When Israel was established in 1948 there were barely any resources, money or services. In 73 years the population has grown from 900,000 to 9.3 million. Today, Israeli ideas contribute to many leading business sectors.
The list of sectors includes cyber security, homeland security, healthcare, finance, insurance, printing, mobility, navigation, agriculture, water, renewable energy, artificial intelligence, information and communication, IoT, food, hardware, sensors, space, and more.
What stands behind this extraordinary transformation? The ‘No Camels’ Israeli online innovation newsletter asked several Israeli entrepreneurs who are deeply involved with emerging technologies.
Personal views
Hod Moyal, a co-founder of Israeli VC firm iAngels, says that any innovation needs to find world appeal because the local market is not big enough or interesting enough.
Efrat Duvdevani, Director General of the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation, believes that a strong motivator for new ideas is wishing to make the world a better place.
Dov Moran, Managing Partner at Grove Ventures, points to situations where things don’t go as planned. He says this is the time when Israelis thrive.
Lior Handelsman, General Partner at Grove Ventures, notes that because Israelis are flexible, they have great ability to adapt to market changes. The fast response to COVID-19 is just one such example, he says.
According to a report by the ICV Research Center and the Meitar law firm, Israeli companies and start-ups attracted $5.3 billion in funding between January and March 2021 – double the amount of the same period in 2020. Of this amount, 28.3% ($1.5 billion) went directly to the cyber security sector.
11 Israeli start-ups that redefine industries
Aurora Labs has developed ‘self-healing’ automotive software. This manages
all three stages of an automotive maintenance system to detect, repair, and seamlessly implement over-the-air (OTA) updates to software faults.
Beewise introduces ‘Beehome’, the world’s first automated and autonomous beehive. They say that this beehive yields 200% more honey, improves bee colony survival rates, and cuts manual labor by 90 percent.
Deci AI’s deep learning platform enables data scientists to transform their artificial intelligence models into production-grade solutions on any hardware, crafting the next generation of AI for enterprises.
Percepto specializes in drone-based autonomous and aerial inspection solutions for asset monitoring and compliance for industrial sites. These drones operate alongside third-party robots.
Prospera is the answer for plant health and development. Its technology captures multiple layers of data from the crop field and provides actionable, easy-to-read insights to growers via mobile and web dashboards.
Run AI bridges the gap between data science and computing infrastructure by creating a high-performance compute virtualization layer for deep learning, and then speeding the training of neural network models
SentinelOne is a cyber security specialist with an AI-based platform that secures endpoints including laptops, PCS, servers, cloud servers, and IoT devices. It identifies anomalies and provides a response to attacks.
Synk is Israel-founded and UK-based. Its platform automatically integrates security into existing work flows. The platform includes secure components (such as code and open source libraries) to develop cloud-native applications.
Syte provides a product discovery platform for e-Commerce. Large retailers are using its powerful visual search capabilities so that shoppers can find items using pictures or screenshots.
Theator is an Israeli-founded, US-based company. Its surgical intelligence platform combines advanced AI with computer vision technology so that surgeons can review and assess a recently completed hours-long procedure in minutes.
Wint provides water management and control solutions. It uses AI, signal processing, auto-shutoff valves and IoT technologies to monitor water flows and detect anomalies, leaks, and waste.
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This is an edited and augmented summary of the article written by Viva Sarah Press for NoCamels, entitled ‘On Israel’s Independence Day, a look at Israel’s innovation contributions to the World’ – published 14 April 2021.
