from IT downtime events. Our insurance offerings protect from financial damages incurred during outages caused by third parties such as cloud, eCommerce and payments platforms and CDN service providers. Based on the data generated by our innovative monitoring technology, we provide parametric policies with fast payouts, short waiting periods, no usage restrictions and hassle-free processes. The company is backed by some of the biggest insurers and reinsurers including certain underwriters at Lloyd’s of London.
Company
Chemi Peres
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Location
Herzliya
Sector
Venture Capital
Website
Description
Chemi Peres is one of Israel’s foremost venture capitalists and innovation pioneers. He is the co-founder & managing partner of Pitango, one of Israel’s leading VC funds, and also serves as chairman of the board of directors for the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation, where he has been one of its guiding visionaries for many years.
Over the years Mr. Peres has played an integral role in Israel’s thriving high-tech scene and has become a key player on the global entrepreneurial stage. Since 1992, when he co-founded Mofet Israel Technology Fund traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, he has been active in technology entrepreneurship and venture capital investments.
In 1996 he co-founded and continues to serve as managing partner of Pitango Venture Capital, Israel’s leading venture capital fund with more than $2.8 billion in committed capital in three hyper-focused funds: Pitango First (seed stage), Pitango Growth and Pitango HealthTech. In this role he has been involved in 250 investments across all verticals, 84 exits, and a significant number of unicorns.
Currently Mr. Peres serves on the boards of numerous Pitango portfolio companies such as Taboola, Via Transportation, Duda, Totango, Localize, Venn.City, and more.
Founded in 1996 by the late ninth president of Israel and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shimon Peres, the Peres Center is Israel’s leading nonprofit focused on developing and implementing unique and cutting-edge peacebuilding programs in innovation, peace education, medicine, business and the environment.
Company
Maty Zwaig
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Community/NGO
Website
Description
For the last three years Maty Zwaig has been CEO of Scale-Up Velocity, a non-profit organization that is part of Start-Up Nation Central, which focuses on promoting the Israel high-tech ecosystem through finding solutions for the country’s human capital challenges.
Prior to that, Ms. Zwaig served as a vice president of digital and technologies at information systems and technology services company Ness Technologies, where she ran the development and projects divisions. She joined Ness after eight years at IBM, where she managed the software and infrastructure development groups.
Before IBM, Ms. Zwaig served in various research and development posts in the Israeli Defense Forces military intelligence corps and retired at the rank of lieutenant colonel.
Zwaig earned her bachelor’s in mathematics and computer science from Tel Aviv University. During her military service, and since then, she has volunteered in several organizations that deal with the advancement of girls and women in the tech sector. She also serves on the National Council for the Promotion of Women in Science and Technology’s Industry Committee on behalf of the Science and Technology Ministry.
Scale-Up Velocity–part of the Start-Up Nation Central organization–partners with leading high-tech companies, academic and training institutions, government agencies, non-
profits and philanthropies to build programs and models that increase and improve the supply of talent to Israel’s tech sector. Its initiatives range from practical coding boot camps geared towards talent from untapped communities to drafting policy recommendations for government agencies looking to tackle the chronic human capital shortage in Israel’s tech sector.
Company
Avi Shua
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Cybersecurity
Website
Description
Avi Shua is a cybersecurity expert with more than 25 years of industry experience. Prior to co-founding Orca Security, he was the chief technologist at Check Point Software Technologies. While at Check Point he built and scaled cybersecurity solutions that protect tens of thousands of organizations to this day.
Mr. Shua also held key leadership positions within Unit 8200, the Israeli NSA, for nearly a decade. He learned several valuable lessons from his training during this time, one of which especially drove him to create Orca Security. This viewpoint was to “believe you’ll find a solution to any given problem, and never assume that existing approaches are the only possible solutions.”
Orca Security was created in 2019 to provide customers with cloud-wide, workload-deep security and compliance for AWS, Azure, and GCP assets–without the gaps in coverage, alert fatigue, and operational costs of agents. The technology tackles a fundamental cloud security problem: Organizations could not gain 100 percent coverage to discover and manage all cloud assets, vulnerabilities and risks without deploying agents or network scanners. Mr. Shua knew there had to be a better way, and he invented Orca Security’s patent-pending SideScanning technology to solve this need.
Unlike legacy tools that operate in silos, Orca Security treats customers’ cloud accounts as an interconnected web of assets, prioritizing risk based on the underlying issue, its accessibility and blast radius. This also does away with thousands of meaningless security alerts to provide just the critical few, along with their precise path to remediation.
Company
Ron Gura
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Digital Health
Website
Description
Ron Gura is a tech entrepreneur who has brought his love for developing empowering products to startups and major international corporations alike. As SVP at WeWork, he started and oversaw a global R&D center of 250 team members responsible for the tools and systems that helped the company scale operationally. Previously, Mr. Gura served as entrepreneur in residence at Aleph, a $550 million early-stage venture capital fund. Prior to that, he served as a product director and general manager at eBay, leading its business incubation organization. Mr. Gura joined eBay as a result of the 2011 acquisition of The Gifts Project, a social-commerce startup where he served as co-founder and CEO.
Empathy’s mission is to help families deal with loss, incorporating both emotional and logistical support for families in their time of need. Powered by technology and driven by purpose, Empathy’s application, awarded Google Play’s 2021 “Best App for Good” and CB Insights’ “Top Digital Health Companies Of 2021,” simplifies and streamlines end-of-life bureaucracy with personalized plans and grief support. Launched in 2021 and headquartered in New York and Tel Aviv, Empathy is backed by top tier venture capital firms and serves Fortune 100 enterprise customers alongside its direct-to-consumer offering.
Company
Kobi Samboursky
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Location
Herzliya
Sector
Venture Capital
Website
Description
Kobi Samboursky, a serial entrepreneur with over thirty years of experience in various technology and investment fields, co-founded Glilot Capital Partners in 2011 with Arik Kleinstein. Mr. Samboursky’s vision for Glilot was to create a leading investment platform that will grow Israel’s finest innovating companies.
Mr. Samboursky’s vast experience in building businesses continuously contributes to Glilot’s portfolio. His success-driven execution resulted in twelve acquisitions thus far. Prior to founding Glilot, he founded and successfully exited a handful of technology companies in the cybersecurity, telecom, internet and consumer electronics domains. Before those, he served as an executive at various technology companies and as an officer in Unit 8200, an elite Israel Defense Forces technology unit.
In 2019, following Glilot Capital’s success, Mr. Samboursky and Mr. Kleinstein welcomed Nofar Amikam as a general partner and launched four additional funds with about $700 million under management. In 2021 Glilot launched Glilot+, a $180 million early growth fund with Lior Litwak as its managing partner.
In total, Glilot has invested in almost 40 portfolio companies and witnessed 12 successful exits in fields ranging from cybersecurity to SAAS and Dev/DevOps.
Company
Chen Amit
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Location
Herzliya
Sector
Fintech
Website
Description
Chen Amit, co-founder and CEO of Tipalti, is a veteran high tech executive and repeat entrepreneur. Prior to Tipalti, Mr. Amit was CEO of Atrica, a carrier Ethernet company that Nokia-Siemens acquired. Before Atrica, he was co-founder and CEO of Verix, a provider of business intelligence software. At ECI Telecom, he founded an ADSL business unit and led it from inception to $100 million in annual sales. He earned a bachelor’s from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology and an MBA from INSEAD.
Tipalti comes from the Hebrew expression for “We handled it.” Tipalti is the only company handling both accounts payable and mass pay workflows for high-velocity companies across the entire financial operations cycle: onboarding and managing the global supply chain, instituting procurement controls, streamlining invoice processing and approvals, executing payments around the world and reconciling payables data across a multi-subsidiary finance organization.
Tipalti enables high-growth companies to scale quickly by making payables strategic with operational, compliance, and financial controls. Companies can efficiently and securely pay thousands of partners and vendors in 196 countries within minutes. Thousands of companies such as Amazon Twitch, GoDaddy, Oscar Insurance, Roku, WordPress.com, and ZipRecruiter use Tipalti to reduce operational workload by 80 percent and accelerate the financial close by 25 percent while strengthening financial controls and spend visibility.
Company
Orit Shilo
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Location
Herzliya
Sector
Venture Capital
Website
Description
Orit Shilo recently joined Vintage Investment Partners as partner, serving as chief Value Added Services officer. Vintage’s VAS function helps startups win Global 10,000 companies as customers. To date, the Vintage Value Added Services team has generated more than 230 purchase orders or paid proofs of concept for startups, generating an estimated $150 million of revenue for those startups. Vintage provides this service for free to help both the corporate and startup communities.
Prior to joining Vintage in 2022, Ms. Shilo spent 12 years at Google and founded Google for Startups in Israel, a strategic effort that connects the Israeli startup community with Google and advocates for an inclusive and diverse ecosystem. She was a member of the Google Israel leadership team, leading teams in the sales, partnerships and marketing organizations. Previously she led a business development team which supported growth-stage startups in connecting with the best of Google and before that she led a business line within sales.
Ms. Shilo holds a master’s in history and philosophy of science and technology and a bachelor’s in East Asia studies and business administration, both from Tel Aviv University.
Company
Udi Ziv
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Location
Ramat Gan
Sector
Insurance Tech
Website
Description
Udi Ziv is the CEO at Earnix, a global provider of advanced AI-driven rating, pricing, and product personalization solutions for insurers and banks. Mr. Ziv has over 30 years of experience as an executive leader and entrepreneur in the enterprise software space. He has led global companies and piloted numerous successful acquisitions. This experience and his desire to support the revolution faced by two of the largest and oldest industries–insurance and banking–fuels his strategic priorities.
Accelerating the company’s rapid growth, Mr. Ziv has cemented Earnix as the leading provider of mission-critical systems for global insurers and banks. Under his leadership, Earnix has expanded its total addressable market and scaled its business operations to establish a strong international presence with seven global offices and customers in over 30 countries. In 2021 Mr. Ziv drove the company’s latest funding round that established Earnix’s unicorn status and executed the company’s first-ever acquisition. Under his leadership, Earnix nearly doubled its workforce, secured signature deals with prominent global companies, and achieved an impressive Net Promoter Score of 71%, all during the last year.
Prior to Earnix, Mr. Ziv was CEO of Pontis, a leading digital customer engagement company, where he drove its growth and acquisition by Amdocs in 2016. Previously he served as the President of NICE Systems’ enterprise group with responsibility for its $600 million customer interaction business. He also served as GM at SAP after the company he co-founded in 1991–TopTier Software–was acquired by the global software company in 2001.
Mr. Ziv holds a degree in computer engineering from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.
Company
Othman Alshekh
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Location
Be'er Sheva
Sector
Industrial Internet of Things
Website
Description
Othman Alshekh, 30, is CEO at Siraj technologies and a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev. Mr. Alshekh was born in Germany; at the age of 3 he returned with his family to Israel to the Bedouin village of Tel Sheva. After graduating, he began managing the family medical center, then completed a bachelor’s degree in law and accounting and a master’s degree in law at Tel Aviv University. He did a law internship in the capital market department of one of the most reputable law firms in Israel, Goldfarb-Seligman. Mr. Alshekh also worked as a senior advisor on KPMG’s deal advisory and management consulting team and at Procter & Gamble.
Siraj Technologies was founded in 2016 by Mr. Alshekh alongside Bedouin and Israeli hi-tech entrepreneurs and academics who shared a vision to streamline the painstaking process of onboarding industrial internet of things (IoT) edge devices to cloud platforms leveraging AI/DL. Siraj’s proprietary deep learning algorithms automatically recognize and standardize data collected from diverse edge devices, creating a clean and unified data stream that brings industrial IoT to its full potential. With expertise in industrial edge onboarding, Siraj provides end-to-end solutions covering every phase in the onboarding process, from site mapping to complete site connectivity. Designed to increase industrial productivity and safety, Siraj’s solutions focus on multiple interconnected layers including embedded, sensor data, network connectivity, IoT gateways design and implementation and IoT platform interfaces.
Along with the company’s cutting-edge technology the company seeks to promote coexistence between Arabs and Jews in the high-tech sector and integrate Bedouin employees, whose representation in the sector is very poor. The company strives to create jobs for the Bedouin society in the field of technology and high-tech professions in Israel.
Company
Rafael Museri
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Hospitality
Website
Description
Rafael Museri, co-founder and CEO of Selina, served 12 years as a commander in one of Israel’s most elite army units. After completing his military service Mr. Museri moved to Central America in 2007, where he joined Selina co-founder Daniel Rudasevski in creating Dekel, a Panama-based development company. Dekel developed several successful real estate projects along the Pacific Coast of Panama and in the old town of Panama City, leveraging a development strategy focused on the creation of full, diversified communities that appeal to people from all walks of life and that integrate into the local markets–the same philosophy that now sits at the heart of Selina.
To test their idea for Selina–a unique stay, work and play ecosystem–Mr. Museri and Mr. Rudasevski traveled the world staying in more than 120 hotels, hostels and houses in the space of a year, looking for a consistent offering that allowed them to meet new people, experience new cultures and seamlessly live and work anywhere.
Through the lessons that they learned, they set out to launch the Selina platform–a hospitality concept that catered to a new generation of travelers, digital nomads and remote workers–-in 2015, opening their first property on the surf beach in Venao, Panama.
Over the past six years, Selina has expanded to 134 properties in 23 countries as one of the world’s fastest-growing hospitality brands, blending beautifully-designed accommodation with coworking, recreation, wellness, and local experiences. Custom-built for today’s nomadic traveler, Selina provides guests with a global infrastructure to seamlessly travel and work abroad. Each Selina property is designed in partnership with local artists, creators, and tastemakers, breathing new life into existing buildings in interesting locations worldwide–from urban cities to remote beaches and jungles.
In December 2021 Selina entered into a definitive merger agreement with BOA Acquisition Corp. that will result in Selina being publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol SLNA.
Company
Veetahl Eilat-Raichel
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
HR Tech
Website
Description
Veetahl Eilat-Raichel is an award-winning marketing, product and business development leader with more than 20 years of experience working at multinational industry leaders like L’Oréal, Lockheed Martin and Bank Hapoalim.
She is currently the co-founder and CEO of Sorbet, a first-of-its-kind fintech unlocking the $272 billion market of unused paid time off. It was recently selected as one of the 20 most promising startups in 2021.
Ms. Eilat-Raichel holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
Sorbet is a disruptive fintech solution that turns PTO from a lose-lose into a win-win. Twenty-eight percent of PTO days go unused each year, resulting in employee burnout, productivity loss and an unhealthy work-life balance. Annual accrued PTO liabilities in the U.S. alone total over $272 billion, weighing down companies’ balance sheets and cash flow.
Sorbet connects to HRIS and payroll systems, analyses the data and begins to proactively suggest preapproved times when employees can take time off while predicting the unusable portions of time that employees won’t be able to take and allowing them to convert those unused days into cash, while enabling their employer to decide when they want to pay Sorbet back. This one-of-a-kind benefit helps employers reduce vacation accruals, save on refinancing costs and regain control of their cash flow, all while putting their employees’ wellness top of mind.
Sorbet was co-founded in 2019 by Ms. Eilat-Raichel, Eliaz Shapira (CTO) and Rami Kasterstein (board member). The company recently announced a $21 million financing round–the largest Israeli fintech seed round to date, led by Dovi Frances’ Group 11 along with Viola Ventures, Meron Capital, and Global Founders Capital.
Company
Amir Schlachet
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Location
Petach Tikva
Sector
E-Commerce
Website
Description
Amir Schlachet is the co-founder and CEO of Global-e (Nasdaq: GLBE). Mr. Schlachet has an extensive technology background, having served for 11 years in various elite technological units of the Israeli Defense Forces, including as the commander of the “Talpiot” elite technological military-academy program. After completing his MBA at INSEAD (first in his class) and working for several years as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, Mr. Schlachet served as SVP and strategic advisor to the CEO of Israel’s largest bank, Bank Hapoalim.
Mr. Schlachet, together with Nir Debbi and Shahar Tamari, established Global-e in 2013, focusing on their mission to revolutionize global e-commerce by enhancing the entire international shopping experience and streamlining international expansion for online retailers and brands. Global-e’s end-to-end platform enables e-commerce retailers to grow international traffic conversion rates and sales by offering shoppers in over 200 destinations worldwide a seamless localized shopping experience tailored to their market’s characteristics and local shopping preferences. This includes localized messaging, local pricing in local currency, a multilingual checkout, duty and tax calculation and prepayment for guaranteed landed costs, a wide variety of local and alternative payment methods as well as multiple delivery and return options at attractive rates.
Since its inception, Global-e has rapidly grown to become the world’s leading platform to enable and accelerate global, direct-to-consumer cross-border e-commerce. Today Global-e is the chosen cross-border e-commerce platform of hundreds of retailers and brands across
the U.S., Europe and Asia, including Marc Jacobs, Marks & Spencer, Hugo Boss, Skims, Alo Yoga, Netflix, Reformation and many more.
In May 2021 Global-e became a public company, trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker GLBE.
Company
Tom Livne
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Artificial Intelligence
Website
Description
Tom Livne is the founder and CEO of Verbit, the world’s leading voice AI transcription platform. Mr. Livne has international experience in all aspects of the tech company lifecycle, from startup foundation to raising more than $600 million and scaling sales of hundreds of millions of dollars in annual recurring revenue. He holds vast domain expertise in enterprise software as well as tech-enabled and SaaS businesses. Mr. Livne is a leader and visionary in strategy and execution across all disciplines, including general management, sales and marketing, product and technology, finance, and marketplace operations. He has been instrumental in building new businesses and setting the go-to-market plan for them, developing and launching industry-leading products and technologies.
Verbit serves as an essential partner to 2,000+ businesses and institutions. Verbit’s vertical-built voice AI solutions provide its partners with the tools they need to offer engaging and equitable experiences that not only meet accessibility guidelines but also make verbal information searchable and actionable. In just a few years since its founding in 2017, Verbit has grown into a unicorn company with a $2 billion valuation and a global presence. Verbit employs the largest professional captioner workforce in the world and has emerged as the leader in the $30 billion transcription industry.
Verbit’s in-house, voice AI technology transforms both live and recorded video and audio into 99% accurate captions and transcripts for the education, legal, media, government, finance and corporate industries. The dual combination of Verbit’s in-house automated speech recognition technology with its professional human transcribers provides a competitive advantage and quick turnaround times. This hybrid model provides high-quality transcripts, captions and additional solutions for access including audio description, translation and dubbing. Verbit supports its customers as they aim to offer content and experiences which meet ADA, FCC and other compliance guidelines. Users are provided with specialized teams and technology, 24/7 support, and a tailor-made solution for their unique needs.
Company
Dr. Erel Margalit
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Location
Jerusalem
Sector
Venture Capital
Website
Description
Dr. Erel Margalit is one of the chief architects of “Startup Nation,” bringing innovation and entrepreneurial leadership to Israel’s most pressing economic and social challenges. Dr. Margalit’s journey started in Jerusalem, where he is considered the founder of the capital’s tech ecosystem. For three decades, Dr. Margalit, a former member of Knesset, has been a visionary leader, championing innovation as a tool for economic growth and an engine for social change. For Dr. Margalit, the entrepreneurial spirit springs from creativity, and he harnesses his regional economic development success, applying it on an international scale, supporting urban ecosystems with cultural, technological, entrepreneurial, and educational components.
JVP is an internationally recognized venture capital fund. JVP’s winning strategy combines company creation with early- and late-stage investment. Under Dr. Margalit’s leadership, JVP created more than 150 companies, facilitated 12 IPOs on Nasdaq and orchestrated dozens of industry acquisitions to leading international companies. Dr. Margalit has raised over $1.5 billion from the world’s leading investors, and JVP continues to be ranked by Preqin as one of the top-performing funds in the world, with portfolio companies that drive global markets today.
The Margalit Start Up City (MSC) economic model creates thematic regional ecosystems with cultural, technological, entrepreneurial and educational components. MSC’s centers of excellence created tens of thousands of jobs domestically and internationally in a wide variety of outstanding companies that define the global innovation economy.
The first MSC was established in Jerusalem, followed by the Cyber Center in Beersheva, the Foodtech initiative in the Galilee, the Digital Health Initiative in Haifa and the International Cyber Center in New York. These innovation centers have become life-changing socioeconomic growth engines, integrating the best of strategic, local, government and international partners. MSC’s centers of excellence also enhance human capital, empowering the next generation of entrepreneurs through a socioeconomic nonprofit called Margalit Startup City Community Bakehila.
Company
Zvi Schreiber
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Location
Jerusalem
Sector
Logistics Tech
Website
Description
Zvi Schreiber is CEO of the Freightos Group which includes Freightos.com, the largest digital freight marketplace; WebCargo, the digital pricing, booking and sales platform for logistics providers; and Freightos Data, which publishes the Freightos Baltic Index (FBX).
Mr. Schreiber studied at the University of Cambridge and at Imperial College where he earned a doctorate in computer science. He is a serial entrepreneur who has previously founded and led B2B technology companies acquired by both IBM and GE. He has written and spoken widely.
Mr. Schreiber understood that while international trade is at the core of the world economy, the $500 billion global freight market powering that trade remains one of the last offline industries, increasing costs and reducing reliability for the world’s supply chains.
Freightos is the global freight booking platform connecting carriers, freight forwarders and importers/exporters and making international shipping faster, more cost-effective and reliable while expanding trade between the people of the world.
The Freightos Group is a widely recognized logistics technology leader with a worldwide presence and a broad customer network. Freightos has raised $120 million from leading venture funds and strategic investors.
Company
Elram Goren
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Logistics Tech
Website
Description
Elram Goren is the CEO and co-founder of Fabric. He has led the company from its inception in 2015 and now is at the helm of its rapidly scaling operations. Before co-founding Fabric, Mr. Goren served as a major in the Israeli Defense Forces managing R&D teams and multidisciplinary projects in the Intelligence Technology Unit. He holds a bachelor’s in physics and electrical engineering from the Technion and an MBA from Tel Aviv University.
Fabric is a retail technology company that enables exceptional customer experiences from click to delivery. By combining intelligent robotic fulfillment with local last-mile operations, Fabric is redefining how supply chains work.
The company’s proprietary mesh network and micro-fulfillment technologies bring brands closer to their customers, unlocking the insights to place local inventory in the right place at the right time. Fabric is running micro-fulfillment operations for grocery and consumer brands throughout the U.S. and Israel and will expand to additional major U.S. centers of commerce in the coming year.
Founded in 2015, Fabric is backed by leading investors including Corner Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, Aleph, Playground Ventures, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Evolv (Kraft Heinz), Temasek and Princeville Capital. Fabric is headquartered in New York City with main offices in Tel Aviv and Atlanta and has over 300 team members globally.
Company
Mendel Gniwisch
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Location
Ramat Gan
Sector
Retail Tech
Website
Description
Mendel Gniwisch is CEO of Stor.ai, a leading provider of end-to-end digitization solutions for grocers. He moved to Israel in 2018 because of his passion for Israeli innovation, with the intention of helping Israeli startups go global–a passion which has directly contributed to his success at stor.ai. Prior to being appointed CEO he was the company’s executive vice president of business development, spearheading stor.ai’s 300% year-on-year growth in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. Previously, he was vice president of business development and vice president of retail development at Impax Media, a digital communications company for grocers, where he was responsible for the company’s strategic positioning in the grocery and advertising industries and worked with retailers and engineers to tailor products to the company’s network.
Throughout Mr. Gniwisch’s career he has been at the forefront of building new organizations from the ground up as both a strategic developer and a marketer, challenging the status quo to make a positive impact on people’s lives. He is also actively engaged in pro bono work to help other Israeli companies expand outside the country.
Stor.ai is the world’s most complete digital enablement company for grocery retailers today, with a focus on “Customer First Commerce.”
Customer First Commerce is led by the vision of a digital experience both online and in-store that is 100% focused on the customer. The company’s passion is to build products and solutions that blur the line between the physical and the digital commerce experiences and ensure that the customer experience is seamless and delightful wherever and whenever a customer comes in contact with a Stor.ai-powered retailer.
Retailers using Stor.ai technology increase their online sales through Stor.ai’s platform, improving their profitability with a suite of fulfillment tools. The platform will very soon allow retailers to offer their customers in-store experiences that exponentially improve in-store shopping and customer satisfaction.
Company
Shahar Levi
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Location
Herzliya
Sector
SaaS
Website
Description
Shahar Levi is the co-founder and CEO of Locusview. He is a veteran of the Israeli Central Intelligence Research unit and was part of a pioneering team that leveraged GPS and mapping technologies into advanced intelligence applications. Prior to Locusview, Mr. Levi served as vice president of business development at Nortec Group, where he led its acquisition by a multi-billion dollar global company. Shahar holds an MBA in finance and banking (magna cum laude) and an LL.B. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (magna cum laude).
Nearly $500 billion is invested annually into energy and telecom infrastructures. Locusview’s vision is to enable those infrastructure organizations to scale their construction execution and optimize their capital investments.
Headquartered in Tel Aviv and Chicago, the company has 170 employees in 5 offices worldwide. In April 2021, the company announced the completion of a $64 million Series A financing round led by Israel Growth Partners in participation with existing investors. Unlike other companies announcing growth rounds over recent months, Locusview has been profitable almost from its founding, registering annual revenue of tens of millions of dollars with 25+ of the largest energy utility companies in the US in production in less than three years.
Company
Yaron Samid
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Venture Capital
Website
Description
Yaron Samid is an Israeli-American technology entrepreneur, investor, and startup community builder. He is the founder of TechAviv, the 3,000-member global Israeli startup founders club, and managing partner of TechAviv Founder Partners, a pre-seed venture fund backed and powered by 150 of the world’s most successful company-builders.
Previously, Mr. Samid was the founder and CEO at BillGuard (acquired by Prosper), founder and CPO at Pando (acquired by Microsoft), and a founding board director at CloudLock (acquired by Cisco) and Pond5. He lives in Tel Aviv with his family and is a regular guest lecturer at Stanford and Columbia business schools.
Established in 2007, the TechAviv Founders Club is a private global network of more than 3,000 Israeli startup founders and investors committed to helping each other and the next generation succeed. Members meet on- and offline to harness their collective energy, knowledge, and networks. In 2020 TechAviv added a founders’ fund. Together, TechAviv and TechAviv Founder Partners help elite Israeli founders build large-scale, enduring, IPO-caliber companies.
Company
Michael Gabay
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Retail Tech
Website
Description
Michael Gabay co-founded Trigo after serving in the Israel Defense Forces General Staff Reconnaissance Unit (Sayeret Matkal)–the equivalent of the U.S. Army’s Delta Force. There, he gained experience in managing large and diverse teams, cutting-edge technology, and mission-critical projects in complex, multidisciplinary environments. During his time in the military he helped to develop life-saving technology rooted in navigation systems, process control, computer vision and AI.
Mr. Gabay’s military experience showed him that advanced technology can be successfully integrated into a non-technological organization and that starting with a positive user experience is the foundation for everything that follows.
Trigo is a technology company that builds the digital infrastructure and seamless checkout technology for the future of retail.
Utilizing the technical expertise of its founders, Trigo set out to redefine retailing and the shopping experience. The platform enables brick-and-mortar grocery retailers to integrate the efficiencies and insights of digital commerce into the physical world. To achieve that, Trigo is building the world’s most sophisticated 3D engine designed for use in a retail setting: one that uses artificial intelligence and computer vision working together to digitize physical stores completely. Starting from checkout-free technology all the way through user-journey analysis and brand-related insights, this is the reason that five out of ten of the top global grocery retailers are implementing Trigo’s solutions.
Trigo-powered stores allow retailers to reduce costs, base business decisions on an unbiased view of what’s happening in-store, improve customer experience, cultivate nimble logistics, and open up new pathways to profitable growth.
Company
Ariel Berkman
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
SaaS
Website
Description
Ariel Berkman, founder and chief product security officer at OwnBackup, is responsible for product security at OwnBackup. Prior to founding OwnBackup, Mr. Berkman co-founded Recover-IT, a data-recovery and data-forensics service provider in Israel. Ariel comes from an information-security and information-technology background in Israel’s elite 8xxx Intelligence Ministry of Defense unit.
OwnBackup is the number one data backup, archiving, and sandbox seeding app on the Salesforce AppExchange. With over 3,000 customers, the company is ranked 25 on the Financial Times list of America’s fastest-growing companies and has raised $267.5 million in funding from Salesforce Ventures and others.
The leading cloud-to-cloud backup and restore vendor, OwnBackup provides secure, automated, daily backups of SaaS and PaaS data as well as sophisticated data, compare and restore tools for disaster recovery.
OwnBackup covers data loss and corruption caused by human errors, malicious intent, integration errors, and rogue applications. Built for security and privacy, the platform exceeds the General Data Protection Regulation requirements for backed-up data.
Company
Mati Kochavi
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Augmented Reality/Metaverse
Website
Description
Mati Kochavi is an Israeli technology and media entrepreneur and award-winning filmmaker.
Mr. Kochavi began his work in technology in the early ‘90s, and defines himself as an “eclectic entrepreneur.” In recent years, his work has spanned AI-based IoT technology and new media-internet technologies.
Mr. Kochavi established the AGT group to provide AI-based IoT solutions for physical environments. AGT’s work is based on the notion that creative analysis of sensorial data is a limitless source of “storytelling” which can revolutionize the way we understand the world. AGT has done some of the world’s largest IoT projects, generating billions of dollars of revenue in fields such as smart cities and infrastructure, safety, health and sports and environment.
Mr. Kochavi has spent the past three years shifting his focus from large-scale physical environments to the human body through his COACH-AI. COACH-AI is an engine that enables creators to build products for the next generation of the internet. These products will put human physical activity in the center. COACH-AI allows developers to build experiences that involve both human body movements and real physical objects, fully and seamlessly integrated into metaverse, virtual or mixed reality. Products built on the engine by COACH or by third parties cover physical, mental, and intellectual domains such as child development, sports, physical games, health, entertainment and education.
Mr. Kochavi’s work was quoted in hundreds of leading media outlets around the world and has won more than 20 of the leading awards for digital products and content.
Mr. Kochavi’s family foundation is dedicated to improving the physical and mental health of children. The foundation has donated millions of dollars to children’s health and education.
Company
Eyal Waldman
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Venture Capital
Description
Eyal Waldman is the chairman of Waldo Holdings, a family office that focuses on diversified investments in private and public companies, various funds, real estate and other financial platforms and vehicles.
Mr. Waldman has been the co-founder, president, CEO and board member of Mellanox Technologies since 1999. Mellanox is a semiconductor company which went public on Nasdaq in 2007 and was acquired by NVIDIA in April 2020 for more than $7 billion.
From 1999 to 2013, Mr. Waldman served as Mellanox’s chairman of the board.
From 1993 to 1999, Mr. Waldman served as vice president of engineering and was a co-founder of Galileo Technology, a semiconductor company, which went public on Nasdaq in 2007 and was acquired by Marvell Technology Group in 2001 for $2.7 billion.
From 1989 to 1993, Mr. Waldman held several design, management, and architecture-related positions at Intel and was given the Intel Achievement Award and named Employee of the Year.
Mr. Waldman serves on the board of directors of several private and public companies. He holds a bachelor’s in computer engineering and a master’s in electrical engineering from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
In 2016, Mr. Waldman was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Technion.
Company
Shira Kaplan
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Location
Lake of Zurich, Switzerland
Sector
Cybersecurity
Website
Description
An alumna of Unit 8200 of the Israeli Intelligence Corps as well as of Harvard (B.A., 2004-2008) and the University of St. Gallen HSG (MBA, 2012-2014) and a mother of three, Shira Kaplan founded Cyverse AG in 2016 in Zurich with the vision of connecting Europe to Israel’s booming cybersecurity ecosystem. Cyverse was based on Ms. Kaplan’s St. Gallen MBA thesis, “Swiss Venture Capital Investments in Israeli Cyber-Security Startups: A Critical Analysis.” Cyverse has positioned itself as the leading provider of best-in-breed, next-generation Israeli cybersecurity solutions for enterprises with access to 200+ Swiss, German and Scandinavian multinationals.
In 2021, following a successful track record of angel investments, Ms. Kaplan and her husband Itay Shlomo launched Cyverse Capital, an invitation-only club of executives from the DACH region–chairmen, CEOs and CISOs–who invest in early-stage cybersecurity companies. Ms. Kaplan and Mr. Shlomo are early-stage investors in Climacell, Fireblocks, CyberX (acquired by Microsoft for $165 million), Cardinalops, Lightspin, IntSights (acquired by Rapid7 for $335 million) and others.
Prior to founding Cyverse, Ms. Kaplan immersed in a decade of business activity in leading global corporations including Teva Pharmaceuticals in Israel and Bank Julius Baer & Co. in Zurich.
She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and scholarships including the Seeds of Peace scholarship, the United World College Scholarship, the Shelby Davis Scholarship, the Goldman Fellowship, the Milken Fellowship, the St. Gallen Women in Business Scholarship and the STARS Program in Switzerland.
Ms. Kaplan is an advisory board member at the Geneva School of Economics and Management. She is an active board member at the Weizmann Young European Network. She is a mentor at the 8200 Woman2Woman program.
Company
Avi Hasson
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Community/NGO
Website
Description
Avi Hasson’s career spans executive leadership roles in the business, technology, and not-for-profit sectors. He served as chief scientist at Israel’s Ministry of Economy and Industry, and as founding chairman of the Israel Innovation Authority, the government entity tasked with planning and executing innovation policy in Israel. Prior to his government service, Mr. Hasson was a general partner at Gemini Israel Funds, one of Israel’s top venture capital firms.
Upon leaving his position at the Innovation Authority, he joined early-stage venture firm Emerge as a general partner and serves on the board of Tower Semiconductor (NASDAQ: TSEM)–the leading foundry of high-value analog semiconductor solutions.
In addition to his long record of public service, Mr. Hasson has distinguished himself as a leader with some of Israel’s most important not-for-profit organizations. He serves on the board of the Sheba Medical Center; SpaceIL, an organization promoting scientific and tech education with the aim of landing the first Israeli spacecraft on the moon; and the Israel Tech Challenge, which offers tech-training programs to address Israel’s industry-wide tech talent shortage.
Start-Up Nation Central is the address for corporations, governments and investors to connect with the Israeli tech ecosystem. Start-Up Nation Central catalyzes growth opportunities by bringing Israeli tech innovation to global business and societal challenges. Established in 2013 and headquartered in Tel Aviv, Start-Up Nation Central is a nonprofit funded by philanthropy.
The organization’s mission is to help realize Israel’s value as a global solution hub, and support its continuous growth to strengthen Israel’s position as the leading nation in tech innovation.
Company
Guy Goldstein
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Location
Kfar Saba
Sector
Insurance Tech
Website
Description
Guy Goldstein is the CEO and co-founder of NEXT Insurance. As an entrepreneur and executive, Mr. Goldstein brings nearly two decades of management, strategy and product development experience to his role. With more than $880 million in funding, over 300,000 customers, a $650 million annual run rate and a $4 billion valuation, Goldstein has led NEXT to become a leading digital insurtech transforming small business insurance.
Mr. Goldstein is committed to making NEXT the leading small business insurance company in the U.S. NEXT is the only small business insurtech to receive an A-Excellent rating by AM Best, the industry standard for rating insurance companies. NEXT is committed to helping small businesses and entrepreneurs thrive by offering instant, custom insurance policies at up to 30 percent savings all self-served. In 2021, the company tripled gross written premium reaching a $650 million run rate. As of 2022, NEXT served more than 1,100 professions and is continuing to expand its offerings to new businesses. The company has nearly 1,000 global employees.
Prior to NEXT, Mr. Goldstein founded mobile payment company Check (acquired by Intuit for $360M), where he grew the company from zero to 10 million members. He graduated cum laude from Tel-Aviv University with a bachelor’s degree in business and computer science. Early in his life, Mr. Goldstein was handpicked for an elite group of candidates to train for the Israeli Air Force. He excelled and rose to the military rank of major and fighter pilot in one of the world’s most respected air force programs.
Company
Omri Mendellevich
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Wellness Tech
Website
Description
Omri Mendellevich is the co-founder and CTO at Clay, a healthcare startup still in stealth mode. Before founding Clay he was CTO and co-founder of Dynamic Yield, a personalization engine and platform acquired by McDonald’s in 2019. In 2021 he partnered with Lee Rotenberg and Alex Schinasi–whose previous startup was also acquired successfully–to found Clay.
Clay empowers pediatric primary care practices to provide integrated behavioral health care and extends support to families beyond medical appointments. By making science-backed screening tools and interventions accessible at scale we help identify challenges early, connect families to the right type of care, and provide coordinated and comprehensive family-centered support to prevent future health crises. Clay is designed by leading experts in pediatrics, psychology and early childhood development and powered by technology.
Mr. Mendellevich has 24 years of experience leading teams, building R&D organizations, and innovating in the fields of big data and complex decision engines. He served eight years in the Israeli military and was a team leader in the Israeli Air Force Technical Unit. After the military he led a technical team at Symantec, a leading information management and data security company. Prior to becoming CTO at Dynamic Yield he served as director of R&D at Virtual Web, a startup for social tools.
Company
Shir Ekerling
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Location
Ramat Gan / New York
Sector
Accessibility Tech
Website
Description
Shir Ekerling is accessiBe’s CEO and co-founder. Before accessiBe, Mr. Ekerling provided manual accessibility services to clients worldwide. He founded accessiBe in 2017-2018, together with Dekel Skoop and Gal Vizel, to find a scalable solution that can make the entire internet accessible to everyone.
Mr. Ekerling is an experienced entrepreneur and software engineer with a history of establishing and scaling SaaS companies as CEO and CTO. Skilled in entrepreneurship, business strategy, growth and marketing, software development and UX/UI, he was named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in 2019.
accessiBe was established as an innovative AI-powered web accessibility solution that makes websites accessible, automated, and affordable. Founded in early 2018, accessiBe’s proprietary technology scans and modifies websites’ behavior in real-time to be accessible for people with disabilities and compliant with the ADA and WCAG 2.1. accessiBe’s widgets allow users with disabilities to customize their independence based on their individual needs and preferences.
Today, accessiBe is a full accessibility hub providing solutions for businesses of all sizes with services and tools that enable everyone to take part in helping to make the internet accessible and inclusive. accessiBe’s founding team has deep domain expertise in the field of website creation and manual accessibility and created the technology in close partnership with users who have vision impairments, epilepsy, motor impairments, and cognitive dysfunctions.
Company
Dean Sysman
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Cybersecurity
Website
Description
Dean Sysman is a world-renowned cybersecurity expert who was named an EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2021 award winner for the New York region. Before founding Axonius Mr. Sysman co-founded Cymmetria, a YC-backed cyber deception company with Fortune 500 customers. He has spoken at major cybersecurity conferences including Black Hat, Defcon, and CCC.
Mr. Sysman is an alumnus of an elite unit in the Israeli Intelligence Corps, where he served for five years as a team leader and officer and received commendations and awards. Mr. Sysman is a graduate of the special Etgar program, where he earned his bachelor’s in computer science at the age of 19. In 2005, he was part of the gold medal-winning team in the International Robotic Olympics in South Korea. He enjoys playing poker and reading existential philosophy.
Axonius gives customers the confidence to control complexity by mitigating threats, navigating risk, automating response actions, and informing business-level strategy. With solutions for both cyber asset attack surface management and SaaS management, Axonius is deployed in minutes and integrates with hundreds of data sources to provide a comprehensive asset inventory, uncover gaps, and automatically validate and enforce policies. Cited as one of the fastest-growing cybersecurity startups, with accolades from CNBC, Forbes, and Fortune, Axonius covers millions of assets including devices and cloud assets, user accounts, and SaaS applications for customers around the world.
Company
Efrat Fenigson
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Co-Working
Website
Description
Efrat Fenigson is a seasoned CMO and strategist with 17 years of experience in technology, marketing and personal branding. In her current position, Ms. Fenigson is the CMO of Mindspace, a global leader in coworking and flex spaces spanning 32 locations in Europe and the U.S.
Ms. Fenigson was featured as one of StartIsrael’s 2021 most promising marketing leaders in Israel focused on social impact and awarded CMO of the Year for 2019 by Israel’s Geektime magazine as well as one of the top 10 tech marketing executives in Israel in 2017.
Ms. Fenigson is also co-founder of G-CMO, a community of Israel’s top CMOs from global companies. In addition, she is the co-host of “Market Shift,” a videocast on marketing and strategy.
Previously Ms. Fenigson served as vice president of marketing at Airobotics, an autonomous drone startup, and as senior director of marketing at Viaccess-Orca, an Orange Group subsidiary. Ms. Fenigson also founded and managed the “New Media” sector of the Israeli Export Institute, enabling hundreds of Israeli startups to take their first steps in global business and contributing to international sales.
Ms. Fenigson co-manages the Israeli personal branding community on Facebook, called “Walk the Talk,” with 6,000 community members. In addition to being a frequent speaker at industry events, a blogger and a startup mentor, she is also a guest lecturer in academia.
Ms. Fenigson’s experience extends beyond business development and marketing, having worked as a software engineer in the video game industry. She holds a bachelor’s in computer science from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She is mom to 11-year-old Ethan and is a social activist with a passion for fashion, design, travel and food.
Company
Sophie Melnik-Amitay
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Location
Herzliya
Sector
Venture Capital
Website
Description
With a marketing career spanning nearly 20 years, Sophie Melnik-Amitay brings with her a diverse skill set and vast professional expertise. She is experienced in leading marketing teams across a variety of industries, for multi billion-dollar unicorns, with strategic thinking as well as the ability to be hands-on. In 2021, she was named as one of StartIsrael’s most promising marketing leaders in Israel.
Currently, Ms. Melnik-Amitay is CMO-in-Residence at Joy Ventures, a venture capital fund dedicated to developing science-backed consumer products that help people experience everyday moments of joy and improve their wellbeing. She is also co-founder of G-CMO, a community of Israel’s top CMOs from global companies.
Ms. Melnik-Amitay is passionate about entrepreneurship, creativity, and growth in complex global and diverse B2B and B2C environments. This is reflected in her previous roles which include leading global marketing and strategy at adtech unicorns Taboola and Outbrain and as vice president of strategy at several global advertising firms.
A true believer in investing in the next generation of marketers, Ms. Melnik-Amitay is a senior MBA lecturer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
As a cancer survivor, Ms. Melnik-Amitay is a vocal advocate working on raising awareness of health concerns amongst younger generations by volunteering at Halas Sartan (Stop Cancer).
Sophie is Guy’s life partner and a proud mom of three teenage girls, whom she tries to teach to follow their hearts, dream big and dare to fail. She holds an MBA from HEC in Paris.
Company
Shiri Grosbard
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Community/NGO
Website
Description
Shiri Grosbard is first and foremost an entrepreneur. So it comes at no surprise that throughout her 20-year career, she has either established her own companies from scratch or consulted others on their own ventures.
Today, Ms. Grosbard is the director of people, brand and experience at Verbit.ai, which provides technologies that make all video and audio content accessible to everyone. Verbit’s in-house, AI-based solutions take live and recorded audio and video to the next level with the support of 22,000 human professional transcribers. Ms. Grosbard is also co-founder of G-CMO, a community of Israel’s top CMOs from global companies, as well as co-founder of Join – Digital Talent Agency.
Previously, Ms. Grosbard was head of culture and innovation at Appsflyer. She drove innovative thought amongst the company’s People Operations leadership in relation to employee brand. This meant implementing and evolving cultural interventions that shaped and shifted the company’s culture across 19 offices worldwide while impacting the business strategy.
Past roles also include CMO at Join – Digital Talent Agency, a recruiting agency for digital marketing positions which she still co-owns. She also served as the CEO of Nirshamim Ltd., a unique lead-generation company which was successfully sold to the largest media group in Israel at the time.
Ms. Grosbard holds a master’s in sociology from Tel Aviv University and a bachelor’s in communication and journalism (with honors) from Sapir Academic College. In 2018 she was named one of the top 100 digital media influencers.
Ms. Grosbard is a passionate public speaker, a women’s rights advocate, and a proud 3rd generation descendant of Holocaust survivors.
Company
Roey Eliyahu
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
API Security
Website
Description
Roey Eliyahu’s service in the elite security units of the Israeli Defense Forces focused on building large-scale cybersecurity systems to defend the military and government against a variety of attack vectors. He recognized the role that APIs play as the foundational layer of all digital systems and saw how easily they could be hacked. He also saw that existing security technologies could not protect APIs and, more importantly, they are built on architectures that prevent them from ever evolving to defend against API attacks.
Salt Security created the API security market. The company built a patented solution that leverages cloud-scale big data along with machine learning and artificial intelligence for API discovery, attack prevention, and remediation. The Salt Security API Protection Platform enables organizations to protect their APIs across build, deploy, and runtime phases. Through its unique API Context Engine architecture, the Salt platform is able to discover all APIs and the sensitive data that they expose; identify API vulnerabilities in pre-prod testing; stop API attackers; prevent data exfiltration, account takeovers, and service disruption; and simplify compliance.
Salt has two unique advantages that establish it as the leader in the API security market. Only Salt leverages cloud-scale big data, enabling the platform to build rich context over time–essential for detecting API attacks that unfold over days, weeks or months. Second, only Salt has been in the market for more than four years, giving its AI and machine-learning algorithms unparalleled time and exposure to learn and stop API attacks.
Company
Gal Moav
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Developer Tools
Website
Description
Evinced helps enterprise software development teams make their websites, web applications and native mobile apps accessible for people with disabilities. Historically, this has required continuous, extensive manual testing with screen readers, keyboards, voice control and other assistive technologies. This exclusive reliance on a labor-intensive approach does not scale in today’s rapid pace of software development.
Evinced has significantly advanced the state of automated testing for accessibility. Its technology visually analyzes a webpage or a mobile app and uses advanced rulesets, computer vision and AI to automatically detect accessibility issues and suggest fixes for developers. Fortune 500 firms like Capital One and others use the Evinced product portfolio of browser extensions, automation SDKs and site scanners to weave accessibility into their software development lifecycle. This enables them to create inclusive digital experiences and remain compliant while maintaining their rapid pace of software delivery.
Evinced was founded by Navin R. Thadani and Gal Moav and is funded by Microsoft ventures, BGV, Engineering Capital and other leading Silicon Valley venture capital firms.
Company
Alon Werber
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Location
Petach Tikva
Sector
Sport Tech
Website
Description
Alon Weber is the CEO of Pixellot, and since 2015 has led the company from its first project to become the biggest sports production platform in the world. Prior to joining Pixellot, Mr. Weber held numerous leadership positions in Israel and the U.S., including vice president of marketing and business development at Pontis, a leading provider of software marketing systems for Telcos; vice president of strategies at Exigen, a provider of business process optimization services; CEO of Gate42 Technologies, developer of an application productivity management suite; and partner and co-CEO at P.O.C., a leading management consulting firm. He holds an MBA and bachelor’s in industrial engineering from Tel Aviv University. In 2021 he released his debut book, “Barriers.”
Only one percent of sporting events worldwide are captured and produced today. The rest–some 200 million events annually, ranging from tier one sports all the way to grassroots and youth sports–are not produced, and the game and player data are not collected. This represents a huge unserved market of players, fans, and coaches.
Pixellot is the leader in automatic AI-based video and analytics solutions for the sports market. Pixellot’s end-to-end technology streamlines the video creation workflow by using an unmanned multi-camera device that covers the entire field and simulates a camera operator, following the action automatically. Using AI, Pixellot enables sports organizations to broadcast sporting events that would otherwise not receive coverage and monetize them using ads, videos, and PPV. In addition to the live video coverage fans can enjoy commentary, graphics, game and player highlights as well as team and individual stats.
In five years, Pixellot has produced more than one million games from 18,000 venues across 16 types of sports. The company streams 80,000 live games per month on a variety of platforms (web, mobile, OTT, etc.). Customers include sports federations, broadcasters, sports betting companies, rights holders, and production companies as well as the world’s leading professional clubs.
Company
Yoni Tserruya
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Enterprise Tech
Website
Description
Yoni Tserruya, Lusha’s co-founder and CEO, is a 36-year-old software engineer turned entrepreneur. Mr. Tserruya first developed Lusha as a side project in 2016 along with co-founder Assaf Eisenstein. They wanted to create a prospecting solution that allowed salespeople to spend more time selling and less time on administrative work. Lusha quickly exploded in popularity, and Mr. Tserruya decided to turn his passion into his profession. Today he creates the vision and strategy that informs all product and business decisions at Lusha. He focuses on envisioning the future of the data world and then making his vision a reality by hiring the right team and anticipating the future needs of customers.
Lusha is B2B’s largest sales prospecting platform with over 670,000 users to date. As a crowdsourced data community Lusha empowers sales, marketing and recruitment professionals to identify, engage and close qualified prospects with accurate, self-serviced data.
Lusha’s community approach allows salespeople from organizations of all sizes to get immediate and affordable access to enterprise-grade prospecting tools. By integrating billions of community and publicly available data points, Lusha opens the door for companies to maximize their revenue growth while providing data insights that help companies focus on their most revenue-yielding pipeline. Lusha’s community has expanded to over 223,000 sales organizations including Google, Dropbox, Uber, Sprinklr and Aircall.
Lusha was founded in 2016 by Assaf Eisenstein and Yoni Tserruya and is headquartered in Tel Aviv with an office in Boston.
Company
Leeor Ben-Peretz
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Location
Petach Tikva
Sector
Digital Intelligence
Website
Description
Leeor Ben-Peretz leads Cellebrite’s strategy and corporate business development functions. He brings 25 years of experience in digital intelligence, forensic, telecom, and software security markets, having served in key business development and product management related positions at industry-leading companies such as Aladdin Knowledge Systems (NASDAQ: ALDN), Pelephone Communications, Comverse (NASDAQ: CMVT) and InfoGin.
During his 12-year tenure with Cellebrite, Mr. Ben-Peretz has been instrumental in driving the evolution of the company’s offering from a single product to a rich portfolio of innovative products, solutions, and services. He holds an executive MBA from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a bachelor’s in business and economics from the Academic College of Tel Aviv.
Cellebrite’s (Nasdaq: CLBT) mission is to enable its customers to protect and save lives, accelerate justice and preserve privacy in communities around the world. Cellebrite is the global leader in digital intelligence solutions for the public and private sectors, empowering organizations in mastering the complexities of legally sanctioned digital investigations by streamlining intelligence processes. Trusted by thousands of leading agencies and companies in more than 140 countries, Cellebrite’s Digital Intelligence Platform and solutions transform how customers collect, review, analyze and manage data in legally sanctioned investigations.
Company
Efrat Ferri
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Location
Kfar Vitkin
Sector
Food Tech
Website
Description
Sufresca develops novel bio-coatings for fruits and vegetables that prolong shelf life and help create a plastic-free world, where costly food loss and waste is a thing of the past. Led by its co-founder and CEO, Efrat Ferri, Sufresca has an impressive team who are leaders in their field. Growing up on a farm, Ms. Ferri, who holds an advanced degree in physics and chemistry, is well familiar with the issues agricultural producers are facing. As a long distance runner, Ms. Ferri is determined to breathe new life into the fight against food waste and plastic overuse.
It is estimated that 38% to 55% of fresh fruit and vegetables produced globally are lost or wasted. This results in massive carbon and water footprints, devastating impact on food security and hampering productivity of supply chains at a great financial cost to all actors. Paired with biodegradable alternatives, Sufresca’s coatings render harmful plastic packaging obsolete in addressing these issues under the threat of climate change.
Maintaining high quality of perishables for long periods is difficult, but years of academic research resulted in Sufresca’s edible coating for fruits and vegetables as well as other unique solutions for bulbs and fresh snacks. Sufresca’s technology significantly extends shelf life across a wide variety of environmental conditions. These coatings are truly natural, biodegradable, simple to use, and easily implemented in packing houses big and small as they only require standard or otherwise simple equipment.
Sufresca is an Israel-based agtech startup dedicated to developing innovative bio-edible coatings for a growing variety of fresh produce, using only natural and biodegradable ingredients. Sufresca’s technology originated at the Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at the lab of Sufresca’s co- founder, Prof. Amos Nussinovitch.
Company
Or Offer
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Enterprise Tech
Website
Description
Or Offer’s global data intelligence empire started with a simple thing: fixing a personal problem he had. As a son of two jewelry designers, Mr. Offer was keen to help his parents and find more information online about similar successful designers. He discovered there wasn’t any tool for searching products based on resemblance to other products, so he created one. And the rest is history.
Today, Similarweb is the most trusted platform for understanding online behavior. Millions of people use Similarweb’s insights daily to strengthen their knowledge of the digital world. The company empowers anyone—from the curious individual to the enterprise business leader—to make smarter decisions by understanding why things happen across the digital ecosystem. Mr. Offer has been the CEO of Similarweb since the company’s founding in 2007. Under his leadership the company has grown from a small Israeli startup to a global business with more than 1,000 employees, 11 offices and thousands of paying customers. Mr. Offer was also a founding partner at AfterDownload (acquired by IronSource) and is an active investor in a number of startups.
Company
Zohar Elhanani
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Location
Shefayim
Sector
Medical Imaging
Website
Description
Zohar Elhanani has more than 25 years of experience in a variety of leadership roles across startup and growth businesses, industries and geographies.
As an Israeli-American, Mr Elhanani has spent over 20 years living and working in the U.S., leading companies with global business operations and diverse cultures, operating activities across a variety of complex industries and geographies. During this time he has established a proven capacity to master new domains and lead organizations in a relatively short time frame. Such industries included growth ventures in medical imaging AI, financial services, and insurtech at different phases: start up, growth and M&A.
He holds an MBA from Solvay Business School in Brussels, Belgium, from which he graduated summa cum laude, as well as dual degrees in law and economics from Tel Aviv University in Israel.
Mr. Elhanani joined Zebra Medical Vision as CEO in September 2020. Within a year, Nanox agreed to acquire the company with the goal of leveraging Zebra-Med’s industry-leading team, cutting-edge AI technology, cloud capabilities, and unprecedented regulatory framework to form the next-generation medtech juggernaut. This move is anticipated to fuel the companies’ shared goal of developing the next generation of AI-enabled hardware and software devices, which are expected to set a new standard in the medical device sector.
Zebra Al-based imaging solutions detect chronic medical indications as part of population health management. It does this by harnessing its imaging data repository to enable healthcare systems to better evaluate large volumes of patients for chronic condition vulnerabilities, alerting relevant healthcare stakeholders and triggering new care pathways. Zebra Medical Vision’s solutions integrate into existing healthcare system workflows, including radiology, primary care physicians and specialists in cardiology, bone health and others.
Company
Tomer Tzach
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Location
Netanya
Sector
Agri Tech
Website
Description
Tomer Tzach joined CropX in January 2017 as the CEO. A seasoned executive with a strong technological and financial background, Mr. Tzach has led three technology companies that generated multimillion-dollar revenues, two of which were acquired by strategic investors under his leadership. In addition, Mr. Tzach was an acting partner at Eurofund, Israel’s most successful vintage 2000 VC fund. Prior to that, he spent seven years in the Israeli Air Force as a pilot.
Mr. Tzach holds an MBA from the University of Haifa (summa cum laude) and bachelor’s in computer science from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
A global leader in agricultural analytics, CropX is revolutionizing the farm and automating the decision-making process by combining above-ground data sets with real-time soil data. CropX gives farmers an unmatched connection to their soil, offering proprietary soil sensor technology and cloud-based ag analytics that integrate with irrigation systems.
The affordable, easy-to-install CropX system helps farmers sustainably increase crop yield and quality by significantly reducing water, fertilization and energy usage and costs while minimizing runoff and waterway pollution. Founded in 2015, CropX is backed by world-leading strategic partners and investors, such as Finistere Ventures, Greensoil Investments, Innovation Endeavors, OurCrowd and others.
Company
Moshe Shlisel
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Location
Ramla
Sector
Auto Tech
Website
Description
GuardKnox CEO Moshe Shlisel co-founded the company in 2016 with Dionis Teshler, who serves as CTO. Mr. Shlisel has more than 18 years of successful managerial experience, including as an executive at TADIRAN Communication and Elbit Systems, as general manager of medical ERP startup ExactCost, as CEO of audience measurement startup TruMedia and as COO of satellite communication company SatixFy. He is a veteran of the Israeli Air Force where he served as deputy commander of a special operations unit and oversaw the development and application of highly complex products.
Today, Mr. Shlisel is leading a team of industry all-stars to provide best-in-class products for the automotive industry. The mobility market is going through a paradigm shift that is redefining a car from simply a means of transportation towards a personalized, extension of our digital lives. This “iPhonization” of the automobile has created a new dynamic in which consumers receive a software-defined computer on wheels that is customizable to their specific preferences. Whether drivers want to upgrade their horsepower, traction, or battery management, automakers will be able to simultaneously deliver while ensuring safety and security remain the top priority.
To address these evolving consumer demands, GuardKnox empowers tier-one suppliers, OEMs and the aftermarket to deliver the next generation of software-defined and service-oriented vehicles. The GuardKnox solution allows for added connectivity, vehicle personalization, secure application deployment and hosting, high-speed routing (including network recovery and service discovery functionalities), and next-generation electronic architecture.
Company
Yonatan Adiri
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Med Tech
Website
Description
Yonatan Adiri is an Israeli digital healthcare entrepreneur and founder and CEO of Healthy.io.
In 2008, at the age of 26, Mr. Adiri was entrusted by the president of Israel, Shimon Peres, as the country’s first chief technology officer and steered the country’s technological diplomacy with his counterparts in world capitals. In his role, he was responsible for the president’s long-term agenda on transformative technologies such as neuroscience, immunotherapy, stem Cells and bioinformatics.
As part of his service, Mr. Adiri participated in the inaugural class (2009) of Singularity University’s GSP program, where he co-founded “the Airbnb of cars,” GetAround. In 2012 he was recognized by the World Economic Forum as one of its 100 Young Global Leaders and was selected by TIME Magazine as one of the 50 most influential people in healthcare in 2018.
In 2013, Mr. Adiri founded Healthy.io, a digital health company that transforms the smartphone camera into a medical device. The company’s at-home urinalysis and digitized wound care services enable providers and healthcare systems to close gaps in access and care while increasing patient satisfaction. Healthy.io is a global leader in digital health and a recipient of the CNBC 2020 Disruptor 50 Award, Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Companies 2020 Award, and the Financial Times 2020 Boldness in Business Award.
Company
Dror Davidoff
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Location
Ramat Gan
Sector
Cybersecurity
Website
Description
Dror Davidoff is co-founder and CEO of Aqua Security, the world’s largest pure-play cloud native security company. Mr. Davidoff has more than 20 years of experience in senior management, sales, marketing, and business development in the enterprise software space and has held executive positions at several emerging IT security and analytics companies. Before co-founding Aqua in 2015 he led global sales for database security at McAfee and was executive vice president of sales and business development at Sentrigo (acquired by McAfee).
Aqua Security pioneered the market for container security and today is the leader in cloud-native security solutions. Offering the broadest portfolio for securing cloud-native applications throughout their lifecycle, the Aqua platform protects on any cloud, across VMs, within containers and even serverless deployments. Aqua enables customers to capture the benefits of cloud native development without sacrificing the security of their supply chains and production environments. More than 450 enterprises around the world, including more than 25 percent of the Fortune 500, deploy the Aqua Platform. Aqua also has strategic partnerships with AWS, Azure, GCP, Rad Hat and VMware.
Beyond industry-leading product innovation, Aqua is committed to securing cloud-native assets and environments around the world. Team Nautilus, Aqua’s dedicated security research team, is on the front lines every day investigating and finding ways to mitigate attacks on cloud-native applications and infrastructure. Their findings educate the market on cloud-native threats, drive Aqua product innovation, and inform enforcement policies.
Company
Michael Shaulov
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Cybersecurity
Website
Description
Michael Shaulov is CEO and co-founder of Fireblocks, a global leader in digital asset and crypto custody technology. Prior to Fireblocks, he co-founded Lacoon Mobile Security–which was acquired by Check Point–and was then appointed head of products, mobile and cloud security for Check Point. Mr. Shaulov is a serial cybersecurity entrepreneur and investor. Before his commercial endeavors, Michael pioneered the mobile security field in the Israeli military intelligence’s elite 8200 unit, where he received the Israeli Presidential Excellency Honor for his contributions.
Fireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based self-custodial wallet infrastructure. Fireblocks serves more than 900 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $2 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage and transit.
The Fireblocks platform propagates the expansion of digital asset use cases beyond bitcoin into payments, gaming, NFTs and digital securities, and ultimately allows any business to become a digital asset business. Fireblocks’ technology can be white-labeled for crypto custody solutions, allowing new and established financial institutions to implement direct custody on their own without having to rely on third parties.
Since its inception in 2019, Fireblocks has raised $14 billion from leading global VCs in the fintech, blockchain and cybersecurity space, and in July announced it had raised $550 million in Series E funding. This extension of capital marks a significant milestone for Fireblocks, boosting the company’s valuation to over $8 billion.
Company
Gal Rimon
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Location
Ra'anana
Sector
Enterprise Tech
Website
Description
After many years of leading business intelligence companies, Gal Rimon realized there was a gap in the market. Most BI tools were focused on analyzing data on performance to provide insights for managers–insights that would be reported to leadership and influence strategy but had little impact on the individual frontline employee. Data was rarely used to guide employees’ day-to-day activities and behaviors, even though these were the strongest influencers on the successful execution of strategy and the delivery of customer experience.
Mr. Rimon founded Centrical with the goal of closing this gap and bringing data down to the frontline. His vision is making employees the center of business success, using real-time data to guide employee training and behavior so that each employee can reach their full potential, improve, and deliver the maximum impact on business results.
Centrical provides an Employee Centric Success Platform. It helps companies improve their business results by improving their employees’ performance. The platform blends advanced gamification with personalized microlearning, real-time performance management, and proactive manager coaching tools to make sure every employee knows their goals, understands how to achieve them, and is always motivated to excel.
Centrical is embedded with some of the world’s leading organizations including Microsoft, British Telecom, Coca Cola, and Verizon. Companies implementing Centrical’s platform see improvements such as higher employee productivity and retention, increased average deal values, faster onboarding and time to proficiency and increased customer satisfaction.
Company
Arnon Kraft
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Location
Petach Tikva
Sector
Fintech
Website
Description
Arnon Kraft is a business and operations executive with over 20 years of management experience at Fortune 500 companies in the U.S., including Microsoft and SanDisk, and at various startups in Israel. Mr. Kraft is responsible for overseeing, maintaining and driving execution and delivery of Payoneer’s services to global customers and aligning on company priorities. Working closely with the business, he also oversees onboarding of new customers and partners, program management, and all operations functions as well as the company’s operational effectiveness and efficiency initiatives.
Payoneer (NASDAQ: PAYO) is the world’s go-to partner for digital commerce, everywhere. From borderless payments to boundless growth, Payoneer promises any business, in any market, the technology, connections and confidence to participate and flourish in the new global economy.
Since 2005, Payoneer has been imagining and engineering a truly global ecosystem so the entire world can realize its potential. Payoneer is powering growth for customers ranging from aspiring entrepreneurs in emerging markets to the world’s leading digital brands like Airbnb, Amazon, Google, Walmart and Upwork.
Company
Kobi Marenko
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Auto Tech
Website
Description
Arbe Robotics (Nasdaq: ARBE) is spearheading a radar revolution, enabling truly safe driver-assist systems today while paving the way to full autonomous driving in the future. A global leader in next-generation 4D imaging radar solutions, Arbe provides advance sensing and paradigm-changing perception to dozens of leading automotive OEMs, tier-one suppliers and mobility partners. Arbe’s Imaging Radar offers 100 times more detail than any other radar on the market at an unparalleled cost advantage. It is a vital sensor for unmatched safety, from hands-free driving all the way to full vehicle autonomy.
Arbe’s proprietary chipset solution resolves some of today’s most pressing perception challenges – seeing through objects blocking one’s line of sight, determining the orientation and velocity of other vehicles to know what lies ahead, identifying bicycles and pedestrians, and differentiating real objects from false alarms to eliminate phantom breaking – in all weather and lighting conditions. In terms of performance, Arbe’s technology platform is dramatically superior to its nearest competitors.
Founded in 2015 by CEO Kobi Marenko and CTO Dr. Noam Arkind, the company today is led by a broad and experienced team of entrepreneurs, auto and semiconductor executives, and radar and data scientists.
The fast-growing automotive radar market has an anticipated total addressable market value of $11 billion by 2025. With its recent Nasdaq listing and a highly scalable business model, Arbe is positioned for commercial success in the automotive, industrial, and new mobility markets. Arbe is headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, and has offices in the United States.
Company
Uri Lavi
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Location
Herzliya
Sector
Auto Tech
Website
Description
Uri Lavi is a passionate visionary and an experienced motorcyclist. Before Ride Vision, Mr. Lavi was the CEO at PicScout, which he led the company through multiple pivotal changes which resulted in it becoming the industry leader in visual content tracking and analysis
Prior to joining PicScout, Uri held leadership positions at a variety of other companies ranging from startups to multinational corporations. He has also managed teams in the insurance and homeland security sectors. He holds a bachelor’s in software engineering from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
Ride Vision is the first-ever Advanced Rider Assistance System built to prevent two-wheeler accidents, providing riders with real-time alerts on life-threatening situations so they can take split-second decisions and stay safe. Ride Vision’s product is retrofittable to any model and the technology is also available for OEMs for future integrations into new product lines and models.
The system works by using two small wide-angle cameras mounted on the rear and front of the vehicle that transmit footage to Ride Vision’s onboard processing unit, where a patented algorithm is used to detect and notify riders of collision threats in real-time.
Company
Zvika Netter
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Location
Ramat Gan
Sector
Ad Tech
Website
Description
Zvika Netter is responsible for strengthening Innovid’s industry position and strategic relationships. Prior to Innovid Mr. Netter founded and acted as CEO of Converit, a real-time collaboration platform for financial services.
Before Innovid, Mr. Netter founded and served as CEO of NTR Visual Technologies and co-founded GarageGeeks. In 2009 he was selected as a “Tech Pioneer Who Will Change Your Life” by Time Magazine.
Innovid is the only independent omni-channel advertising and analytics platform built for television. The platform uses data to enable the personalization, delivery, and measurement of ads across the widest breadth of channels in the market including TV, video, display, social, audio, and DOOH. Innovid seamlessly connects all media, delivering superior advertising experiences across the audience journey.
Innovid serves a global client base of brands, agencies, and publishers through 15 offices across the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific.
Company
Tor Ivry
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Wellness Tech
Website
Description
Tor Ivry is one of the founders who developed Nanit and currently leads the company’s strategy and implementation of the technologies used in all of its products. He holds a master’s in computer science and bioinformatics and worked as a software architect, R&D leader and developer for companies including Conduit, Philips and Applied Materials.
Nanit is on a mission to support the journey of parenting. The Nanit family of award-winning products keeps parents connected and informed while providing personalized insights and guidance to support their baby’s sleep and well-being. From the AI-powered Nanit HD camera that tracks and analyzes a baby’s sleep and growth, to real-time breathing motion monitoring with Breathing Wear, to capturing amazing moments with the in-app Memories feature, Nanit helps parents see and understand everything happening in and around the crib. Since launching in 2016, Nanit has tracked over 500 million hours of sleep, 81 million parental visits, and over 44 million morning wakeups.
Company
Gilad Japhet
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Location
Or Yehuda
Sector
Consumer Tech
Website
Description
Gilad Japhet’s passion for family history began when preparing a genealogy school project at age 13. Twenty years later, he decided to dedicate six months to working on his own family tree. Not satisfied with the family tree software on the market at the time, he started developing his own. Then he decided to transform his hobby into a full-time career.
Mr. Japhet assembled a small team for his genealogy startup and set up shop in a nearby barn. With chickens clucking in the background, MyHeritage was born. The team released the service for free in several languages. The dream was to create a genealogy platform that would connect the whole world.
That was 2003. Fast forward to today, MyHeritage is an extended family of 500 employees serving 98 million users worldwide, with 1.1 million annual subscribers and strong profitability. The platform is available in 42 languages, added DNA testing in 2016, and was recently acquired by leading private equity firm Francisco Partners.
MyHeritage’s Deep Nostalgia feature took the internet by storm last year, propelling MyHeritage to the #1 spot of the app charts in Europe and the USA. With millions of family trees, a robust DNA database, and billions of historical records, it’s easier than ever to trace your family history on MyHeritage.
Entrenched in the company’s values is leveraging its technologies and expertise to do good in the world. One of MyHeritage’s most ambitious projects to date, led by Gilad, was to establish a COVID-19 testing lab in Israel in just 3 weeks. Since opening in June 2020, the lab has conducted 6.5 million PCR tests and saved countless lives.
Company
Amit Bareket
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Cybersecurity
Website
Description
Amit Bareket is the CEO and co-founder of Perimeter 81, an industry-leading SaaS security platform providing radically simplified cybersecurity for businesses and organizations. He holds eight patents for storage, mobile applications, and user interface.
After working as a software engineer for IBM XIV Storage and BigBand Networks, he founded his first company, SaferVPN, which was sold to J2 Global in 2019. Mr. Bareket strives to provide the world with smarter but simpler solutions to solve emerging and evolving cyber challenges.
Company
Eze Vidra
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Location
Tel Aviv / London
Sector
Venture Capital
Website
Description
Eze Vidra is the co-founder of Remagine Ventures, a seed and pre-seed venture firm investing in the future of gaming, metaverse and consumer tech in Israel and U.K. Prior to Remagine, Mr. Vidra was the founding head of Campus London, Google’s first physical hub for startups. He scaled the Campus model internationally as the head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and was a general partner at Google Ventures. In Strategic Partnerships at Google he helped launch Google Shopping, Local Shopping, and Google Wallet in various markets.
Mr. Vidra joined Google after holding leadership positions at Shopping.com, Gerson Lehrman Group, Ask.com and AOL Europe. He is the author of two patents on web search and online advertising. In 2005 he founded vccafe.com, named as one of the top venture capital blogs worldwide. He also co-founded Techbikers, a non-profit focused on supporting girls’ education. Techbikers has built 11 schools and 50 libraries in Africa and Asia since its inception in 2021.
Mr. Vidra holds a bachelor’s from IDC University with distinction and is a graduate of the Zell Entrepreneurship Program. He also holds an MBA from London Business School and resides in London with his family. A native Argentinean raised in Israel, he is fluent in Spanish, Hebrew and English.
Company
Gideon Ben Zvi
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Location
Sector
Semiconductor
Website
Description
Gideon Ben-Zvi is the CEO of Valens Semiconductor, a premier provider of high-speed connectivity solutions for the automotive and audio-video markets. He has more than 30 years of experience as a serial entrepreneur.
Mr. Ben-Zvi has co-founded four companies and led three of them to exits, including BriefCam (acquired in 2018 for $90 million by Canon Japan), Ligature (acquired for $29 million in 1998) and Wizcom (IPO at $120 million valuation). Gideon has strengthened this track record of strong leadership, announcing that Valens is set to list on the NYSE with a $1.16 billion valuation.
Valens’s Emmy award-winning HDBaseT technology is the leading standard in the professional audio-video market with tens of millions of Valens chipsets integrated into thousands of HDBaseT-enabled products. The company counts as its customers all of the leading audio-video product manufacturers, including Epson, LG, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, Harman, Crestron, Extron, Logitech, and many more. These companies have created thousands of electronic devices that rely on Valens’s HDBaseT technology for their basic connectivity solution. Valens audio-video solutions can be deployed wherever long distance high-definition video systems are required for time-sensitive applications that require zero latency, with applications spanning the medical, education and industrial sectors.
After setting the standard in the audio-video market, Valens has positioned itself to do the same in the much larger automotive market. The company’s underlying technology has been selected by the MIPI Alliance as the basis for its global standard for high-speed automotive connectivity, which is set to transform the industry as it transitions towards the next stages in the evolution of autonomous driving. Valens chipsets are on the road in vehicles around the world, including in Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz S-Class.
Company
Shahar Bin-Nun
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Location
Haifa
Sector
Auto Tech
Website
Description
Shahar Bin-Nun has 21 years of experience in global sales, marketing and business development. Before joining Tactile Mobility he served as the CEO of HumanEyes Technologies, a VR company with more than 70 patents in various 3D fields and computer vision. Prior to his tenure at HumanEyes, he served as vice president of sales and business development for Press-sense, a provider of software solutions to the printing industry; vice president of sales at Magink Display; and CEO of CTV Tech.
Tactile Mobility enables the next phase of mobility development by leveraging existing vehicle sensors and artificial intelligence to equip vehicles with the missing sense of “touch.”
The company’s solutions consist of its in-vehicle software-only module residing on one of the vehicle’s computers and its cloud-based system. Tactile’s software collects first-order data–including wheel speed, wheel angle, RPM, paddles position and gear position–from vehicles’ built-in non-visual sensors and analyzes it to yield actionable insights in real-time.
These insights provide a clear-cut, highly accurate description and analysis of the continually evolving state of the vehicle, roads, and vehicle-road dynamics. Tactile Mobility’s insights are beneficial across many sectors due to their availability, accuracy, and quality–from road planning and management to tracking tire conditions and wear, and even for insurance purposes.
By generating, collecting, and processing data from existing in-vehicle sensors about the vehicle, road, and surrounding environment, Tactile Mobility enables OEMs, tier-one suppliers, insurers, and city maintenance and planning departments to offer their customers innovative products, driving efficiency and performance as well as a safe driving experience, depending on their specific objectives.
Company
Ami Daniel
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Logistics Tech
Website
Description
Ami Daniel is the co-founder and CEO of Windward. For two decades he has harnessed innovation and a relentless focus on driving transformative change to build successful organizations in both the nonprofit and private sectors.
A seven-year veteran of the Israeli Navy–where he developed his passion for the sea–Mr. Daniel co-founded Windward in 2010 with the mission of bringing predictive intelligence to the maritime ecosystem. Over the past decade the company has partnered with governments worldwide, the United Nations, energy supermajors, banks, marine insurers, and compliance teams to power operational readiness and future-forward decisions. Prior to co-founding Windward, Mr. Daniel led a community center aimed at promoting coexistence and an NGO to inspire and engage youth at risk. The recipient of a bachelor’s in law and business from Tel Aviv University, Mr. Daniel has won numerous accolades over the course of his career, including the Ilan Ramon Award for Excellence and the Israeli President’s Award for Social Good.
Windward is the leading predictive intelligence company fusing AI and big data to digitalize the global maritime industry, enabling organizations to achieve business and operational readiness. Windward’s AI-powered solution allows stakeholders including banks, commodity traders, insurers, and major energy and shipping companies to make real time, predictive intelligence-driven decisions, providing a 360-degree view of the maritime ecosystem and its broader impact on safety, security, finance and business.
Company
Prof. Moshe Shoham
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Location
Haifa
Sector
Med Tech
Website
Description
Prof. Moshe Shoham is a globally acclaimed authority in the field of robotics, whose life work is dedicated to developing technologies that improve patient care. He is one of the few Israelis to be elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and has received more than a dozen awards, including the prestigious 2013 Thomas A. Edison Patent Award and most recently the 2021 Yigal Alon Prize. This prestigious prize has been awarded annually since 1982 to an individual, entity or organization whose life’s work or actions serve as a model of pioneering excellence and contribution to Israeli society.
Prof. Shoham founded and led the medical robotics laboratory at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, which incubated several successful robotic companies. He is the inventor of the first commercially available guidance system for spine surgery, Renaissance Guidance System, developed by Mazor Robotics, a company he founded and which was acquired by Medtronic in 2018 in a $1.6 billion deal.
In 2018 Prof. Shoham founded Tamar Robotics based on five years of research conducted in his laboratory with his student and co-founder Dr. Hadas Ziso. The company is developing an endoscopic surgical robotic system for bringing the benefits of minimally invasive robotic surgery to “small cavity” procedures. Developed for providing superior outcomes in challenging workspaces, the Tamar system is based on robotic working channels that can safely and accurately reach targets beyond the axis of the endoscope and also offers improved surround vision. The system is expected to offer improved clinical and economic benefits for millions of procedures annually worldwide in neurosurgery, spine surgery, head and neck surgery, urology, thoracic surgery and more. The company is initially focused on introducing its system for use in pituitary tumor removal surgery.
Company
Ben Volkow
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Location
Herzliya
Sector
Auto Tech
Website
Description
Prior to Otonomo, Ben Volkow established an astounding track record as founder and CEO of three successful companies. He served for four years as a business unit general manager at F5 Networks (NASDAQ:FFIV), which he joined after the acquisition of Traffix, where he was co-founder and CEO. Mr. Volkow built Traffix into a multi-million-dollar global business, working with partners and Tier One service providers around the world.
Otonomo fuels a data ecosystem of OEMs, fleets, and more than 100 service providers spanning the transportation, mobility and automotive industries. Otonomo’s platform securely ingests more than 4 billion data points per day globally from over 40 million vehicles licensed on the platform and massive amounts of mobility demand data from multimodal sources, then reshapes and enriches it to accelerate time to market for new services that improve the mobility and transportation experience.
In harnessing the power of mobility intelligence, we provide deeper visibility and actionable insights to empower strategic data-driven decisions–taking the guesswork out of mobility and transportation planning, deployment and operations. Privacy by design and neutrality are at the core of our mobility intelligence platform, which enables GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy-regulation-compliant solutions using both personal and aggregate data. Use cases include emergency services, mapping, traffic management, EV management, subscription-based services, micro-mobility, parking, predictive maintenance, insurance, media, in-vehicle services, and dozens of smart city solutions. Otonomo has an R&D center in Israel and a presence in the United States and Europe.
Company
Gal Oron
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Location
Tel Aviv/New York
Sector
Enterprise Tech
Website
Description
As CEO and co-founder of Zoomin, Gal Oron is leading a paradigm shift around how companies get value out of the rich technical content they already have. Mr. Oron founded Zoomin in 2016, bringing with him an extensive background in entrepreneurship. A former fighter pilot in the Israeli Air Force, he accrued over a decade of experience in investment and SaaS, serving as a partner at Trigger Partners and an M&A specialist at Verint. Previously, he rose from software engineer to president at Orsus (acquired by NICE Systems). Today, he lives with his wife and three children in New York. An avid reader and passionate believer in the power of culture, Gal strives to apply lessons from his readings across history books, sports biographies, religious texts and psychological literature to the culture at Zoomin.
Enterprise companies have tons of technical content for using their products. But with so many content types, channels and different groups creating content, finding it is a challenge. In addition to frustrating existing and prospective customers, this makes them lose trust in those enterprise products and leads them to look for alternatives.
Zoomin sets a new standard for how customers experience technical content. Our platform brings together product user guides, support articles, developer documentation and more in one unified place, to match the right answer to the right person at the right time. Since we are the place where end-users interact with our customer’s content, we also offer rich analytics around what customers are interested in, where they are experiencing the most friction and the most promising areas for improvement. This makes companies more productive, cutting support tickets in half and reducing content publishing from hours to minutes. It also helps customers succeed by helping them get the most out of products and continuously improving their experience.
Company
Ori Bauer
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Artificial Intelligence
Website
Description
Ori Bauer has more than 20 years of experience delivering top-notch products, leading R&D and product teams in both startups and large global corporations. Mr. Bauer was vice president of engineering at Storwize, a storage startup that was acquired by IBM, and later led the IBM Storage R&D center in Israel and a global group (of more than 400 employees) developing cloud, software-defined, and all-flash storage products. Before that, he led R&D at Algotec, a medical imaging startup that was acquired by Kodak, and was founder and CEO of Glean Health, an innovative digital health data startup. Mr. Bauer started his career as an officer in a technology unit of the Israeli Defense Forces. He holds a bachelor’s in computer science and economics and an MBA.
Today, Mr. Bauer is the CEO of Dynamic Yield, which helps enterprise brands quickly build and test personalized, optimized, and synchronized digital customer interactions.
Marketing, product, development, and ecommerce teams from more than 400 global brands are using Dynamic Yield’s Experience Optimization platform as the technology layer that works alongside existing CMS, Commerce, or ESP solutions to iterate faster and algorithmically match content, products, and offers to each individual for the acceleration of long-term business value.
Company
Dedi Gilad
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Location
Netanya
Sector
Med Tech
Website
Description
TytoCare is the global healthcare industry’s first all-in-one, AI-powered modular device and examination platform for on-demand, remote medical exams, transforming primary care by putting health in the hands of consumers. The company’s FDA-cleared handheld examination kit enables users to perform comprehensive physical exams–from any location–of the heart, skin, ears, throat, abdomen, and lungs as well as measure blood oxygen levels, heart rate, and body temperature, which are key for monitoring Covid-19 and many other chronic and acute conditions.
In addition to the handheld examination kit, TytoCare’s solutions offer patients and healthcare providers a complete telehealth platform for sharing exam data, monitoring chronic conditions, conducting live as well as asynchronous exams, and scheduling visits. TytoCare has a cloud-based data repository with analytics to provide insights for healthcare providers and built-in AI-powered guidance technology to ensure accuracy and ease-of-use for patients.
Co-founded by Dedi Gilad and Ofer Tzadik in 2012, TytoCare has partnered with more than 150 major health systems, health plans, and strategic partners in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Israel. In 2020 alone, TytoCare performed more than 650,000 telehealth examinations worldwide.
Company
Yotam Drechsler
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Location
Jerusalem
Sector
Med Tech
Website
Description
BrainQ is developing a novel at-home therapy for stroke recovery and other neuro disorders. Last year the company received a breakthrough designation by the FDA following their pilot results showing 250% improvement over sham (placebo) and standard of care.
Their technology utilizes AI to extract biological features in brain waves that are then used to target networks in the brain for recovery with a low-intensity frequency tuned electromagnetic field delivered by a noninvasive wearable device. The device is cloud-connected and designed for a decentralized care model between hospital and home. The company has recently launched EMAGINE, a pivotal multicenter trial in the US for subacute ischemic stroke patients with some of the top medical sites in the country.
As CEO and cofounder of BrainQ, Yotam Dreschler supervises the strategic development of BrainQ’s novel technology. Mr. Dreschler, together with his team of top-ranked data science and neuroscience experts, has led the company in creating a solution that can become a game-changer for 100 million stroke survivors worldwide. Prior to BrainQ he worked for several years at BCG alongside senior managers of top multinational companies worldwide, implementing large-scale multibillion-dollar mergers and acquisition activities. He was awarded the BCG 2015 Award of Excellence.
Mr. Dreschler served as a Google Launchpad mentor and is a member of the Forbes Technology Council, McKinsey & Company’s HealthTech CEO forum, and the 8400 Healthtech leadership forum. He’s a captain in the military reserves, serving in multiple positions in combat engineering and Ministry of Defense special combat. He holds a bachelor’s in mathematics, cognitive science, and computer science from The Hebrew University and a master’s in financial economics from IDC.
Company
Ziv Binyamini
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Location
Ramat Gan
Sector
Auto Tech
Website
Description
Ziv Binyamini is CEO and co-founder of Foretellix. He is a world-renowned verification visionary with more than 30 years of experience. Prior to Foretellix Mr. Binyamini served as corporate vice president at Cadence running its simulation and verification business. He also served as vice president of R&D at Verisity and at Intel, leading the development of Coverage Driven Verification solutions that changed the way semiconductors are tested.
Unlike their mechanical forebears, modern vehicles rely on ADAS and AV technologies. These systems are designed to make safety-critical, split-second decisions in millions of possible driving scenarios. Yet, while modern vehicles have become complex digital products, their testing processes have yet to undergo their own digital transformation. Current solutions lack the scale and automation required to cover all possible scenarios which these systems may encounter on the road.
This is where Foretellix steps in, with its revolutionary testing management platform using hyper-automation to generate and orchestrate the millions of relevant tests required to verify the safety of these driving systems, expose bugs, and guide development teams using advanced coverage analytics and metrics in the most efficient way to the completion of a safe product.
Founded in 2018, Foretellix is led by a seasoned team with decades of experience in developing advanced verification solutions. Its team has a proven track record in deploying solutions for the world’s leading companies including major suppliers to the automotive industry such as Nvidia, Intel, Qualcomm and Samsung. The Foretellix platform is already being deployed by dozens of the world’s largest OEMs and Tier 1 companies including Volvo Group and DENSO Corp.
Company
Asaf Ezra
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Infrastructure/Cloud
Website
Description
Asaf Ezra is the co-founder and CEO of Granulate, a company providing real-time continuous optimization. Mr. Ezra is a Talpiot program alum and continued his Israeli Defense Force service as a commander in the elite 8200 intelligence unit. He previously held positions as an R&D team leader and project manager where he led more than 30 researchers, engineers, and analysts in large-scale projects.
Granulate continuously optimizes services’ OS resource management from the kernel and runtime level, enabling an immediate application performance improvement and reducing cloud costs within days and without requiring any code changes. Companies such as Mobileye by Intel, Dream11, and 605 that implement Granulate reduce their compute expenses by up to 60%. Their performance benefits from a 40% reduction in response time and 5x increase in throughput.
Company
Arik Kleinstein
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Location
Herzliya
Sector
Venture Capital
Website
Description
For over 25 years Arik Kleinstein has been founding, growing and investing in innovative technology companies. Taking an active part in the genesis of the Israeli startup scene, he co-founded Glilot Capital in 2011 with Kobi Samboursky, striving to bring his experience to the investment space whilst providing ongoing support to Glilot’s portfolio. As a board member, Mr. Kleinstein supported 12 portfolio companies through their successful acquisitions.
In 2021, the Israeli government’s minister of innovation appointed Mr. Kleinstein as a member of the National Research & Development Council. In this strategic thinking arm, Mr. Kleinstein and 12 additional members make recommendations on national policy matters relating to R&D with the purpose of achieving key national goals.
In addition, Mr. Kleinstein currently serves on the board of governors of the Technion University. He is also on the board of the National Council for Civilian Research and Development and the Technion Friends Society.
In 2019, following Glilot Capital’s success, Mr. Samboursky and Mr. Kleinstein welcomed Nofar Amikam as a general partner and launched four additional funds with about $700 million under management. In 2021 Glilot launched Glilot+, a $180 million early growth fund, with Lior Litwak as managing partner.
In total, Glilot has invested in almost 40 portfolio companies and witnessed 12 successful exits in fields ranging from cybersecurity to SAAS and dev/DevOps.
Company
Assaf Henkin
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Insurance Tech
Website
Description
Assaf Henkin is co-founder and president at Sproutt Insurance and previously co-founder and COO at Kontera (acquired by Singtel in 2014). Mr. Henkin is an experienced entrepreneur and technology executive who believes in fusing innovative data-driven products with massive market opportunities via scalable go-to-market solutions.
Sproutt is a new kind of life insurance company that uncovers and rewards the “hidden” healthy behaviors in everyone. Using AI technology, Sproutt’s Quality of Life Index assesses behaviors that reflect healthy living–movement, sleep, emotional health, nutrition and overall lifestyle balance–to personalize life insurance policies for each customer.
Company
Yariv Bash
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Logistics Tech
Website
Description
Yariv Bash is the co-founder and CEO of Flytrex Aviation. Prior to Flytrex, Mr. Bash was the co-founder and the first CEO of SpaceIL, a $100 million Israeli nonprofit that attempted to land Beresheet–the first private interplanetary robotic mission–on the moon in April 2019, making Israel the seventh nation ever to orbit the moon and reach the lunar surface. Mr. Bash holds a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Tel Aviv University.
Flytrex is the leading B2C drone delivery company for restaurants and retailers in the U.S. suburbs (total addressable market: 80 million single-family detached homes), offering unmatched delivery costs and customer experience. Using our Boeing-level FAA-certified drones and delivery optimization cloud system, Flytrex is an order of magnitude more affordable than using humans, allowing us to tap into this blue-ocean market.
Flytrex is one of only three companies targeting this space that are looking forward to receiving a unique FAA commercial-type certification within the coming year, which will clear the way for it to operate in the across U.S. airspace. Flytrex is already operating seven days a week at its North Carolina stations–servicing an area of 10,000 households–and is set to expand to Dallas, Texas.
Flytrex has partnered with leading national restaurant chains and retailers, including Walmart, El Pollo Loco, Brinker International, and many others.
Company
Roni Al-Dor
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Location
Holon
Sector
Insurance Tech
Website
Description
Roni Al-Dor has served as president and CEO of Sapiens since 2005. His first mission was to lead Sapiens to recovery. Four years later, after stabilizing the company and resuming its profitability, Mr. Al-Dor launched an accelerated growth plan to capture the emerging “tech renaissance” in the global insurance market. Under his leadership, Sapiens’ 2021 non-GAAP revenue guidance is from $461 million to $466 million, with the operating margin expected to exceed 17.4%, from less than $50 million revenue and a loss situation in 2005.
Mr. Al-Dor leveraged Sapiens’ assets, supported by a robust M&A program, to develop a rich portfolio and global presence. With Sapiens’ leading product offerings and unique service value proposition, he positioned the company to become a leading player in developing cutting edge software solutions for the insurance industry. Under his leadership, Sapiens expanded into nearly 30 countries, serving more than 600 customers with 4,000 insurance expert employees, and is consistently recognized by leading industry analysts.
Sapiens serves the financial service markets globally, primarily insurance markets, including property and casualty, life, pension and annuity, and workers’ compensation. To help insurers address growing competition, Sapiens’ mission is to enable carriers to be more customer-friendly and efficient through advanced solutions that allow seamless and automatic interaction, presenting the most relevant business insights. Sapiens empowers insurers by providing innovative, sustainable solutions and managed services to accelerate their digital transformation and move to the cloud.
Prior to Sapiens, Mr. Al-Dor was co-founder and president of Team Telecom International Ltd., a global supplier of operations support systems to communications service providers. After serving in the Israeli Air Force, Mr. Al-Dor studied computer science and management at Bar Ilan University and attended the Israel Management Center for Business.
Company
Zion Harel
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
OT, Cybersecurity
Website
Description
IXDen was founded by Zion Harel and Dr. Leonid Cooperman, experienced entrepreneurs who established and managed startups and held senior positions in companies such as Amdocs, Fundtech and Pango Mobile Parking.
An Israeli cybersecurity company, IXDen introduces a novel software-based approach to OT systems protection covering industrial IoT cybersecurity and sensor data integrity. IXDen has developed a single self-contained autonomous software-based solution that covers both OT failure prediction and industrial cybersecurity.
Leveraging patented biometric IoT device identity and multifactor authentication, IXDen achieves the utmost sensor data integrity on a sensor level and provides at-the-source threat detection.
IXDen leverages proprietary behavioral and mathematical algorithms, statistical analysis, machine learning and AI to model the behavior of various industrial physical systems, attaining deep understanding of the device data, software and hardware. The solution brings unrivaled data veracity and device security without any hardware or security keys stored on the device.
IXDen is well positioned to take advantage of a rapidly expanding market fueled by exponential growth in IoT-internet-connected devices and growing concern over protecting critical infrastructure in the wake of high-profile breaches, including a remote attack in Florida that came very close to harming a municipal water supply and recent attacks on the Colonial oil pipeline in the U.S. that supplies 45% of the East Coast’s supply of diesel, gasoline and jet fuel.The company is implementing its product in global utilities companies including gas, oil, water, power, HLS, Smart City and BMS.
IXDen was selected to protect Mekorot, Israel’s national water infrastructure provider–probably one of the most targeted systems in the world.
Company
David Harel
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Pharma & Biotech
Website
Description
David Harel is co-founder and CEO of CytoReason. He spent the first part of his career in private equity, focusing on strategy and financing of growth companies in industrial and Healthcare IT markets. Before starting CytoReason, David served as CEO of Virtual OfficeWare Healthcare Solutions. He holds an undergraduate degree from Haifa University and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon.
CytoReason is a tech company developing a computational model of the human body. The company collects proprietary data from pharma companies and uses it to simulate human diseases – tissue by tissue, cell by cell. With CytoReason’s massive database and AI-led platform, pharma and biotech companies identify new opportunities, shorten trial phases, reduce development costs, and increase the likelihood of drug approval. To date, five of the world’s top ten pharma companies use CytoReason’s technology.
The company is backed by prominent VC firms such as PICO Venture Partners, OurCrowd, Pontifax and Infinity Medical, and aims to take on additional segments in the pharma/biotech market.
CytoReason’s products and services address a central challenge in the pharma industry. Drug development is expensive and risky. The average cost of developing a successful new drug is over $2bn and growing, while the probability of success is very low and shrinking. In fact, only one out of 5,000 new drugs is approved, and only 8% of drugs that start clinical trials make it to the market.
In the future, drugs will be developed and tested by simulating drug responses using data and computational models instead of human clinical trials. Just like many other industries, the drug industry will be transformed by the data revolution.
This is what led David Harel and co-founder Professor Shai Shen-Orr to found CytoReason in 2016, when significant biological data started piling up, making it critical to find effective ways to extract insight from the data.
The company’s technology helps pharma companies manage their drug portfolio and address the increasing cost and complexity of bringing new therapies to market.
Company
Uri Gabai
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Community/NGO
Website
Description
Uri Gabai is CEO of the newly established Start-Up Nation Central Policy Institute. Prior to that, he served as general manager and vice president of strategy for Start-Up Nation Central, overseeing strategy, policy and data, and research activities. He also serves as chairman of the board of Scale-Up Velocity, a human capital operations platform working under the Start-Up Nation Central umbrella that specializes in high-tech training programs.
Prior to this role, Mr. Gabai served for seven years as the chief strategy officer and head of the strategy and economic division in the Israel Innovation Authority. He led the division since its establishment in 2011, focusing on strategy, evaluation, budget planning and research.
For five years prior Mr. Gabai was a senior economist at the National Economic Council in the prime minister’s office. At the National Economic Council, he led the macroeconomic team and was involved in several government initiatives including a new fiscal rule for the Israeli government, a $7 billion program for transportation infrastructure and a reform in the entitlement criteria for elderly citizens.
Start-Up Nation Central Policy Institute was founded in 2021 with the goal of strengthening the Israeli innovation economy while maximizing the socio-economic value captured in Israel.
The institute’s focus areas include increasing the number of Israelis employed in innovation-driven high-quality jobs; maintaining a competitive advantage in developing cutting-edge technologies and implementing them in Israel; and ensuring, through financial regulation and policy, that the right supply of capital reaches Israeli tech while enabling more segments of the population to benefit from the value the technologies create.
Company
Daniel Rudasevski
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Hospitality
Website
Description
Daniel Rudasveski is CGO and cofounder of Selina. After serving the Israeli Air Force, where he led over 40 soldiers in special commando operations, Daniel decided to visit Latin America, where he started his real estate career.
Mr. Rudasevski and his partner, Rafael Museri, launched Selina in 2015 with the mission of inspiring authentic and meaningful connections through the world’s first work, stay and play ecosystem. They have been immersed in cultural and community building for over a decade, originally through their disruptive real estate company, Dekel, which redevelops struggling neighborhoods into vibrant communities. Based on key learnings from their work with Dekel, they launched Selina and have carried forward the concept of converting distressed assets into community-based and economically viable hospitality properties.
Over the past six years, Selina has expanded to more than 134 properties in 23 countries as one of the world’s fastest-growing hospitality brands, blending beautifully-designed accommodation with coworking, recreation, wellness, and local experiences.
After ten years of experience developing real estate and being the driving force behind Selina’s real estate and growth strategy, Mr. Rudasevski’s invaluable knowledge, and expertise have secured and consolidated the Selina portfolio and helped in its global expansion.
In December 2021 Selina entered into a definitive merger agreement with BOA Acquisition Corp. that will result in Selina being publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol SLNA.
Company
Noam Levavi
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Location
Israel / New York
Sector
Retail Tech
Website
Description
Noam Levavi is a seasoned tech professional and a metaverse native. He is a serial entrepreneur with more than 20 years of innovations in user experience technologies, including several patents in personalized media delivery and user interfaces.
Before founding ByondXR in 2017, Mr. Levavi was founder and CEO of YCD Multimedia, a world-leading on-site digital media provider helping brands deliver personalized content to their customers. Reaching more than 100 million people every month in thousands of venues worldwide, Noam partnered with some of the world’s most recognized brands including Mercedes, Ferrari, Nike, Chanel, Hugo Boss, AT&T, Microsoft and Coca-Cola.
ByondXR is a metaverse retail-tech company that developed a one-of-a-kind commerce platform to provide brands and retailers with virtual experiences that are scalable, measurable and work in real-time with unprecedented quality. The company uses a state-of-the-art cloud-based 3D rendering and real-time visualization engines to create impressive 3D environments. ByondXR provides the building blocks that help brands enter the metaverse and has proven its expertise through launching online stores in dozens of countries across the globe.
Utilizing the highest levels of photorealism, the web-based virtual environments are fully embedded with 3D products and fixtures allowing for uncompromisingly accurate samples that eliminate difficult decision-making scenarios, making the process more sustainable and saving costs on samples and physical store or showroom.
The value and efficiency in ByondXR’s differentiated experiences have been recognized by some of the world’s biggest international brands and retailers. ByondXR’s impressive list of clients includes Target, P&G, Armani, L’Oreal, Unilever, Mitsubishi, Lancôme, LIDL, Mondelez and many more.
Company
Gil Canaani
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Venture Capital
Website
Description
Gil Canaani is a Managing Director at Hearst Ventures. Based in Tel Aviv, Mr. Canaani leads Hearst Ventures’ investments in Israel. His portfolio includes Otonomo, Snappy, Duality, Vault AI and JoyTunes. Prior to Hearst he was a partner at 2B-Angels–a seed-stage fund focused on growing early-stage technology ventures–and principal at Canaan Partners, as part of the global investment team with a focus on Israeli investment in enterprise software and consumer media. Mr. Canaani served in the elite technological unit 8200 and spent a number of years as part of AudioCodes’s R&D team.
Mr. Canaani is a Kauffman Fellow. He earned his bachelor’s in computer sciences from the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo and a master’s in business from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He lives in Tel Aviv with his wife and two children.
Company
Ziv Yekutieli
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Location
Binyamina
Sector
Med Tech
Website
Description
Dr. Ziv Yekutieli is an expert in connecting technology and neurology: a single transistor to a single neuron, living neural networks to chips, and a brain to a PC. “The first time I faced the impact of neurological disorders was when my high-school math teacher, Yair Cohen, whom I admired, was diagnosed with ALS. Yair’s life has strengthened my inclination towards engineering, his death got me interested in neurophysiology. Contemplating between the two, I ended up studying both.”
Prior to co-founding Montfort Brain Monitor, Dr. Yekutieli was an avionic engineer at Elbit and then a group manager at Intel Design Center in Haifa, Israel. In parallel to his work, he obtained his bachelor’s and master’s in electrical engineering at the Technion and his doctorate in brain science from Tel Aviv University. Dr. Yekutieli realized that the main limitation for improving neurological treatment is the gap that exists between the patient and neurologist.
Unlike in many other chronic conditions, neurological treatment is still based upon short and infrequent clinical visits, thus limiting patients’ quality of care and increasing treatment costs. Mon4t is using smartphone technology, big data and AI to bridge this gap. Mon4t’s application runs standard neurological tests using the sensors found in any smartphone, allowing virtual neurological examination to be conducted anytime, anywhere. Mon4t is already engaged with leading hospitals, medical device manufacturers and the pharma industry. Its goal is to become the standard of neurological assessment in the clinic and the patient’s home.
Company
Ilan Atias
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Location
Tel Aviv
Sector
Fintech
Website
Description
Ilan Atias is the co-founder and CTO of Melio, leading the R&D, product, and business intelligence teams. Before Melio, Mr. Atias was vice president of R&D at Windward, the world leader in predictive maritime analytics. Previously he was a researcher at native advertising company Outbrain, responsible for a personalized recommendation system using machine learning algorithms.
Melio’s mission is to keep small business in business, helping them improve their cash flow and workflow, gain more control over their finances, and optimize their business’s financial health. Mr. Atias founded Melio alongside CEO Matan Bar and Ziv Paz in 2018 with headquarters in New York and an R&D center in Tel Aviv. Melio also selected Colorado for its western U.S. headquarters and has begun recruiting for 250 new jobs in the state.
Melio’s smart B2B online payment solution is tailor-made for small businesses’ needs. It is a free, simple, and secure solution that allows small businesses and their suppliers to transfer and receive payments quickly and easily.
The company has raised $506 million to date, with the latest funding round valuing the company at $4 billion.
