Vibez, a unique, young platform for music events, is determined to help Israelis do just that – with major input from a famous Israeli DJ whose son was one of the victims of the Nova attack. 

The platform is available in app and browser form, and operates as a portal for private communities for specific events, which anyone can apply to join. The platform serves as a complete environment for each event, with social media features, member offers and ticket sales. 

“We built an ecosystem for advanced communities that does much more than just ticketing,” Dovev explains. “We do the whole aspect of member management.”  

And no other platform in the world, he says, has the same range of features as Vibez. 

One of the main communities on the platform – with more than 10,000 members –  is operated by David Abramov, better known in the Israeli music world as DJ Darwish, who is also a member of the Vibez advisory board.   

Abramov’s 20-year-old son Laor was initially declared missing in the chaotic aftermath of the Nova attack and tragically later found to be among the dead. 

Launched just two weeks before the massacre at the Nova festival on October 7, Vibez co-founder and CEO Saar Dovev tells NoCamels that it took until mid-March for Israeli events to begin happening again. 

Nova was a prime example of a community-based music festival, Dovev says. 

Each community – be it created by an individual, specific festival or club – has its own pages on the platform, with listings for upcoming events, messages from the operators and special offers exclusive to that group. 

Would-be members ask to join the specific community in order to access their features and, once approved, can interact and receive often exclusive details of upcoming events.  

Dovev explains that each community can also define the levels of membership within it, such as premium or VIP, set up event promotions or even just send messages to its members. A social media aspect, allowing members to chat, is also in development. 

“We are a little bit like Meetup,” Dovev says, referring to the global forum for people to find others in their immediate vicinity who share their interests, “but for nightlife, festivals, parties – everything to do with culture.” 

Dovev set up Vibez in late 2021 with co-founder Yael Dovev, who is the company COO and also his wife, whom he fondly refers to as his “partner in crime.”  

An experienced entrepreneur in the event industry, Dovev had created ticketing platform EventBUZZ more than a decade ago, but came to realize that as events of all kinds were building communities around themselves, they would need a dedicated home to manage all their interactions. 

“Communities became a big thing everywhere, in every segment of life,” he says.  

The founders funded the development of the platform themselves, with no external investment and a small team to write the code and develop the software themselves. 

“I’m very proud of the fact that we are a bootstrap company, and we reached the milestone that we have reached,” Dovev says, adding that Vibez “didn’t spend a shekel on marketing.”  

That milestone includes some 100,000 users in Israel and an app that he says has been downloaded by more than 10 percent of that number – making it the 15th most popular app in the country in less than a year. 

Although currently operating primarily in Israel, the platform has also expanded internationally with events in Finland and Thailand, and has already established itself as a firm fixture in the latter. 

Vibez is also hopeful that a large music festival in Europe will be using the platform in the near future, and has its sights set on the US, where it has already registered the company. 

Although the emphasis is on music events, Dovev says the platform is suitable for any kind of cultural experience. 

“If it has culture, if it has music, sound, art, movement, it’s relevant for us,” he says.

The post Innovative Music Festival Platform Is Helping Israelis To Dance Again  appeared first on NoCamels.

Jerusalem-based Metabolize is using two small molecules known as metabolites, which are produced in the body in response to exercise, intermittent fasting and a ketogenic (low-carbohydrate, high-fat) diet.  

These two metabolites, Metabolize founder and CEO Morris Laster tells NoCamels, reduce both appetite and weight like GLP-1 medications, but are less aggressive and do not share their unfortunate side effects. 

The GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide-1) family of drugs is used to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity, and includes now-famous brands such as Ozempic and Wegovy. But many people who take these drugs experience unpleasant side effects such as nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.

According to Metabolize, the GLP-1 side effects are so bad that more than 80 percent of people taking the drugs stop the treatment within the first year and many regain whatever weight they had lost.

Furthermore, Laster explains, because the two metabolites actually target different areas in the brain than GLP-1s, they do not have an adverse impact on the pleasure centers by triggering another unpleasant side effect – a phenomenon known as anhedonia or lack of enjoyment. 

Obesity is a rapidly growing problem across the globe. The World Health Organization says that by 2022, some 890 million adults (one in eight people) on the planet were living with obesity – a number that had more than doubled since 1990. 

And for adolescents aged five to 19 years the situation is even more grave, with the number of young people living with obesity quadrupling to 160 million in the same period – bringing the total number of people of all ages living with obesity to over one billion.  

Metabolize believes its metabolites solution could be a game changer, particularly as it is taken orally and not injected, and is classed by the US Food and Drug Administration as a “new dietary ingredient” rather than medication. 

This means that it can be used in foods and accessed over the counter without a prescription once it has successfully completed a checklist of animal toxicology studies. 

“You can use it as an ingredient in protein bars, drinks and functional foods,” Laster says. “So you can basically have a healthy snack, and it’ll reduce your appetite along the way.” 

Although the company was only established in June of this year, the story of Metabolize’s metabolites solution began two years ago, when Laster, a medical doctor and veteran biomedical entrepreneur, became aware of an article in the Nature journal about the N-lactoyl-phenylalanine (Lac-Phe) metabolite, which has a weight loss effect and actually increases in the body due to intense exercise. 

Laster reached out to the scientist who discovered the metabolite, Prof. Jonathan Long of Stanford University, who told him that Lac-Phe had to be injected to supplement the body’s own production of the molecule, but he was actually working on another compound – X-Phe – that had the same impact as Lac-Phe but could be taken orally. 

While Laster began the process to obtain the license for X-Phe from Stanford, Long informed him that he was working on a third metabolite – N-acetyltaurine (NAT) – that had a similar effect and could also be ingested. And together, X-Phe and NAT could lead to weight loss of up to 20 percent without the side effects of GLP-1 medications and without influencing the pleasure center in the brain. 

Laster obtained the licenses for both X-Phe and NAT and so Metabolize, which is also registered in the US State of Delaware, was born. 

The company is now working on achieving the FDA’s new dietary ingredient designation. Laster explains that because it is classed as a supplement rather than a medication, the designation cuts down the timeline for entry to market from a decade to 18 months, and the cost from around a billion dollars to three or four million.  

“You’re talking about a big difference in terms of investment, but the outcome is pretty much the same,” he says. 

Metabolize hopes to meet the FDA requirements and commercialize the supplement by 2026, either selling it over the counter through a B2C model, or license out it to food manufacturers to develop in foods, bars or protein drinks. 

“Essentially, you have a healthy snack that is also involved in reducing weight,” says Laster. 

The post Harnessing Our Own Bodies For Side Effect-Free Weight Loss appeared first on NoCamels.

The Vertica device produced by Ohh-Med uses radio frequency technology to create an electromagnetic field that stimulates the production of the collagen that is a major component of the structural tissue of the penis. The increased collagen then helps blood flow by improving the support for the veins. 

“The collagen remodeling [creates] good erection quality and degradation of flaccidity,” Ohh-Med CEO Daniel Lischinsky tells NoCamels. 

According to the World Health Organization, ED will affect 320 million men worldwide by 2025, while the internationally renowned Cleveland Clinic says around 40 percent of men experience ED by the age of 40 and nearly 70 percent by the age of 70.  

Today, the most popular treatment for erectile dysfunction is the family of drugs that includes Viagra, which increase the blood flow to the penis and help it to become erect. 

However, these drugs do have some side effects, including mild symptoms such as headaches, nausea and indigestion, but also more serious – and rarer – symptoms such as loss of vision and seizures. Furthermore, it is recommended that the medication is taken up to an hour in advance, and its efficacy can be adversely impacted by food and alcohol. It also only works in around two-thirds of men. 

Ohh-Med’s solution, called Vertica, is a circular device, with controls on a bar at the top, which is placed at the base of the penis and then activated for a period of about 30-40 minutes. 

The device has eight points of contact to apply the radio frequency technology, which during the process heat up to around 48 degrees centigrade, although the temperature felt on the body is considerably lower. 

The user feels “a pleasant warmth” while using the device, says Lischinsky. 

The warmth also directs the body to send plasma – the component of the blood that helps circulation and supports blood vessels – to the penis, he says, which also improves erectile function.  

The stimulation of the collagen begins immediately, Lischinsky explains, and the positive results can be seen within one to three weeks in men of all ages, with a success rate of over 85 percent and no side effects.

Lishinsky even recalls that one of the users, an 87-year-old man, told him that the device had made him feel like a teenager again. 

The company recommends that the device is used three times per week for the first month; twice weekly for the second month and then once every week for “maintenance” purposes. 

Lischinsky was previously the founder of Endymed, the company that created the first facial skin-tightening machine using radio frequency that was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in its De Novo category, for new medical devices with no legal existing version.  

The Endymed device creates heat that stimulates the production of collagen to help keep the skin of the face firm – creating similar results to a surgical facelift, albeit temporarily. And Lischinsky realized that he could apply the same principle to the collagen in the penis, leading to him found the Tiberias-based Ohh-Med in 2017.  

Today, there are some 6,000 Vertica devices in use around the world, and according to Lischinsky is already causing a stir on social media and in professional medical circles. After all, he points out, there had been no new advances in the ED field since the arrival of Viagra in 1998.  

Vertica is approved for use in Australia, the European Union, Israel and the UK, and the company is now planning to sell it commercially in those areas.  

It is also currently undergoing trials in the US in order to receive repeat FDA approval, because even though the technology has already been approved, its use on a different part of the body requires further authorization.  

“The theory makes sense; the results are more than amazing,” says Lischinsky. “We are on our way.” 

The post Israeli Device Is New, Drug-Free Solution For Men Coping With ED appeared first on NoCamels.

The BIRD (Binational Industrial Research and Development) Foundation, which was established in 1977, serves as a “matchmaker” between companies from Israel and the US for a cooperation that works for both participants. 

“The idea is that there’s assets in the technological ecosystems in both countries that when encouraged to work together, can create value for both countries,” BIRD Executive Director Jaron Lotan tells NoCamels. 

The foundation is government funded on both sides, and offers every collaboration a grant of up to $1.5 million, which is paid back if and when the joint venture turns into a successful commercial endeavor. 

Although the foundation’s funds come from state coffers, it acts as an independent entity with a board of directors – albeit one that does include representatives from both governments – whose sole goal is encouraging and supporting bilateral ventures.  

The foundation operates in both the US and Israel, although the majority of the small team works out of Tel Aviv, with three personnel dotted about the United States. 

In its early years, the foundation’s focus was on helping nascent Israeli companies team up with more established US companies in order to break into a specific segment of the immensely bigger and more lucrative American market, Lotan explains. 

This was not just assistance vis-a-vis sales, he says, but also in helping the Israelis better understand the US market and how to better adjust their “great inventions and technology” to its requirements. 

Over the decades, however, the tech sector in the so-called Startup Nation flourished and the American company was no longer the larger, senior partner by default, Lotan says.  

“We still see Israeli startups working with bigger US companies [but] we see large Israeli companies working with young US companies,” he says.  

“We [also] see startups from both countries working together because they have complementary technologies that make them stronger together.” 

BIRD Deputy Executive Director of Business Limor Nakar-Vincent explains that while there may be an imbalance in terms of size, stage of development or even accessible funding between the Israeli and American partners, each side plays its own crucial role in accelerating the development of the project and bringing it to market. 

One example of a major, established Israeli company working with a smaller American startup is the current BIRD-backed collaboration between Israel Aerospace Industry (IIA), the state-owned aviation giant, and Virginia-based MELD PrintWorks, which specializes in 3D printing. 

The two have teamed up on an innovative project to 3D print high-quality, large metal components for civil aviation applications. The technology addresses critical industry challenges, and is expected to significantly reduce production costs, lead times and material waste, BIRD Director of Business Development tells NoCamels.

And without BIRD, says Lotan, the small Virginian startup would have found it “very difficult” to enter into an agreement with such a leading company as IAI.

Conversely, BIRD helped to broker a partnership between Celleste Bio, a Misgav-based startup that is cultivating cocoa beans in the lab, and American multinational Mondelez, one of the largest food companies in the world. 

Thanks to this partnership, Mondelez, whose portfolio includes global chocolate brands such as Cadbury, Milka, Côte d’Or and Fry’s, is today Celleste’s strategic investor, and, according to the Israeli startup’s CEO Michal Beressi Golomb, “a great partner.”  

And even though Mondelez is a massive multinational, it is BIRD’s platform that provides the framework and structure to enter into an agreement with Celleste in a mutually beneficial way, explains Lotan.  

“That’s really what’s unique about the platform,” he says.  

Companies can either be introduced by BIRD in order to maximize their synergy potential or can team up unaided and then apply for a BIRD grant. And the foundation remains involved in the partnership, with the funding being provided in increments, based on milestones that are set out for the collaboration. 

“We don’t just give them a grant and walk away,” says Lotan.   

The foundation also takes heed of trends in and demands of the tech ecosystem, he says. 

In 2009, BIRD began to expand into what he calls “vertical programs,” that focus on specific areas within the sector. There are currently four such programs – two in the field of energy, one in homeland security and another in cybersecurity for critical infrastructure. 

Aside from BIRD’s own financial support, the four programs also receive funding from “relevant stakeholders” in both governments. For example, the energy projects are financed by the US Department of Energy and the Israeli Ministry of Energy and Israel Innovation Authority. 

The call for proposals for the cyber program was set to be issued this month, followed soon after by the one for the homeland security program.

The foundation’s success rate is high, according to Nakar-Vincent, with 70 percent of the projects it supports achieving commercial success and 30 percent of them actually repaying their grants.  

As a non-profit, any revenue that is accrued is funneled directly back into grants for new bilateral partnerships.  And with an endowment of some $150 million, the foundation gives grants to the tune of around $35 million per year. 

“The idea in the end is to bring together companies that can work together,” says Nakar-Vincent. “Each one of them can add value to one another, and we are here to support them through the process.” 

The post Innovative Israel-US Collaboration Helps Tech Companies Fly High  appeared first on NoCamels.

The box actually contains an entire communications software system called Halo that was developed by Or Yehuda-based company Elsight, and is most commonly used for small unmanned aircraft (drones).

The company’s CEO Yoav Amitai tells NoCamels that the unique platform not only works with any small robot or application that requires critical communication but also can connect to any existing network. 

“We are providing a highly reliable communication link, or, as we call it, connection confidence,” he says.

According to Amitai, what makes Halo different from similar products on the market is that it can combine multiple networks simultaneously, including major providers such as AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon. 

“In very simple terms,” he says, “we are creating an abstract layer on top of the physical layer to enable always-on connectivity.” 

It also allows drone operators to use universal SIM cards rather than country-specific ones, potentially allowing companies in one country to operate in another without having to switch SIM, saving both time and money. 

The small, 90-gram box that is attached to the unmanned vehicle was created purely as a way to easily install the Halo software. 

It is the software, which Amitai calls the true “secret sauce,” that funnels all the different communications networks into a single channel.

“We couldn’t find hardware that would support what we needed,” he explains. “So we had to go and develop our own hardware.”

This proprietary communications capability, which was already making a name for itself in the international market, proved of great use to the Israel Defense Forces in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 terror attack by Hamas as the country found itself on a war footing. 

“Before October 7, less than 10 percent of our revenue was from defense applications,” Amitai says. “And then October 7 came, and the IDF was looking for commercial technologies that could fit into their needs, and they knew about us.”

The system was already in use by the military on October 8, and Amitai says that a question of payment never arose. 

“We just let them use it for whatever needs they had,” he recalls. 

According to Amitai, the IDF was “extremely satisfied” with the platform, and its effectiveness soon spread by word of mouth throughout different units and departments – including the Directorate of Defense Research and Development, the army’s center for military technology. 

Since then, the platform has garnered more global attention in this sector, and Elsight earlier this year signed an agreement with Lockheed Martin, one of the world’s largest defense technology companies, to install Halo on all its Indago 4 tactical uncrewed drones.  

“We’re starting to get a very strong track,” says Amitai of this new direction. 

Elsight is now looking to expand Halo’s military capabilities solely beyond communications, he says. These new features include creating three dimensional maps from the skies, and others that Amitai says cannot be yet discussed. 

“We’re constantly looking at how we add more value to our partners by providing them with more features which are not solely on the communication side, but also some adjacent capabilities,” he says.   

And this is not the first time that the company has pivoted. With Amitai’s appointment as CEO in 2019, Elsight, which had already existed for around a decade as a communications company, decided to focus purely on the uncrewed vehicles market. 

“I felt that we were trying to shoot in too many directions, and for a company with limited resources, we needed to be laser focused,” Amitai explains.  

He says that this was the point at which major companies – including such giants as Amazon and Walmart – began to realize the potential of drones, and at the same time the concept of driverless cars really started to take hold. 

The company understood that this was a fast-moving environment and a fast-moving market segment to which Halo could add great value, says Amitai, which also allowed Elsight to stand out as “not just another communications company.”  

Halo was released at the very end of 2020, and since then has had “great traction” in a range of sectors around the world. These include Walmart drone deliveries in the US and healthcare services in Brazil, Europe and Israel. 

Drones, he explains, have become a vital resource for healthcare providers, as they can deliver medical supplies to locations both near and far without having to rely on the vagaries of land-based traffic routes. And keeping drones carrying crucial supplies in contact with the ground is where Elsight shines. 

In all, according to Amitai, Halo has been used by more than 100 partners and logged more than 250,000 flight hours for them.  

And for Amitai, the company, which is financially independent and even publicly listed in Australia, is heading in the right direction – and he intends to stay on course. 

“We’re seeing how we are becoming the industry standard by fact, not by just expression,” he says. 

The post Keeping Drones In Touch With The Ground, Whatever The Mission  appeared first on NoCamels.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide. According to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the disease was responsible for an estimated 1.8 million deaths in 2020 alone, which the American Cancer Society reports is more than breast, colorectal and prostate cancers combined.  

A team of researchers from the Faculty of Biology at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa have been investigating the molecular mechanisms that protect cells from DNA damage, which can be caused by radiation, smoking or other factors. 

And because the failure of these protective mechanisms to repair damaged DNA can lead to cancer development, the researchers realized that understanding such mechanisms could be crucial for developing targeted cancer treatments.

“Our DNA is always under attack,” Technion doctoral student Feras Machour, who jointly led the research, tells NoCamels. “We were interested in researching how our cells cope with DNA damage.” 

This led to an exploration of how cells deal with DNA damage in order to improve targeted cancer therapies, because numerous forms of cancer have mutations in the proteins or genes that are responsible for maintaining and repairing DNA.

The team focused on the RBM10 protein because it is frequently found to be absent in patients with an aggressive type of lung cancer called lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD), Machour says. 

He explains that around 40 percent of all lung cancer patients are affected by this particular form of the disease, and mutations in RBM10, which also make tumors more resistant to current treatments, are found in up to 25 percent of LUAD cases. 

This means that a significant number of all lung cancer patients potentially have a mutation of the RBM10 protein. 

As such, the researchers set themselves the goal of developing new, personalized strategies to treat the specific type of LUAD that includes a loss of RBM10.

Machour says there has been little previous research into missing or mutated RBM10 in tumors, despite its frequent occurrence in LUAD. He hypothesizes that this is due to the fact that the absence of the protein makes it difficult to create a way to target it. 

This led the team to take what Machour calls “a slightly different approach” – looking for genetic signs specific to cells that are missing RBM10, and therefore more susceptible to cancerous growth, in order to remove them. 

Analyzing biological data led the team to dozens of “very high scoring” potential genetic identifiers, and they centered on one gene called WEE1 that is already the focus of clinical trials for a molecule that can interact with proteins.  

“Our idea was that, since it’s already in stage two clinical trials, maybe we can repurpose the drug for RBM10 deficiency in carcinoma, and then… people with mutations in RBM10 would have a therapeutic option that wasn’t available before,” Machour says.

The team then indeed showed that inhibiting the WEE1 gene is highly effective in eradicating RBM10-deficient lung cancer in mice. The findings were recently published in the Nature journal.

“We were very happy to see that the tumors that had RBM10 mutations were very sensitive to this inhibitor, and the tumor actually shrank significantly in size,” Machour says, “meaning that it might be a very reliable therapeutic option for lung adenocarcinoma patients.”

The potential treatment must now undergo clinical trials in humans, which Machour says requires as yet unsecured collaboration with a major research institute or pharmaceutical company. In all, he says, it could still take up to 15 years for the drug to be on the market.  

Machour himself is leaving the Technion for London, where he will continue his post-doctoral studies at the world-renowned Francis Crick Institute, a biomedical research center that is partnered with Cancer Research UK. 

Even so, the Technion lab run by Prof. Nabieh Ayoub, who jointly led the research, will continue to work on the RMB10 protein. 

“And maybe find combinatorial approaches to make the treatment even more effective,” he says. 

The post Missing Protein Could Unlock Treatment For Aggressive Lung Cancer appeared first on NoCamels.

And the industry is extremely profitable, with a projected global revenue for 2024 of $20 billion – a sum that is expected to rise to $22 billion within five years. 

But while attitudes to medical cannabis have changed, the primary method of delivery – smoking – has remained the same. And for one Israeli startup, such an unhealthy practice to deliver medical treatment seems counterproductive, to say nothing of the growing stigma surrounding smoking. 

“We couldn’t see smoking as a solution,” IMCI Pharmaceuticals CEO Alon Hershkovitz tells NoCamels. “[So] we decided to look at the evolution of cannabis products.” 

What IMCI, which views itself as an R&D startup rather than a drug company, came up with was a way to create nanoparticles out of cannabis, which are then taken in one of three ways. 

And according to Hershkovitz, this means more effective delivery of the cannabinoids – the active ingredients in the cannabis plants – as the body absorbs them better when they are in nanoparticle form. 

“That allowed us to reduce the dose significantly in order to reach the same therapeutic benefit as the current solution,” he says.  

The company works with partners who grow the cannabis plants and who then extract the cannabinoids in the form of a concentrated resin-like substance that Hershkovitch compares to honey. IMCI then uses a proprietary method to turn that substance into nanoparticles.

IMCI’s iCann platform has three different products, each with different qualities: The fast-acting version comes in the form of a pill placed under the tongue, which takes 5 to 10 minutes to act and lasts for up to two and a half hours; the long-lasting version is a tablet that adheres to the inside of the mouth, and while it takes up to 45 minutes to take effect, the benefits can last for as long as eight hours; the final version is a pill that is swallowed, which takes around 20 minutes to take effect and lasts for up to four hours.  

The three different therapies are all designed for people suffering from chronic ailments and pain, and Hershkovitz says they all complement one another to provide treatment options for people suffering from a range of disorders, including pain, colitis, Alzheimer’s and autism. 

The long-lasting pill, for example, is suited for pain relief during the night. 

“They have a very good night’s sleep, and they’re waking up in the morning feeling much better,” Hershkovitz says, “because people with pain normally will wake up up to four times during the night because of it.” 

The different medications include varying proportions of both THC and CBD, the two main cannabinoids that cause a reaction within the human body. And although the company primarily uses THC as its analgesic, the intoxicating qualities that are sought after by recreational users of cannabis are seen as a side effect that IMCI counters by carefully controlling the dosage in each treatment.  

In fact, Hershkovitz explains, the company plans to provide the nanoparticles to pharmacies so that the pharmacist can create a “tailor-made solution” on the spot, according to the specific dosage prescribed by a physician. 

The Gan Yavne-based company was founded in 2018 after Hershkovitch’s business partner in a previous venture was diagnosed with stage four cancer of the stomach. Cannabis greatly helped him in the last six months of his life, Hershkovitch says, which inspired him to take the plant seriously as a therapeutic. 

His IMCI co-founder Avi Yakobovich had a similar experience with his own father in his final days, when cannabis greatly helped to ease his pain, and the two believed that they could have a positive effect on the lives of people who were suffering. 

“We knew that this is really helping people,” Hershkovitch recalls. “We decided to learn about it more, and we read every study, every article.” 

He highlights the massive amount of research on cannabis conducted in Israel, where THC was actually first isolated and identified in 1964 by Prof. Raphael Mechoulam of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who known as the godfather of cannabis research.  

Largely self-funded, IMCI began to develop its therapies – with some support from the government’s Israel Innovation Authority and an angel investor. The company also worked in association with the Hebrew University’s Yissum technology transfer company, as the initial development had come out of the university. 

IMCI is now looking for further investment, but Hershkovitz concedes that while he has great faith in Israeli innovations, the ongoing war with Hamas in Gaza means that it is “a very difficult time.” 

The ingredients in IMCI’s products are already approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA), but the company is nonetheless planning human trials at the start of next year at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem. 

The trials, Hershkovitz explains, are not formal tests as required for FDA approval, but rather to further observe the effects of the cannabinoids on the body. 

IMCI aims to have its first product ready for market within nine months to one year, and he predicts that the other products will follow shortly afterwards.  

Hershkovitz believes it is only a matter of time until the medical world stops recommending smoking as a method of delivery for cannabinoids, and IMCI’s nanoparticles are the solution. 

“This is something that we expect to see in the market,” he says.

The post No Smoking! Startup’s Tiny Answer To Safer Medical Cannabis appeared first on NoCamels.

The three-year project provides continuous, extended support through a unique model developed to address the particular needs of the local population, with a focus on their pedagogical and emotional environments. This includes the preschools integrating programs for direct psychological support for children, educators and parents. 

A recently created model to predict the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder in Israel following October 7 found that some five percent of the entire Israeli population could be expected to develop PTSD. But when focusing on the region directly impacted by the attack and subsequent conflict, that percentage soars to over 30 percent.   

The preschool project was developed by SASA Setton and Alumot Or and the bank’s Poalim Litkuma Fund and is initially operating in 25 institutions for children aged 3 to 6 years – 22 regular preschools and three for special education students. 

The project began this month with the start of the Israeli school year, and includes schools in the regional councils of Eshkol, Sha’ar HaNegev, Hof Ashkelon and Sdot Negev, as well as the city of Ofakim, with plans for around 10 more regional institutions to be added. 

“This project goes far beyond the renovation or reconstruction of preschools severely damaged by the events of October 7 and the ongoing war,” said Sonia Gomes de Mesquita, the head of the project and donor representative. 

“We are essentially entering a long-term process of creating early childhood centers of excellence using an innovative educational model tailored to the unique needs of the Western Negev region,” she said. 

Gomes de Mesquita is also the executive director at the Center for Jewish Impact, which initiated the project, and the former head of the Educational Negev Unit of the IDF Southern Command.  

The programs themselves were developed in collaboration with the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Department at Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, which provides mental health support and trauma care for children in southern Israel, and in partnership with the Anna Freud Centre, a London-based charity dedicated to children’s mental health.

The specially developed educational environments include spaces to encourage learning, creativity and personal growth as well as providing ongoing professional training and support for staff. 

An emphasis has also been placed on cementing the ties between the preschools and the local community, with the latter serving as an anchor both to encourage residents who were displaced due to the situation to return and to attract potential new members.

“The goal is not only to provide quality education but also to strengthen community resilience and support the region’s renewal for a better future,” said Gomes de Mesquita. 

“This project exemplifies our commitment to the communities in the Western Negev and our belief in the power of education to effect change. It is deeply important to support this vital initiative, which represents a significant step in the revival of the Jewish people following the horrors of the past year.”

Donations from local and international partners have met the multi-million shekel cost of the project, including the Poalim Litkuma Fund, which was set up in the wake of the October 7 attack, the Segal and Rothman families from the United States, the Russian-Jewish Congress, the San Francisco Federation and the Combat Anti-Semitism Movement.

“The events of October 7 constitute a national disaster that has impacted and continues to affect broad segments of society,” said Reuven Krupik, chairman of Bank Hapoalim’s Board of Directors.

“Children aged 3 to 6 who have experienced emotional and psychological trauma, along with their parents, are a particularly vulnerable population, and educational teams play a crucial role in building mental resilience and shaping the future generation,” he said. 

“On this occasion, I would like to wish all educational teams and children in Israel a meaningful school year.”

The post Innovative Preschool Project Helping Heal Negev Region After October 7 appeared first on NoCamels.

For it is the mosquito that kills more people than any other creature in the world, the US Centers for Disease Control says, by passing on diseases such as malaria, dengue, West Nile, yellow fever and Zika.

The energy humans expend fighting one another is “incomparable to the efforts we should put towards mosquito-borne diseases,” says Daniel Voignac, a researcher and PhD candidate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who has come up with a novel way to keep the insects away from our skin. 

Mosquitos – of which there are more than 3,700 varieties – can be found in almost every part of the planet, and as global temperatures rise due to climate change, the warm and wet areas in which they thrive are only expected to increase, and with them the occurrences of the diseases they carry. 

Safely and effectively preventing the insects from biting us remains a challenge. The most efficient repellents recommended by the US Environmental Protection Agency, such as DEET (diethyltoluamide), contain chemicals that a report published by the US government’s National Center for Biotechnology Information called “a silent environmental chemical toxicant.” 

Voignac and his fellows at the Hebrew University have developed a cellulose-based gel that dries on the skin into what he calls “a really strong, transparent film,” which blocks mosquitoes from detecting the human scents that attract them to us. 

Cellulose is a naturally occurring sugar compound made of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen that is found in plants, including fruits, vegetables and wood. It is used in industry in paper, adhesives and even cosmetics, and, although it is not water-soluble, the molecules in the film created by Voignac and his colleagues can be dispersed by water. 

Voignac says the idea for the cellulose gel came during the coronavirus pandemic, when one of his two supervising professors at the Hebrew University, Yossi Paltiel, complained that he could not spend too long in his garden due to his susceptibility to mosquito bites. 

That led to a conversation between Paltiel and Voignac’s other supervising professor, Oded Shoseyov, about combining their extensive scientific know-how and exploring ways to deter mosquitoes.  

The group who came together to develop the cellulose gel – Paltiel, Shoseyov, Voignac, Prof. Jonathan Bohbot and PhD candidate Evyatar Sar-Shalom – were inspired by a rare study on the use of graphene, a newly discovered strong, transparent and conductive material made of a thin layer of carbon atom, as a potential mosquito repellent. 

But they decided that graphene was not a viable option, despite the fact that its tight atomic structure does actually block a person’s scent from leaving the body. 

“Mosquitoes would fly by and not detect anything,” Voignac tells NoCamels, calling graphene “chemical camouflage.” 

“It’s a nice theoretical concept,” he says, “[but] it’s not that much of a scalable concept, because graphene has unknown toxicity.”

Furthermore, he explains, when it is scaled up in order to cover the skin, graphene takes on a dark color, rendering it unusable. 

Instead, they turned to commonly used cellulose, whose properties Voignac was already exploring with relation to electrical engineering, as part of his PhD. 

“We were working in the lab with [this] really cool material that is very thin, transparent and derived from plants,” Voignac says. “So we had knowledge of how to use this material.”  

Tests of the cellulose gel – volunteers with it on their skin inserted a hand into a cage of mosquitoes – showed an 80 percent reduction in bites, which Voignac says was a “really nice” result. 

Perhaps more crucially, they found that using the cellulose gel led to a 99.4 percent reduction in the number of eggs produced by the female mosquitoes used in the test, as they need human blood to create their eggs. 

Only the female mosquitoes feed on humans to get the nutrients that are necessary to create the membranes of the eggs, Voignac explains. 

“This also meant that we could create maybe an effective solution to prevent proliferation of mosquitoes,” he says.

At that point, the team approached Yissum, the Hebrew University’s tech transfer company, and patented their discovery. They also published a paper about their research in PNAS Nexus, a publication from the US National Academy of Science.  

The paper made waves internationally, garnering coverage in dozens of news outlets worldwide and sparking the interest of what Voignac calls “industry leaders in mosquito repellents,” who were keen to learn more about the product.  These are not, he stresses, the pharmaceutical companies, but rather cosmetics firms who are responsible for developing insect repellents for humans. 

And because the US considers mosquito repellents to be pesticides, their impact on the human body is not regulated, he explains, and only their effect on the environment and the mosquitoes themselves must be evaluated. Furthermore, all of the components in the gel are established ingredients for cosmetics. 

For now, the team is processing the data from its first round of tests, conducting further tests and refining a prototype of the gel. 

If the prototype can be scaled up successfully and still work, then says Voignac they are “95 percent close to the final product.” 

Through its collaboration with Yissum, the team is in contact with a number of companies interested in the gel, and Voignac is aware of its potential to reduce not only mosquito eggs and bites, but the diseases the insects can pass on to humans. 

“We’re talking about malaria – it’s 1.16  deaths per minute,” he says. 

“So it’s also a race against time; there’s a bigger issue than just a university lab trying to make money with a cool invention. If we have real technology, we want to race towards deploying it as fast as possible to the people that want it.”  

The post Gel That Stops Mosquitoes Biting And Reproducing Is Creating A Buzz appeared first on NoCamels.

Joint replacements in particular have become increasingly common. In the US alone, close to 3 million hip and knee replacements are carried out every year, according to the American Joint Replacement Registry. 

While most of these procedures take place without further incident, around 2 percent of patients experience an infection at the implant site that cannot be treated with antibiotics. And although this is only a small proportion of the total number of patients, in real terms it affects thousands of people each year. 

The difficulty in treating these infections is due to a biofilm – a thin layer of cells that bacteria use to protect themselves against attack – that forms at the infection site and even on the implant itself. 

Until now, removing the biofilm in order to treat the infection has required more surgery, but Israeli medtech startup Dimoveo Medical has found a way of using iron nanoparticles to clean away the biofilm with a far shorter and less invasive procedure. 

“Once you get into that position where you have an infection which is untreatable with antibiotics, you go back into the operating room and you reopen the surgery,” Yair Ramot, founder and CEO of Dimoveo, tells NoCamels.  

After the surgical site has been reopened, the implant and the infected area in the body are rinsed with copious amounts of saline to clear the biofilm so that antibiotics can be administered. 

Unfortunately, Ramot says this procedure only works for about half of those suffering from infection at the implant site. 

“They are washing it with a lot of saline and a lot of prayers, because 50 percent of those patients come back again with another infection. It doesn’t go away,” he says.  

And if the infection does return, the steps to remove it become far more invasive, with another operation that involves taking the implant out altogether, and thoroughly cleaning and removing any trace of bacteria from it and the surgical site. 

The implant is only reinserted three months later, according to Ramot, and only if the site is still free of infection. 

Even with this drastic step, there is a 25 percent chance that the infection will return, he explains.  

“Then you go into chronic infection, meaning you have to take antibiotics for the rest of your life. It’s a really bad situation,” Ramot says. 

Dimoveo’s proprietary solution is to partially reopen the surgical site and fill the area with a saline solution containing the iron nanoparticles. The nanoparticles are then hit by ultrasound waves, sending them spinning around at high speeds to destroy the biofilm and enable the infection to be treated by antibiotics. 

“I would call it a sandblasting effect on a nanoscale,” says Ramot. In fact, the name Dimoveo derives from the Latin word for remove or extract. 

The entire process, which is carried out under anesthesia, takes less than an hour. Both it and the recovery period of several weeks are significantly shorter than for the options that were previously available, says Ramot. 

Having decided to move away from using increasingly aggressive medications in an effort to penetrate the biofilm, Dimoveo, which was founded in 2020, took the approach of removing the layer altogether using mechanical energy, washing it away and opening the door for antibiotics to be used effectively. 

The idea for the actual process to clean the biofilm came from a doctor of physics who built on the existing use of ultrasound by adding the nanoparticles. Iron was chosen for the nanoparticles as they had already been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, explains Ramot, himself an experienced entrepreneur in the medical device field and who has degrees in both biomedical and mechanical engineering. 

Dimoveo is for now focused on knee implants. But Ramot says that the procedure is suitable for any kind of joint replacement, such as knee, hip, ankle, shoulder and spine, as well as bone fractures that require screws or a plate to be inserted. 

“We decided to start with the knee, because this is the most common and the most easy [procedure] to prove our efficacy,” he says.  

Most of the funding for the development process came from the Israel Innovation Authority, the government department dedicated to advancing the national tech sector on the international stage, as well as the Israeli medtech incubator MEDX Xelerator, whose offices in the central city of Or Yehuda are also home to Dimoveo. 

“Working in MEDEX is very good,” Ramot says. “There’s a lot of support.”  

The startup is currently aiming to raise an additional $5.5 million to see it through its clinical studies, which it plans to complete at medical centers in Israel, Michigan and Helsinki. And Ramot admits that Israel’s ongoing war with Gaza, triggered by the massive October 7 terror attack by Hamas, has made fundraising a challenge.  

Dimoveo has already carried out non-human studies at a hospital in Pittsburgh to show that the nanoparticles can successfully clear the biofilm and that the method itself is completely safe for a patient who has already been through a painful surgical procedure. It also showed that orthopedic surgeons can incorporate the process into their current standards of care. 

Dimoveo is also preparing to submit a request for approval from the FDA, a vital step for marketing the device in the United States. 

That startup plans to commercialize the device in mid-2025, aiming to find a strategic partner in the form of a large, established company in the field in order to help penetrate the market. 

Once this has been achieved, Ramot explains that the next step will be to create a next generation product that could be incorporated into the initial joint replacement surgery to stop any infection taking hold at all.  

“We don’t do any harm to healthy tissue; we don’t do any harm to the implant itself,” Ramot says. “This is very important.” 

The post Nanoparticles ‘Sandblast’ Hard-To-Handle Bacteria From Joint Implants  appeared first on NoCamels.

Technically a bean and also known as the black-eyed pea, cowpea has a strong spiritual symbolism in many cultures. 

For people from West Africa, it is a traditional symbol of fertility and a source of protection from the evil eye. It is eaten by many in the American south during New Year celebrations – and also has resonance for the Jewish New Year, when many Jews, especially those from Middle Eastern countries, eat it with the hope that it will bring abundance, wealth and fertility.

But aside from its symbolic properties, the cowpea is an incredibly resilient crop and nutritious food.   

Native to the vast Sahel region of Africa, the cowpea requires little water and fertilizer to grow, has a high heat tolerance and can be used in crop rotation, preparing the soil for other crops. 

“It’s non allergenic, it’s non-GMO. It contains almost all of the essential amino acids,” Better Pulse CEO Alon Karpol tells NoCamels. 

These qualities make it a sustainable alternative to dairy milk, which takes a heavy environmental toll. In fact, according to a University of Oxford study, producing a glass of dairy milk results in almost three times the greenhouse gas emissions of any plant-based milk production.  

Environmental concerns are one of the reasons why plant-based milk alternatives are a growing market. According to international market research company Grand View Research, the global dairy alternatives market size was valued at $29.18 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow annually by 12.6 percent between 2024 and 2030.  

Plant-based milks are produced by creating a powder from whichever protein is the source, with soy, oat, almond and rice being some of the most popular. The powder is mixed with water, oil and sometimes sugar and other flavorings, and then reconstituted for use. 

There is no consensus by experts, however, on which plant-based milk is the best overall.  Some look for nutritional value, while others favor one that most resembles dairy milk, has the best taste or uses the least resources.  

According to Karpol, the cowpea milk emulsifies and foams and is white in color like dairy milk and does not leave a strong taste of bean or grassiness – an issue with some milk alternatives. And the team at Better Pulse believe that it makes an ideal source for alternative milk, certain that consumers will agree. 

The idea to use the cowpea for plant-based milk was born when Karpol was approached by his longtime friend Ido Margalit, with whom he worked many years ago at a pharmaceutical company.   

After they parted ways professionally, Karpol went on to pursue a career in biochemistry research, while Margalit became an entrepreneur, focusing on agricultural technology. He ultimately co-founded the company BetterSeeds, which has re-coded the cowpea’s genetic makeup to make it suitable for mechanized harvesting.

Over a beer about two years ago, Margalit told Karpol about the cowpea, highlighting its nutritional value and resilience in the face of climate change. Karpol recalls Margalit quizzing him about the other potential uses for the bean.  

He dove in and learned about its nutritious properties, finding it hard to believe that it wasn’t already being used as an alternative to dairy milk.  

The bean boasts a list of other positive attributes, including its high amino acid content and exclusion as one of the eight major allergens. 

“It’s the staple food for many cultures,” Karpol says. “I’m so surprised to see there are no other companies using it [in this way].”

Better Pulse plans to initially introduce the cowpea to the market as a protein source for plant-based milk alternatives. But it also has bigger dreams for the bean. 

Working on a business to business (B2B) model, Better Pulse plans to market cowpea protein to food companies to be reformulated into non-dairy yogurt, coffee creamers and more, as well as a dairy milk alternative.   

It also has a license to use CRISPR technology – a powerful gene-editing tool that allows plant DNA to be modified with unprecedented precision and ease.   

“This is where the fun begins for me,” Karpol says of the technology.  

Better Pulse intends to use CRISPR to edit the protein inside the cowpea to make it even more nutritious, by removing the bean’s phytic acid, a benign compound that inhibits nutritional absorption.

Crucially, CRISPR technology is considered to be non-GMO in most parts of the world, including in the United States and Israel, even though is currently seen as such in Europe.  

Until recently, the Better Pulse team had raised $250,000 from their own personal network. They are now in the pre-seed round, and have so far raised $100,000 from an angel investor and received a $400,000 grant from the Israel Innovation Authority for their CRISPR work. The target of the round is $1 million, Karpol says. 

Like many Israeli startups following the mass terror attack of October 7 and Israel’s subsequent and ongoing war, the company has faced challenges. Its food technologist, David Etienne, has spent six of the last 11 months serving in Gaza as a reserve soldier in the Israel Defense Forces. 

But, like the company’s beloved protein source, Better Pulse has proven to be resilient. And Etienne has used his breaks from reserve duty to continue his work with the cowpea. 

“We’ve found ways to overcome [the challenges],” Karpol explains. “We are pushing hard.”

The company has just completed its lab tests and pilot, and is confident it can scale it up very quickly and even start selling that within the next three to four months. 

Karpol says the cowpea milk has passed several taste tests, even by the pickiest of critics – his own children. 

“And if they think it’s good,” he says, “it’s good!”  

The post Resilient And Nutritious New Plant-Based Milk Aims To Make A Splash   appeared first on NoCamels.

And while some boat styles fall out of favor, never to be heard of again, one Israeli startup is giving an old boat a renaissance with new technology to bring it into the modern day. 

Level Hydrofoils, as the name suggests, has adapted the traditional hydrofoil to make it more stable, versatile for individual users and potentially even a form of mass transportation. 

Hydrofoils operate through a similar principle to airplane wings, using the speed of the craft to lift it up and propel it forwards  – giving the user a sense of flying through the air rather than moving through water. 

And because it is not forcing its way through the water, instead balancing on a slim blade attached to a submerged rudder, it is faster and expends less energy than traditional boats. 

“It’s extremely efficient,” Level CEO Arthur Yanai tells NoCamels. “It is able to reduce up to 80 percent of the energy consumption of a given vessel.” 

But what makes the hydrofoil so energy efficient is also what made it so hard to operate and one of the main reasons for their lack of popularity – staying afloat on the surfboard-like top as it rests on that narrow blade takes skill and a great deal of practice.  

“It’s like balancing a broomstick on the palm of your hand,” says Yanai, a captain in the Israeli Navy reserves. “You would have to drink a lot of sea water until you were able to fly.” 

Level’s proprietary technology has removed that perilous training period, using a built-in gyroscope stabilization system to instantaneously adjust and balance electric-powered hydrofoils, known as e-foils, as they move. 

The gyroscope is embedded into the e-foil base and functions at 100 hertz (actions per second), Yanai explains, making it three times faster than highly trained sports people who rely on their quick responses, such as racing drivers. 

“In the battle here between the human and machine, the machine has won,” he says. “The machine can do a much better job of stabilizing than a human being.” 

This technology makes the e-foil so stable that Yanai claims it takes the average person just a few moments to master and can even safely transport a dog.

“With our self-stabilization system, we are able to make this entire learning curve as simple as a click of a button,” he says. 

The user simply pushes the takeoff button on the deck of the board and the e-foil begins to move forward, lifting itself out of the water while remaining stable at all times. 

“You might fall every now and again, but you will be successful and in control in an extremely short period of time,” according to Yanai.   

The craft comes with an app that can let the user determine how fast they go can and even let the more experienced turn off the gyro for a regular e-foil flight.

Yanai envisions fleets of the Level e-foil being used to escort travelers to waterbound areas of interest, not dissimilar to the popular city tours using two-wheeled Segways that also require a short lesson to master. 

This would also be a singular experience, he says, as e-foil operators today only offer lessons and not group expeditions with family and friends. 

“Imagine yourself on a lake in Italy and meeting a fleet of them, or a beautiful island in Greece, a lagoon in the Bahamas,” he says.  

The watercraft has a top speed of about 35 kilometers per hour and a range of about 30 to 40 kilometers. But, says Yanai, more intrepid travelers could carry a spare battery or two on board and easily change them even in the water – another original feature. 

Level is a portfolio company at IN-VENTech, Haifa Municipality’s startup program, a support framework for local innovation that partners with the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa Port and AWS, among others. 

The company has already passed its proof of concept milestone, and now has a fleet of four prototypes that it is now demonstrating to interested parties in Israel and Europe. 

The final hurdle, he explains, is to fully commercialize the e-foils and begin mass production. This requires a fresh round of funding to finance the manufacturing process, which will see the e-foil components being made in the Far East and then assembled in Israel. 

Each Level e-foil currently costs approximately $14,000, but despite the price tag, Yanai says the startup is already taking pre-orders from a “select group” of clients, ready for delivery next year. 

“We have built the safest hydrofoil surfboard in the world,” Yanai says, “and that’s completely unique.” 

The post Marine Tech Keeps E-Foil Users In The Air And Out Of The Water appeared first on NoCamels.

This is the conundrum that Israeli startup Croptimize has set out to solve, combining advanced crop modeling technology and effective farming methods to ensure that we all have enough to eat even as the effects of climate change become more pronounced. 

“We know that in the future there will not be enough food production,” Croptimize co-founder and CBO Pamela Jramoy tells NoCamels. “Climate change is sowing instability.”  

And because of this increasing instability in the food chain, she says, the startup began to look for a way to mitigate this phenomenon, creating technology that will allow agriculturalists to understand what crops to plant, where and when. 

The company predicts that the global population will reach 9 billion within the next six years, which will lead to an 85 percent increase in demand for food. Coupled with a potential 10 percent decrease in viable farmland due to climate change, this could trigger a massive food crisis.

A recent report by the US Environmental Protection Agency takes a similar stance, warning that climate change is having a major impact on agriculture, as it relies on natural resources that are affected by it, such as water and land. 

This will indeed make it harder to farm in some areas, the report says, and will require farmers to adapt by changing the crops that they grow and when they grow them.  

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization is also sounding the alarm, stating that climate change is not only adversely impacting food security but also the safety of that food due to higher temperatures, degraded soil quality and contaminants penetrating the crops themselves. 

The Croptimize platform, which is designed for use by food production companies rather than the individual farmers they buy from, provides an integrated method of modeling for up to a decade to come. 

Collaborating with the Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem through an interim exclusivity agreement, the startup created unique algorithms that can predict where best to plant certain crops and in what season – taking into account variables such as the weather, the quality of the soil, the durability of the crop itself and the farming history at a particular site. 

Furthermore, Jramoy explains, the platform works for multiple different crops at the same time in multiple locations around the world, something that she says Croptimize’s competitors are unable to do. 

It also tracks the crops in real time as they grow, offering suggestions for optimal conditions, such as increasing irrigation. 

Jramoy compares the Croptimize platform to the traffic navigation app Waze, which tells drivers which roads to avoid due to congestion or other obstructions, and instead directs them to optimal routes. 

“We are 89 percent accurate in our results indicating risk,” she says. “The idea is that [food production companies] will have a tool that lets them know the real risks in their food production.”  

Working with the food production companies rather than the individual farmers increases the effectiveness of the system, says Jramoy. This is because it allows those companies to help maximize production on a larger scale, determining which crops will grow in sufficient quantities and even directing growers to change the seeds that they intend to plant in the years to come. 

Users access the platform through what Jramoy calls a “dynamic dashboard,” which shows them the data for each of the individual farms that they buy from, allowing them to plan large-scale crop production over multiple years. 

Operating purely as Software as a Service (SaaS), the dashboard can be accessed as an app from any smart device, and Jramoy says it is up to the individual food companies to decide how much data they share with their farmer vendors, who can number in the tens of thousands. 

Jramoy and her co-founder, Croptimize CEO Shai Gilboa, created the company in early 2022 after recognizing the urgent need to tackle the issue of stable and sustainable food production. 

“We saw that we needed to help everybody,” she says. 

The two, both veterans of the entrepreneurial world, immediately brought onboard Hebrew University’s Prof. David Hellman as chief scientific officer, utilizing his expertise in crop modeling and digital agriculture to develop the technology, a move that led to the agreement with the university. 

They also started consulting with food companies in the United States and Latin America, learning that they were indeed struggling to plan for crop production for the coming years, cementing what the founders had already come to accept. 

Now, the startup is preparing to work with food companies commercially, and has already signed with one partner in Latin America. Over the summer, it was also part of the annual Early-Stage Accelerator Program staged by MassChallenge Israel – a four-month intensive course based in Jerusalem that helps nascent companies to flourish.

After having self-funded the company so far, the founders are also seeking to raise the $2.5 million they say they need for their next step. 

The aim, Jramoy says, is to both be profitable within five years and reach enough food companies to make a real difference as the world seeks to resolve the looming threat of grave food insecurity.  

“We must hurry up,” she says. “Climate change is real and it’s changed the [food] production and the behavior of everybody in the world.” 

The post Clever Crop Tech Tackling Climate Change-Triggered Food Insecurity appeared first on NoCamels.

Global market data company Innova says in 2023, nearly two-thirds of consumers worldwide bought some form of chocolate. And according to international consumer insights firm Statista, the chocolate market is today worth $133 billion – and is expected to grow every year by close to five percent.

But chocolate comes at a price that goes beyond what we pay in the shops. The industry has a heavy impact on the environment, and Israeli startup Celleste Bio is determined to change that with its lab-cultivated cocoa beans.

The World Wildlife Fund says that farmers who grow the cocoa beans – 70 percent of whom are in the West African countries of Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon – tend to clear tropical forests to plant new cocoa trees, rather than reusing the same land. Because of this, West Africa is experiencing massive deforestation.

But the environmental toll does not end there. Two other common ingredients in chocolate – soy and palm oil – are also major causes of deforestation around the world.

And while some chocolate manufacturers, such as Germany’s Ritter Sport and Tony’s Chocolonely of the Netherlands, do have sustainable practices, this has yet to take hold in the industry as a whole.

But Celleste Bio says it has the answer – cultivating cocoa in the lab, from cocoa beans, that is indistinguishable from farmed cocoa.

“We’re the real thing, because we’ve found a way to produce 100 percent natural cocoa without all the limitations and the problems that this broken supply chain has,” Celleste CEO Michal Beressi Golomb tells NoCamels.

The lab-cultivated cocoa is grown from just a couple of actual beans, which can be repeatedly reproduced, and without, Beressi Golomb says, “having to cut a single tree again.”

The Misgav-based company’s unique method uses cell culture technology to create the cocoa beans, and combines it with AI modeling to create the optimal growing conditions. These bean cells are then used to make the cocoa butter needed to manufacture chocolate, which has the identical chemical profile to the original.

“We are the first in the world to have been able to produce chocolate-grade cocoa butter,” Beressi Golomb says. “We’re really excited about it.”

She explains that the company takes the cells from one or two cocoa beans and places them in a liquid culture in a bioreactor. The cells rapidly multiply and are harvested to obtain the butter.

It takes just seven days for the bean cells to mature in the bioreactor so that the butter can be harvested. Celleste also produces cocoa powder from the remainder of the beans once the butter is extracted.

And no stage of the process involves genetic modification, a fact Beressi Golomb makes sure to stress.

The unique environment, according to Beressi Golomb, makes the cocoa bean cells think that they are growing in a pod on a tree.

“We’re using the bioreactor as our forest,” she says.

This means that the bean cells can be grown anywhere in the world, regardless of climate, and not just in the traditional hot countries around the equator.

“They just grow over and over again, it’s a continuous cycle,” she says. “We don’t need more trees.”

Beressi Golomb points out that the company’s method also eradicates high-quality beans’ vulnerability to pests and disease, a sensitivity that devastated the Brazilian cocoa bean industry – downgrading it from the world’s second-largest cocoa producer 40 years ago to just the seventh-largest today.

She warns that West African cocoa farmers are now facing a similar situation, making a new solution all the more urgent.

Celleste Bio was established in late 2022, two years after its founders began working on a way to make chocolate healthier. But, Beressi Golomb says, with support of Israeli agritech and foodtech incubator Trendlines, they soon pivoted to cultivating cocoa for the industry.

The company soon caught the interest of American multinational Mondelez, one of the largest food companies in the world, whose portfolio includes global chocolate brands such as Cadbury, Milka, Côte d’Or and Fry’s. And today the food giant is Celleste’s strategic investor.

“They’re a great partner and they’re very excited about it,” says Beressi Golomb.

Others are working on similar solutions, she says, primarily companies in the US, Switzerland and Israel, but they are all focused on cocoa powder and none have been able to produce cocoa butter.

Even so, she qualifies, with such a huge market for both cocoa butter and cocoa powder, each worth billions of dollars, there is room for more than one company.

Celleste has already produced its proof of concept in the form of its chocolate-grade cocoa butter, and is now focusing on upscaling its process, with the objectives of both creating a 50,000 liter bioreactor (it is currently aiming for a 1,000 liter bioreactor within a year) and being ready for market in 2027.

“We’re here to save the chocolate industry,” says Beressi Golomb, “and to ensure that everybody can eat chocolate and feel good about it.”

The post Chocolate From Cultivated Cocoa Comes Without Environmental Toll  appeared first on NoCamels.

Plastic Back uses a proprietary method that takes discarded polyvinyl chloride, better known as PVC, and breaks it down into its components of crude oil and chlorine, both of which are then reused. 

“Plastic is made from oil, so we are converting it back to what it was made from,” Plastic Back co-founder and CEO Tal Cohen tells NoCamels. 

“And once we’re able to do that, we can use that oil in the production of new plastics or different petrochemical applications.” 

PVC is ubiquitous in our lives. It is the world’s third-most widely produced synthetic plastic polymer and used for multiple applications in multiple industries, including for pipes in construction, medical devices and packaging. 

And, according to Cohen, although some 40 million tons of the polymer are produced every year, the long-standing inability to fully recycle it has a direct impact on the green credentials of those industries that use it.   

Almost all substances in the world – including the oil used to create plastic – are made from carbon, Cohen explains, and Plastic Back‘s chemical process is able to attack the carbon bonds of the PVC and break them down into their former form. 

Plastic Back also treats the chlorine that is present in PVC, which Cohen says has always been “the bottleneck in the recycling processes” due to the difficulty in repurposing it. This means while PVC is one of the most commonly produced plastic polymers, the chlorine content has it made least recycled. 

The company’s dechlorination process transforms it into salts that according to Cohen have a range of applications, including the production of new PVC.

“Because we’re able to take both the carbon and the chlorine content, Plastic Back is the first chemical company that is able to do the complete cycle for PVC,” he says.

Other companies are working on ways to convert plastics back to oil, but Cohen says that they are mostly in early stages of development and are struggling to actually recycle PVC. 

“Existing solutions are able to [treat] one or maybe two percent of PVC in their recycling processes,” he says. 

“We’ve shown that we can take up to 100% PVC, which was never seen before.“ 

Furthermore, Cohen explains, the other solutions involve a conversion process that relies on very high temperatures of between 500 and 1,000 degrees Celsius to break down the carbon, which is extremely energy inefficient. Plastic Back’s solution, however, only needs to heat the substance to 100 degrees Celsius. 

It places the PVC in a reactor, which Cohen compares to a big silo, where it is heated up and, due to Plastic Back’s unique process, “the magic happens.” 

The company has two sources for the PVC it recycles – plastic manufacturing companies and recycling facilities that try to treat the waste themselves.  

“They recycle what they can, and the rest, instead of being sent to landfills, can come to Plastic Back,” says Cohen. 

By removing waste from landfills, the company is also helping to mitigate a growing problem around the world. 

For according to the World Bank, 2.01 billion metric tons of municipal solid waste are produced every year – an amount expected to rise to 3.4 billion metric tonnes by 2050 – and at least 33 percent of it is not managed in an environmentally safe manner.

The company was founded in 2018, when Cohen, who has a background in marine biology and chemistry, was looking for a business opportunity that tackled environmental issues.  

“I got a chance to see what plastic pollution really looks like in the ocean,” he says. “And I knew I wanted to do something related to that.” 

Cohen became aware of the technology that was at the time being developed at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and reached out to its developers. 

“I thought that they had reached a very good proof of concept, showed good potential and a good market, and we decided to go for it,” he recalls. 

“Once we found that gap in the industry, and also our technology relevance, that was our market fit.” 

Cohen praises the technology transfer companies created by academic research institutions, including Yissum of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which he says should be a priority for entrepreneurs seeking new opportunities that have economic and technological feasibility.

Funding initially came from an angel investor who Cohen says “really believed” in the company. After that, the proof of concepts attracted further funding, including from the Israel Innovation Authority and Ministry of Energy, and later investment came from venture capital funds both in Israel and Europe.  

Cohen says that the past year or so has been a challenge, with widespread protests in Israel over proposed judicial reforms and the ongoing war that started with a massive terror attack by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7. 

“Israel is a very small country, so everyone was affected, either firsthand or secondhand, by the situation,” he says. “It does change the atmosphere in the lab, in the company, in the country… but also brings people together.” 

Cohen believes that the fact that the company has managed to stay on course for reaching its milestones during this period has also proved its viability to current and future external partners.   

Plastic Back is now fine-tuning the R&D process at its base in Ness Ziona, a town just outside Tel Aviv that has become a favored location for Israeli innovation. 

And while the company has its eye on making inroads in Europe, the United States and Asia, it will maintain its base in Israel.

“We’re an Israeli company,” says Cohen. “Most of the R&D will stay here, and while we do realize that we will have a footprint in these locations, we’ll continue to stay an Israeli company.”

One of those locations is Thailand, where Plastic Back has an agreement with SCG Chemicals, a major producer of PVC. Other similar petrochemicals companies have shown an interest in the startup, and the first pilot, expected to begin in 2025, will be in association with one of them.  

“We are targeting to have 100,000 tons of PVC treated per annum by 2028,” he says. “So that means we have to really get working!” 

The post Plastic Fantastic: Startup Takes PVC Back To Its Crude Oil Roots  appeared first on NoCamels.

That’s the vision of BomVento, a young Israeli startup developing a special coating for the blades on wind turbines that will extract greenhouse gasses (GHG) from the air even as the massive machines themselves generate power. 

“As you approach the problem of global warming, it’s clear that today there are targets for reducing emissions, but they are not being met systematically for economical, geopolitical reasons,” BomVento co-founder and CEO Yuri Tsitrinbaum tells NoCamels. 

As such, he explains, solutions that in the past had seemed “ridiculously irrelevant,” such as the removal of GHG from the atmosphere, are being increasingly seen as a viable option.

“If we can’t really control emissions, we need to control what’s in the atmosphere,” he says. “And another way to manage that is by reducing greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere.” 

An April 2023 report by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that greenhouse gasses have reached historically high rates of growth and that atmospheric carbon dioxide is now 50 percent higher than pre-industrial levels. 

One of the greatest challenges of reducing the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere was the expense, Tsitrinbaum says. 

The cost per ton of greenhouse gasses removed must be under $100 to be viable,  he explains. But according to David Webb, the chief sustainability officer at Boston Consulting Group, one of the “big three” strategy consulting firms in the world, the current cost is $600-$1,000 per ton. 

Furthermore, Tsitrinbaum says, it has proven to be extremely difficult to scale up any solution for removing GHG from the atmosphere. 

“If you can only do it on a very small scale, that’s meaningless,” he says. “It’s not enough to reduce 1,000 or 2,000 tons.”  

And it is these two issues that the BomVento solution seeks to address. 

The company says that its coating would bring the cost of removing GHGs from the atmosphere to less than $50 per ton. And the increasing number of wind turbines in use across the world means that there is no shortage of blades to cover. More than 90 percent of the turbines are onshore, but the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that the number of offshore wind farms will increase around the world in the coming years as more countries move to adopt the technology.  

Wind power today generates 10 percent of global electricity, according to the World Wind Energy Association, with a 12 percent rise in the amount of power created in 2023. 

In fact, the IEA is calling for an average annual growth of 17 percent in order to be on track with the plan laid out in the 2016 Paris Agreement on climate change to reach net zero emissions by 2050.  

The startup’s solution, coating the blades of turbines with a patented material that triggers a chemical reaction through photocatalysis (using light exposure to create the sought-after effect). 

“It’s a chemical process that allows us to reduce a greenhouse gas into an environmentally benign product,” Tsitrinbaum says. 

The light source to trigger the chemical reaction, which breaks up greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide into benign separate elements, would be placed at the base of each wind turbine, and require about five percent of the energy the machine creates.

He compares the process to that of a catalytic converter, the chamber installed in every non-electrical vehicle that he says reduces the amount of emissions by up to 70 percent. 

“We’re applying a close enough process to large volumes of atmospheric air,” he says. 

Tsitrinbaum predicts that each turbine using the BomVento solution could conceivably remove up to 10,000 tons of GHGs per year. And with some 300,000 turbines currently in use globally, that translates to a potential 3 billion tons of GHGs being extracted from the atmosphere annually.  

The Tel Aviv-based company was established in 2022, after Tsitrinbaum says he came to the conclusion that he could do more to contribute outside of the nonprofit ecosystem.  

“I decided that business as a driver for change is more sustainable,” he says, which led him to the renewable energy sector. He worked for several years for a company that provides renewable energy in emerging markets before setting up BomVento. 

“I felt that this is the right time in terms of my maturity, experience [and] financial backbone to go into my own entrepreneurial journey,” he says.

While there are a multitude of companies working to reduce the amount of GHGs in the atmosphere, there are no others developing a solution akin to the one devised by BomVento. 

Even so, Tsitrinbaum recently told a German magazine, given the gravity of the problem, they should not be seen as rivals but rather as fellow travelers working towards a shared goal. 

BomVento  is a member of the startup ecosystem at the Israeli National Center of Blue Economy and Innovation, which focuses on innovative marine technologies, and in 2023 it was named a finalist in the Israeli Climate Awards held by Calcalist business website and Doral Energy-Tech Ventures.  

Tsitrinbaum believes it will take a year and half to fully develop proof of concept and another two and a half years before the coating is ready for commercial purposes. 

The company has previously received backing from the “amazing” Center of Blue Economy, as well as a grant from the Israeli Ministry of Innovation, Science and Technology and investment from a venture capital firm, all of which will support it as it reaches the proof of concept stage.  

Now, BomVento is seeking future funding as it makes what Tsitrinbaum calls the “significant leap” to what it believes can be done.

The post Transforming Wind Turbines Into Killers Of Greenhouse Gasses appeared first on NoCamels.

But four former and current students of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa have developed a new tool that could mean an end to such situations, with an automatic translation platform that is designed specifically for encounters between patients and their physicians.  

“It is a simultaneous translator between doctors and patients who have both language and cultural challenges,” explains CommU CEO Hadar Eliad, MD. 

“The objective of CommU is to offer free communication between patient and doctor,” she tells NoCamels.

Israel is a melting pot of citizens from a multitude of countries, and while Hebrew is the primary language, more than 20 percent of the population is Arab and another 15 percent are native Russian speakers.  

The startup was established by Eliad along with CFO Efrat Ordan, CTO Hanna Ben-Yehuda and COO Ella Fainitsky. Eliad and Fainitsky were both medical students, while Ben-Yehuda was studying computer science and Ordan electrical engineering.  

Crucially, the CommU platform takes into account cultural differences that could both hamper diagnosis and adherence to a treatment regimen. 

Eliad gives the example of a Russian-speaking patient who told her doctor that she had pain in her left side. 

In Russian, explains Eliad, there is a specific word for the area around the ribs, but which in Hebrew became a more general reference to the left side. Because of this, the doctor did not initially understand that the patient was referring to a specific area on the left side of her body. 

The tool comes in the form of an app that can be installed on any device that a doctor uses – phone, tablet or computer – and provides text and voice-based translation.  

It is designed primarily for family physicians and emergency room doctors, the two places where patients born in foreign countries are most likely to interact with medical staff. 

The four began to work on the translator about a year and half ago, after Eliad had an encounter during an oncology rotation, when the doctor she was with had to inform a patient that her breast cancer had returned. 

The patient spoke only Arabic, which the doctor did not speak, Eliad says. As a result, the physician was forced to address her remarks to the patient’s husband, while the patient played no part.  

“The patient sat there completely uninvolved in the conversation,” she says. “They were talking about her cancer and she was completely disconnected.”

Eliad asked the patient’s husband if his wife understood anything that was being discussed and he replied that she did not but he could explain it to her later at home. 

“It pained me that he had to give this bad news to his wife at home, when it was the job of the doctor, who could also answer any questions she had,” Eliad recalls. 

Eliad then brought in a colleague who speaks Arabic as her mother tongue to help translate. 

“Suddenly the patient became very engaged,” she says, “asking questions about her treatment and her prognosis and other things she wanted to know.” 

Eliad discussed this experience with her co-founders and they decided to create a platform to solve this problem. 

They built the app using a number of different AI machine learning models in order to maximize the individual strengths of the various formats. 

The four then further adapted the new platform to their own needs by adding medical vocabulary and terms. 

They worked extensively with anthropologists at the University of Haifa in order to incorporate more than 100 relevant cultural references, and collaborated with the Israeli Ministry of Health and three of the four national health maintenance organizations. 

The app supports Hebrew, Arabic, Russian and English – the four most commonly spoken languages in Israel – as well as most European languages. They are working on adding more languages, the four say, but want to ensure that the translation is of the same high standard before making them available. 

The startup came through BizTec, the Technion’s entrepreneurship program, and was this summer in the 2024 cohort for MassChallenge Israel’s Early Stage Accelerator Program, a four-month intensive course in Jerusalem that helps entrepreneurs advance their nascent companies. 

The team recently completed the development of the app, working with several clinics that treat patients from a wide variety of backgrounds, including Ukrainian refugees. 

“The last time I was [at one of the clinics],” says Fainitsky, “there were six patients from six different countries.”  

Now, says Eliad, the app is at the “exciting” stage of actually being used by the first adopters, including staff at a neurological rehabilitation center in Haifa, and they hope to expand their reach quickly. 

After all, she says, “the patient is the most important thing.”  

The post Automatic Translator Breaks Language Barrier For Doctors & Patients  appeared first on NoCamels.

Today, everything operates in the cloud, from email to apps and even browsers, which presents its own unique security challenges, Perception Point Chief Marketing Officer Karen Krivaa tells NoCamels.  

“The workspace has changed, and this gives attackers lots of places and lots of gaps to get to the user and send malicious either files or links or even text,” Krivaa says. 

Perception Point focuses on these different channels in the modern workspace, protecting the user in the areas of email, browser and app security from one platform, with just one interface that also operates from the cloud.  

“It’s a SaaS [software as a service] solution; it’s cloud,” Krivaa says.  

The platform functions through an API (application programming interface), a piece of software that allows two or more digital devices to talk to one another, weeding out potential threats, and, in the case of emails that form around 90 percent of malicious attacks, before they even arrive in the user’s inbox. 

Any suspicious email is immediately quarantined and inspected before it is passed along to the recipient. If malicious, it never reaches the user.

Email servers can easily connect to the Perception Point platform, usually in just “three clicks,” Kirvaa says, while browsers connect through a URL. This allows the platform to scan every incoming piece of data for malicious activity. 

“Everything is already built in,” according to Kirvaa. 

The platform conducts what the Perception Point calls its own unique dynamic scanning service, examining every piece of data incoming to a business’ servers and network to determine whether it has a sinister intent, creating a layer of protection that swings into action before the servers can pass the data on to the intended recipient.  

The software significantly relies on AI automation to root out the potential threats, but Krivaa says that there is also an active human component, with cybersecurity experts constantly reviewing the platform to ensure that nothing slips through the cracks. And if it does, the company immediately takes action to mitigate the threat. 

“Nothing is 100 percent perfect,” she says. “If something gets through, we remediate it right away.”  

And, Krivaa says, the company does not rely just on finding threats that have already been identified in the cybersecurity world, but understands that every day brings new methods of attacking businesses. 

“We actually scan, check every single link, every single file,” Krivaa says. “It could be a new type of malware never seen before; it could be a new phishing site never seen before.” 

Krivaa explains that hackers and other cyberattackers are becoming exponentially more sophisticated, even to the point of being able to find pre-prepared packages that they can adapt to strike at companies. 

“Attackers are using GenAI,” she says, referring to artificial intelligence programs that allow users to create all kinds of media from text and images to videos using simple prompts.  

“They [created] attack as a service,” she says. “You can buy phishing kits, input your stuff and you’re ready to go.”

This level of refinement can be problematic for what Krivaa calls “legacy” cybersecurity companies, which she says cannot cope with the rapid shift in both the proliferation and the sophistication of modern attacks. 

In fact, it was Perception Point that alerted the world to the recent highly sophisticated phishing attack that the company dubbed “Uncle Scam” as it originated from an email posing as a US government account. 

Adding credence to the phishing scheme was the fact that the people behind the email account used the domain of Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 marketing platform, which organizations regularly use for various business purposes and which may have helped the emails sneak past other security measures. 

The email claimed to be from the General Services Administration (GSA), asking the recipient to bid on a Department of Energy project, and the link within led to a spoofed website that had every detail of the original perfectly copied. 

Every link on the cloned website worked, adding to the image of authenticity, Krivaa says, and ultimately it led the visitor to a form to provide confidential details such as usernames and passwords. 

“The more you go into it and the more reliable it seems, the more you trust it,” Krivaa says. “It was really scary. A lot of work went into this.” 

Another recent phishing attempt with a similar level of sophistication that Perception Point rooted out was one that capitalized on the outage of the CrowdStrike cybersecurity company in July, when a botched software update caused millions of systems worldwide that use Windows to crash. 

The phishing attempt involved the email account update@crowdstrike.com.vc, claiming to be from CrowdStrike and with a domain name that looked legitimate. Only the easily overlooked “vc” at the end of the address indicates that this was not from the company itself. 

“They took advantage of the Crowdstrike error, and they swung into action,” Krivaa says of the email, which included malware purporting to be able to correct the original botched update. 

Perception Point’s system isolated the zipped file placed inside the PDF that was attached to the email. And inside the zipped file was an executable file called CrowdStrike.exe, which, Krivaa says “basically wipes out your entire computer.” 

The latter attack, she says, likely originated in Iran.  

Tel Aviv-based Perception Point was set up in 2015 by IDF cybersecurity veterans, who started with a platform that could identify specific malware that had never been seen before. 

From there, the company expanded to a wide range of cybersecurity protection and today services more than 8,000 companies (it is a strictly B2B operation) of varying sizes across the globe. 

Krivaa says that working for a cybersecurity company has taught her to be suspicious of every email she receives to her personal account, and warns that others should be just as vigilant. 

“I never click on anything,” she says. “If I get a message, I go to my laptop, I go to the company site, I log in, and that’s how I check.”   

The post Startup Tells Hackers: Hey You, Stay Out Of My Cloud! appeared first on NoCamels.

But now unmanned aerial vehicles – commonly known as drones – have not only become instrumental to business but are also on the cusp of a revolution in transportation too. 

And the question of how we can all safely share and navigate the lower airspace in which drones operate is being answered by unmanned traffic management (UTM) systems, which tell them where to fly, and at what speed and altitude. 

“[With] more and more drones flying within our airspace safely, you need the UTM software to make sure that they can synchronize within the airspace,” explains Eyal Zor, the CEO of Israeli startup Airwayz, whose software has become one of the most commonly used UTMs worldwide. 

UTMs were the missing link in the chain, Zor tells NoCamels, synchronizing all of the airborne craft that do not have a pilot and instead are managed remotely from the ground. 

“When you’re managing an airspace, it’s mandatory to connect with a UTM,” Zor explains. 

Flying drones without UTMs is akin to having cars without roads, he says. He also compares them to traffic navigation systems such as Waze, which provide drivers with information about the road conditions ahead, including the location of other vehicles. 

There are multiple UTMs in use around the world, and they are responsible for ensuring that they are all synchronized and that the airspace information is reliable and transparent for all users. 

They guarantee that the drone operators all get the relevant information about weather conditions, GPS data and the overall environment, so that everyone has the same true airspace information and every airborne craft in a certain airspace is accounted for and is authorized to fly along its route. 

“Different operators can work together because UTM companies know how to be the bridge between them,” Zor says. 

Zor says Airwayz’ AI-based platform has the edge over its competitors as it can cope with thousands of drones all in the skies at the same time. 

Airwayz, he says, can work successfully with scores of different drone operators simultaneously. 

“It’s like a virtual traffic controller,” Zor says of the platform. “We get all the information and we utilize AI to understand exactly all the constraints in real time.” 

An air traffic controller must be aware of human limitations, he says, able to manage perhaps 40 aircraft at the same time but absolutely incapable of dealing with 400 or even 1,000. 

But aerospace is dynamic, he points out, and there are a lot of possible routes. As such, Airwayz finds the most optimized flight path for each drone or operator without compromising the safety of the entire environment. 

“Leading clients say, I need to have a system that can understand all of the constraints, and support [our] 1,000 operators. This is what we can provide with our system.” 

Airwayz is currently in use in multiple locations, including Rotterdam Port, the largest seaport in the Western World and the largest outside of East Asia. It is also, according to Zor, the most technologically advanced port in the world. 

The UTM has proved itself at the port, he says, able to manage airspace of an area the size of Manhattan, where there are 3,000 companies and 60 drone operators. The drones are used in a range of ways such as site inspections, moving goods and even countering drug-smuggling efforts. 

Airwayz began working at Rotterdam Port due to a successful period managing drones at the Israeli seaports in Tel Aviv, Ashdod and Haifa, Zor recalls. 

The company’s work at Haifa in the north, Tel Aviv in the center and Ashdod in the south is part of the Israel National Drone Initiative (INDI), a multiyear project designed to prepare the groundwork for the regular use of these unmanned aircraft in the country – building the technology, regulation and infrastructure ahead of their introduction.

“We’re maybe at the front of the line to say the system is ready to deploy on a national scale,” he says. “We are very experienced with our system.” 

The company was established in 2019 by Zor and co-founders Shai Kurianski, the CTO, and Yair Yosef, the CPO. It has completed its Series A funding round, raising an undisclosed sum, and is now looking to expand its presence in the international UTM market. 

With a well-established foothold in Europe, Airwayz is planning to move into other countries and forms of drone usage on the continent. It is also breaking into the US market, where it has begun working with American Robotics, a company specializing in autonomous drone systems. 

Both European nations and the United States, Zor says, are becoming increasingly prepared for an expansion of drone usage, and companies are already certifying theri air taxis as a means of transportation in the near future.  

 “Airwayz is here to make sure that this technology, this revolution is ready to scale up and be adopted in our skies safely,” he says. 

The post Air Traffic Startup Watches The Skies To Keep Drones Safely In Synch  appeared first on NoCamels.

Processed food is actually a blanket description for any foods that have been changed in some way during their preparation. This could be drying, preserving (which is what we usually think of when we hear the term) or even cooking itself. 

And while we imagine processed foods to be ones that have undergone a more drastic treatment like breakfast cereal, ready meals, canned meat or prepackaged bread and pastries, which have had preservatives added, it can actually also include frozen fruit and vegetables, cheese and even yogurt. 

Meanwhile, we need proteins to maintain our health, and the right consumption of them has a major impact on our wellbeing, and even affects responses such as appetite and fatigue.  

The discovery of their relationship came when researchers from the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa were examining the possible danger of ingesting amyloid proteins in our food. 

These amyloids are the clumps of proteins that form a plaque that accumulates in the brains of people suffering from neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. 

This plaque forms in the spaces between the nerve cells, which disrupts cell function in memory, atrophying key areas of the brain and ultimately causing significant loss of its functionality. 

But the scientists found instead that adding these amyloids to processed food can actually promote gut health and mimic the effect of dietary fiber found in fruit and whole grain. 

In fact, they found that the bacteria in our gut prefer amyloids to other forms of protein that can disrupt the digestive process, causing effects such as fermentation in the intestines. 

Focusing their research on proteins found in eggs and dairy, the scientists say they came to the conclusion that adding amyloids to processed food can break them down more slowly in the upper digestive system, creating a more gradual and controlled absorption of proteins by the body. 

They also realized that these amyloid proteins can manage a low ratio between two key bacteria in the intestines, balancing them to maintain gut health and potentially reducing the likelihood of diseases such as diabetes and even cancer. 

And examining the research from a broader perspective, the scientists said, it demonstrates that careful food processing can have the potential to make us healthier. 

“Today, we know how to precisely control and formulate foods and to estimate through models developed in my lab, how different food components will be digested in the body of different consumers,” said Prof. Uri Lesmes, who led the research team. 

“Together with innovative research tools, this scientific approach will help us understand the fate of proteins and innovative food components in the bodies of different consumers and may even facilitate development of personalized dietary choices,” he said. 

Lesmes worked on the study with doctoral students Gil Refael and Alon Romano, along with Prof. Meytal Landau and doctoral student Yitzhaq Engelberg from the Technion’s Faculty of Biology, as well as Prof. Omry Koren from the Faculty of Medicine at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan.

And the study, Lesmes maintains, may even lead to the development of processed foods as a mechanism to improve our health. 

“I believe that this research opens up new avenues for understanding the potential of ‘smartly’ processed food to expand human nutrition sources and improve health,” he said. 

The post Pass The Pies! Study Shows Processed Food Can Be Healthy appeared first on NoCamels.

Co-Energy has created a way of making plastic and organic waste into high-demand energy commodities that include electricity, hydrogen, fuel and biochar – a type of charcoal made by processing organic material that is often used to improve soil health as it can help retain water and nutrients. 

The field of waste-to-value has been around for decades, Co-Energy CEO Aviv Dekel tells NoCamels, but the market faced two obstacles: the technological challenge of making the waste into a resource, and making that technology attractive to potential users. 

“We have conquered both of those challenges,” Dekel says. 

Co-Energy’s technology involves a process called pyrolysis, whereby materials like wood or plastic are heated to very high temperatures without the use of oxygen. 

And because there’s no oxygen, the materials don’t burn, and instead are broken down. This process can transform substances like wood into biochar and plastics into a form of oil or gas.

The company developed a paralytic reactor – a chamber where the pyrolysis occurs – that works continuously, rather than processing the material in batches. 

“There is constant energy being generated,” Dekel says. 

The technology also overcomes many of the challenges presented by dealing with multiple kinds of waste matter. 

Waste comes in many forms, and the Co-Energy platform can work with different types of parameters, such as moisture and mass, in order to generate that consistent and reliable stream of energy.

“The technology needs to be robust on one hand and sensitive on the other,” Dekel explains. 

“We developed a sophisticated system that measures all these different parameters and works at very high temperatures.”  

Established in 2014 by three co-founders with expertise in chemistry, mechanical and material engineering, the Yehud-based company focused on tackling the challenge of transforming plastic and organic waste into a valuable resource. 

Dekel says that it took Co-Energy four years of research and development to reach a level of confidence in the technology to go to market. 

The company’s patented, proprietary technology is now actually able to turn one ton of plastic waste into 2.5 megawatts of electricity. And that, according to the US Department of Energy, could power 1,625 homes for a year. 

Plastic waste is one of the world’s most pressing issues. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), plastic waste made up about 12 percent of the total municipal solid waste in the United States in 2018 – which amounts to 35.7 million tons. However, only about 9 percent of that plastic waste was recycled, and the majority ended up in landfills.

These landfills pose significant environmental threats due to plastic’s long decomposition time, which can span hundreds or even thousands of years. During this period, the plastic can release harmful chemicals into the soil and groundwater, leading to potential contamination of natural resources. 

And Co-Energy is now able to take that plastic waste and convert it not just into fuel and electricity, but also to hydrogen, a material used in a plethora of industrial processes. 

Dekel says that as the company expands its customer base, it is constantly working to expand its capabilities and flexibility in the waste-to-value process, so as to accommodate as many different waste forms as it can. 

Today Co-Energy’s clients include municipalities, recycling companies and even major manufacturers that have large amounts of plastic or agricultural waste to treat. 

Currently operating in Israel, the company works on a business-to-business model, adhering to the national regulations regarding waste treatment for each project. 

In its most recent project at the Elcon Recycling Center in the Negev, Co-Energy is using three reactors each processing half a ton of plastic waste per hour, rising to two tons per hour after six months. This more intensive process can convert the waste to 22 million liters of fuel per year.

Meanwhile, another project that began in December 2022 treats organic waste such as wood, sludge and vegetation at a rate of 3 tons per hour to create biochar.

Dekel explains that creating biochar involves careful monitoring of the process in order to maximize the outcome. 

“This realm of organic waste is very difficult to convert to energy in an efficient manner, because it’s very low in its caloric value to start with,” she says. 

“But we stop the process right before the material is fully evaporated, and then you get the wonderful product biochar, which is well known all around the world.” 

According to Dekel, the company’s biggest competitor is foreign waste facilities, leading to Co-Energy having to convince institutions to process their waste for profit instead of selling it abroad. 

“You take the waste that everybody wants to get rid of, and you turn it into a commodity that can generate over $400 or $500 per ton,” she explains. “That’s taking the notion of circular economy three steps forward.”  

The company is proudly entirely bootstrapped and is currently not looking for funding. With successful projects in Israel to show, Co-Energy has now received interest from international customers, specifically in Mexico and Australia. 

“We have very impressive pipelines of projects, in different stages of negotiations, we are definitely expanding our businesses overseas,” Dekel says. 

In the future, the company aims to take the waste-to-value process and place it in the larger context of climate change, helping countries achieve their net zero pledges for carbon emissions. 

Co-Energy believes that waste-to-value is one of the most impactful ways to reduce a country’s overall emissions. 

“We need to make renewable energy affordable and accessible, and by utilizing waste through our process, we can complement these initiatives and really hit all those different checkboxes in the market,” Dekel says. 

“We really try, as a company philosophy, to work in an overarching manner, to try to tick as many of those boxes as we can.” 

The post Plastic To Power: Startup Changing Face Of Waste Conversion appeared first on NoCamels.

All four sound like developments from companies in Israel’s vaunted high-tech sector, but are actually among the innovations devised by groups of religious Jewish women during a 26-hour hackathon recently held in Jerusalem. 

Sporting vibrant pink shirts, the 120 participants in the 7th annual “Hack.Her.It” competition organized by Jerusalem College of Technology’s Schreiber LevTech Entrepreneurship Center were all students at one of the three JCT campuses – Tal, Tvuna and Lustig. Hack.Her.It is a play on the Hebrew slang word hackerit – a female hacker. 

The annual event showcases the importance of empowering religious women to become innovators in the workforce. 

“It’s been so inspiring to witness these young women, some of them literally juggling young babies in their hands, come up with cutting-edge solutions to very real problems,” said Orlee Guttman, co-founder of the Schreiber Levtech Entrepreneurship Center. 

“We’re proud of the accomplishments of everyone who participated in this event.” 

A similar hackathon for religious men was held soon after the women’s event, with the same goal of imbuing its participants with a personal understanding of what they can achieve. 

“To create systemic change in the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) communities, we need to create a cadre of men and women who are innovative leaders,” Guttman tells NoCamels. 

“They need to be innovative at their workplaces and succeed at senior positions within companies and organizations (intrapreneurship) and/or with their own startups (entrepreneurship).” 

But, Guttman explains, many members of these communities are starting at a disadvantage compared to secular Israelis: Despite being talented and intelligent, they have no prior exposure to the high-tech industry and no experience in product creation. 

And it is these skills, she says, that are crucial to advancement in the workplace. 

JCT offers the students a chance to develop those skills, and indeed among the hackathon participants were women studying for degrees in software engineering, computer science, business administration, and industrial engineering and management. 

Sharing a similar philosophy are some of the leading companies both in Israel and the whole world, evidenced by their various expressions of support for the hackathon. 

Taking an active role in the event were Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Elbit Systems, two of Israel’s major defense technology companies, who set tasks for the competition. And the winning innovation – the wearable device for lost travelers – was a challenge set by Elbit, who also provided mentorship for the women. 

“We had the honor to personally accompany [the winners] and be impressed by their skills and abilities,” Elbit said at the close of the event. “We are happy and proud to take part in a project that promotes the future tech generation in Israel.”

The Schreiber LevTech Entrepreneurship Center, Guttman tells NoCamels, is determined to tap into the ingenuity of members of the Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox community, which it sees as an underappreciated resource in the Startup Nation. 

“We need men and women who understand how to look at a problem, understand the implications and think creatively about how to develop a solution, very often involving technology,” she says. 

“These can include issues in the healthcare sector, education, homeland security and more. They need to have the self-confidence and skills that come from having been trained to understand and design solutions.”

And that, she adds, is what the Schreiber LevTech Entrepreneurship Center does.

Guttman says that the college recognized that the students like to work on projects that help the larger community and the country as a whole. 

As such, the hackathon partnered with companies and organizations that could provide challenges along those lines, such as technology solutions for emergency response teams, those with physical challenges and social service organizations.

Other sponsors of the event came from Israel and abroad, including the disabled veterans’ organization Beit Halochem (warriors’ house), the Women’s Amutot Initiative of Miami, the Jewish Women’s Fund of Atlanta and US financial services organization Cross River. 

The judges panel also had an impressive roster of participants, among them Pnina Ben Ami, VP Marketing at Jerusalem Venture Partners, and Talia Berkowitz, Director of R&D production programs at Mobileye. 

One of the most important aspects of the hackathon, according to Guttman, is showing the participants that they are able to meet the demands of the high-tech sector, and are equipped with the skills that are needed to succeed in this workplace. 

“Many of them were not aware before that they have the ability to create a product, they have the ability to learn new technology overnight and create a working prototype by the next day,” she says. 

“It opens their minds to things that they never knew they could accomplish.”  

The participants themselves are in agreement, inspired by their surroundings and by their own ability to meet the challenges presented to them. 

“It’s been amazing trying to come up with innovative solutions to a real-life problem in just a few days,” said participant Shifra Wexler. “It’s great to be a part of such a robust learning environment.” 

Wexler was part of a team that worked on camera software that could immediately contact the authorities if it detected that a violent event had occurred. 

The team was inspired by the mass terror attack carried out by Hamas on October 7, which triggered the ongoing war in Gaza, as surveillance cameras had managed to record many of the atrocities but did not have the ability to alert the authorities.

And the open door to the sector presented by the hackathon did not close once the competition was over. 

Schreiber LevTech continues to work with the women who participated in the competition, offering them the options of working further on their products from the hackathon via the college’s pre-accelerator program or meeting with the companies that presented the challenges in order to discuss a joint project.   

“Even students who do not continue on with these particular projects, but rather work in other companies after graduation, have [acquired] a skill set that is very valuable,” says Guttman. 

“They can think out of the box and they’re not afraid to try new things and to lead. And they learn how to figure things out on their own, which is amazing.”  

The post Empowering Religious Jewish Women To Be Israeli Innovators appeared first on NoCamels.

When a plant is over fertilized, whatever nutrients it doesn’t need are funneled down into the soil and water, with potentially disastrous results for them and the plants. It is like giving all three – plant, soil and water – an overdose of salt-rich fertilizer.   

Israeli company Yevul Info has developed an AI-enhanced solution designed to prevent this overfertilization and ensure optimal plant health, helping to meet the demands of feeding an expanding world population amid changes in our climate. 

“We actually can contribute to enhanced yields and promote sustainable farming practices,” Yevul CEO and co-founder Keren Avriel-Sadan tells NoCamels. 

“We do it by detecting the early signs of nutritional issues and preventing fertilizers overdose and yield waste.” 

The Leaf Guardian platform monitors plants grown with fertigation, the technique of supplying dissolved fertilizer to crops through irrigation. It uses round the clock precision agriculture – improving crop health and yields through the use of cameras, sensors and other advanced technology – to observe changes in the green color of the leaves that could indicate a problem.   

This allows the platform to detect almost indiscernible signs of plant deterioration due to overfertilization days before visible symptoms appear. 

And this not only prevents a fertilizer overdose that can ultimately lead to yield waste, but also ensures that the precious plants are not starved of food. 

Yevul (the Hebrew word for crop) explains that accepted farming protocol is to use more fertilizer than needed, in an effort to boost immunity to hazards like disease, cold or heat stress.

But this is a flawed method, which in the best case scenario results in wasted fertilizer, as the surplus leaches into the ground and pollutes it and the water. In the worst case, excess fertilizing causes salinization, the accumulation of salt in the water, actively poisoning the environment and resulting in lost yield.

Through the use of its patented algorithm and machine learning to track the crops throughout their lifetime, the platform immediately takes action if and when needed.  

“It detects early signs of plant deterioration days before visible symptoms appear, and adjusts nutrition [as part of] continuous, dynamic monitoring,” Avriel-Sadan says of Leaf Guardian. 

For while a farmer can typically only see the symptoms or the results a week to 10 days after implementing a change, the algorithm runs and analyzes the processes and knows what is going on inside the crop in real time.  

“Although we appreciate the farmers’ expertise, we know that [while] he goes out to the field and sees a green, healthy crop, we can know that something is happening inside the crop,” Avriel-Sadan says. 

Should it detect any worrying changes, Leaf Guardian sends a simple alert message to the farmer, advising them to increase or decrease the amount of fertilizer in the irrigation water. 

It will issue a second alert several days later, informing the farmer that either all is now well or that further steps need to be taken to preserve the plants.  

“We provide actions to take at every stage of the crop’s life,” says Avriel-Sadan. 

The platform is currently in its prototype phase, so the alerts are for now communicated through the WhatsApp instant messaging platform, a method Avriel-Sadan says works very well for the farmers.

She explains that farmers are generally less interested in statistics and diagrams, and so the company instead provides the information that they need at that moment in order to best manage their crops. 

“It’s very important to us, the simplicity of usage for farmers,” she says.   

Although Yevul’s focus is on fertigation, the alerts can also be adapted to monitor plants for attacks by pests or an already existing disease.   

Yevul was founded in 2022 by Avriel-Sadan, along with its CTO Agronomy Yochai Isack, and CTO Ezer Miller, a data scientist and machine learning developer. 

Isack and Miller met at the Hebrew University while pursuing their respective PhDs at the Faculty of Agriculture. They began to explore a solution to the problem of crop overfeeding and its resultant weaker crops and financial losses, which evolved into Leaf Guardian. 

“They were searching for a solution and there was great synergy between these two people – a mathematics guy and an agronomist,” Avriel-Sadan says.  

Avriel-Sadan joined as an experienced entrepreneur in the field of agricultural technology, bringing deep knowledge of sustainable farming and an understanding of the farming industry’s need for a product like Leaf Guardian.   

“My main driver is sustainability,” she says. “A lot of people don’t realize that it can be so easy to save the world from this contamination.” 

Yevul is today part of the Galil Ofek Incubator for life science startups, and has so far raised over $1 million, with some investment coming from the Israel Innovation Authority, the brand of the government dedicated to promoting the national high-tech sector.  

Avriel-Sadan says most of the interest in the platform has come from countries such as Brazil, China, Germany and South Africa, where farmers are penalized for the overuse of fertilizer.  

“Instead of paying a penalty, you can buy this solution,” she says. 

And although Yevul has worked extensively with Israeli farmers in the past, she explains that the first customers have come from outside of the country as Israeli farmers have been focused elsewhere due to the terror attack of October 7 and the ongoing war with Hamas in Gaza, which perpetrated it.  

The company has also been personally impacted by the war. It had to relocate from the Golan Heights-based Shamir Research Institute, where it had completed most of the R&D on Guardian Leaf, due to the constant bombing of northern Israel by Hezbollah in Lebanon that began on October 8.  

Even so, Avriel-Sadan is full of praise for the company’s new home at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Rehovot campus, where they now work with world-renowned molecular physiologist Prof.  Menachem Moshelion. This opportunity, she says, is akin to finding the holy grail. 

As Yevul reaches the end of its R&D phase, its founders say they are looking forward to new partnerships in their pioneering approach to crop management, which Avriel-Sadan refers to as “fertigation 5.0.”   

“I believe in Yevul Info because it represents the future of agriculture, one where technology and data analytics converge to create smarter, more efficient farming practices,” she says. 

The post AI Platform Watches Crops 24/7 To Prevent A Fertilizer Overdose appeared first on NoCamels.

And trying to make order among the sheer number of shocked and injured people can be overwhelming, even for the most experienced first responder. 

A new algorithm devised by Omer Perry, a lecturer at Afeka College of Engineering in Tel Aviv is designed to help emergency personnel handle the tough task of getting victims to hospital in the immediate aftermath of such an event. 

The algorithm comes into play in what Perry describes as phase three of a mass casualty event. Phase one is the evaluation of the scene in terms of numbers of casualties, phase two is the start of treatment at the scene and phase three is the evacuation of the wounded. 

“In this [third] phase, there is a peak of cognitive overload,” Perry tells NoCamels, referring to the massive amounts of information with which the person in charge of managing the situation, known as an incident commander, has to contend.  

“And in this peak of cognitive overload, we need to think about how to make it easier for the incident commander to manage this type of matching process,” Perry says. 

And this is where artificial intelligence “comes to life,” with an algorithm that is able to work out which casualties are in need of the most urgent care, taking some of the pressure off the person in charge at the scene. 

“The algorithm prioritizes the casualties,” he says. “It will lower the cognitive overload of the incident commander, so it will be easier for everyone.” 

The algorithm analyzes data about the number of casualties and severity of the wounds they sustained, and calculates which victims should be placed in which ambulances and to which medical center they should be sent, explains Perry. 

This is because ambulances and medical centers differ in the range of special capabilities and treatments they offer, and because some victims of trauma require more urgent care en route to hospital and must be dispatched to the closest location due to the severity of their wounds. 

“Let’s say, for example, that we have an urgent casualty who needs to go in an ALS,” Perry says, referring to an Advanced Life Support ambulance. 

“The ALS can carry one urgent casualty and two non-urgent casualties. And there is a dilemma: do we upload an urgent casualty and wait a couple of minutes to bring another two non-urgent casualties, or send the ambulance only with the urgent casualty?” 

The algorithm is built to cope with these types of decisions, says Perry. When the incident commander is on site with information about the number of casualties and the number of ambulances, the algorithm starts working and provides the answers to such dilemmas.  

While the incident commander can input the data into the algorithm, Perry explains it is preferable for this side to be handled by a dispatch, someone removed from the often chaotic scene who will then feed the people on site the information they need about which casualty goes where and when. 

He developed the algorithm during his PhD studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, under the supervision of Prof. Avishay Goldberg, chair of the Department of Health Systems Management, and Prof. Yuval Bitan of the Department of Health Policy and Management.

As part of his studies, Perry built a simulator to train paramedics in managing mass casualty events, and from there came the idea for the algorithm to help manage the dispatch of casualties to hospital. 

To build the algorithm, Perry collaborated with Dr. Eli Jaffe, the director of training, volunteer activities and international relations at Israel’s national emergency service Magen David Adom, and also enlisted the help of three of his own students in artificial intelligence at Afeka – Shiri Goren, Yuval Deknuydt and Raanan Yossef. 

And many of his students, he tells NoCamels, have been working on this new way to help others while struggling with their own personal crises – missing school due to military service as Israel battles Hamas in Gaza and later coping with the impact of fighting a war. 

He also pays tribute to Afeka President Prof. Ami Moyal, whom he says has vowed that not one student will be allowed to drop out this academic year due to the war.

Perry says the students were an integral part of developing the algorithm, which took a year to create, after he spent around two years mulling over how to resolve this issue. The students also developed a simulator used to test the algorithm and now with Perry are working on two new algorithms. 

The next task, according to Perry, is to incorporate the algorithm into the simulator used to train paramedics from Magen David Adom. 

“You can see human challenges and limitations come to life,” he says of his work. 

And when you can evaluate them and measure them, then you can decide what to do in order to cope with these challenges.” 

The post AI Algorithm Eases Tough Task Of Handling Mass Casualty Events appeared first on NoCamels.

TreeTube, an Israeli startup from the central city of Ramat Gan, has developed a way to allow trees to flourish in urban settings, even with the challenges posed by the needs of utility companies that take precedence over natural features. The issue is primarily due to the dense compaction of the ground that makes it a difficult environment for trees, rather than the utilities companies themselves.

Today, construction projects make roads, pavements and buildings their priority and only consider greenery if there is any budget surplus, explains TreeTube Co-founder Jonathan Antebi. And, he warns, this decision not to prioritize green spaces will lead to disastrous results for climate change in our cities.

“You need to have a space for electricity, gas, water, sewage, drainage, communication,” he tells NoCamels. “There also needs to be a place for trees – a green utility.”

Trees, he explains, need non-compacted ground like in forests, not the 98 percent compaction that civil engineers insist on.

As a result, he says, more than 30 percent of urban trees stop growing in the first three to five years, and far  more than that fail to reach the age of 10.

Unless trees manage to damage their man-made environment, they are stuck, ultimately making them more vulnerable to diseases and eventually causing them to die.

“Trees need soil, air and water, which is relatively challenging in compacted paved areas,” he says.

Trees are crucial for keeping temperatures down in cities, offering cool and shady spots among the buildings as well as reducing polluting carbon emissions in the atmosphere. 

“Trees are fantastic filters,” says Antebi. “They are one of the utilities that have an actual return on investment to a municipality. Each healthy mature tree contributes close to $275 each year to the city through all its benefits.” 

Tree canopies can bring the temperature down by as much as eight degrees Celsius, he says. But in reality, he explains, the area under trees feels far cooler because the leaves and the branches circulate the air more effectively.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the agency tasked with promoting sustainable growth worldwide, also believes that trees are vital to a thriving urban environment.

“The value of a tree is embedded in every breath we take,” it says. 

“The ecosystem services it provides are practically invaluable: it absorbs and removes carbon and replaces it with oxygen, it reduces air pollution in cities, holds the soil together to prevent landslides and stormwater runoff, it shields us from cold winds and creates a shadow we can hide in from the sun.”

In fact, Antebi says, TreeTube meets several of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) adopted by all UN member states in 2015, which are designed to improve the lives of everyone on the planet.

The SDGs that TreeTube meets are related to the issues of health and well-being; clean water and sanitation; affordable and clean energy; industry, innovation and infrastructure; sustainable cities and communities; climate action; and life on land.

“We needed to act differently in order to be able to handle these goals,” Antebi says.

TreeTube’s patented, proprietary solution is – as its name suggests – massive tubes made of inert plastic material, 25 percent of which is recycled, that are fitted together like blocks and placed under roads and walkways alongside the pipes and cables for infrastructure.

The soil-filled system directs the roots to a secondary habitat through different openings, allowing nature and modernity to coexist.

Antebi describes the TreeTubes system as a cost-effective solution with a fast and easy installation that industrializes urban tree plantation, providing soil for the trees as well as access to air and water.

The installation of the trees is quick and efficient, he says, and can be done within hours. The pavement is removed and room is created for the system between the existing infrastructure for utilities. The system is then placed in the ground and the area around it filled in, compacted and repaved.

The tubes have already been used in Israel, the Netherlands and Estonia, to great success. The company works primarily with local authorities as well as landscape architects, which Antebi describes as TreeTube’s main customers.

In fact, Antebi says, there are more than 1,000 new trees in various parts of the world that are thriving because of the TreeTubes in which they were planted.

Founded in 2019, the company last month was a winner in this year’s MassChallenge Israel Early-Stage Accelerator Program, a four-month intensive course in Jerusalem that helps entrepreneurs advance their nascent companies. 

The five winners were chosen from among the 30 competitors for their ability to present a clear business strategy and their potential to have a positive global impact.

The startup is bootstrapped, with funding coming from the founders themselves. They are currently looking for further investment in order to expand and bring the benefits of urban trees to more locations.

Antebi says that urban life will soon be virtually impossible without trees, making solutions such as TreeTube indispensable as the climate changes and the planet heats up.

“We cannot play this game anymore: the world is in a different situation,” he warns.

“Unless we make a huge change in our cities, [they will be] 4 degrees Celsius higher than today within less than 50 years, we will end up with not enough water and all the seas will rise.” 

The post Tree-Planting Startup Creates Urban Oases In Overheated Cities appeared first on NoCamels.

In 1993, chicken overtook beef consumption per person in the United States alone. In fact, 27.5 billion pounds of beef is produced annually, compared to 43.4 billion pounds of farmed chicken, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports.  

And now Israeli food tech company SuperMeat is getting in on the poultry action, offering an alternative solution to traditional livestock farming, by cultivating real chicken meat from cells.  

Their approach not only aims to reduce environmental impacts of meat production, but also seeks to address other concerns raised in conventional meat production. For instance, cultivating meat rather than farm growing it can significantly reduce the risk of contamination from E. coli and Salmonella, which eliminates the need to use antibiotics on the birds, which is very common in the poultry industry.

SuperMeat was cofounded in December 2015 by its CEO Ido Savir and Koby Barak, with a mission to produce quality meat in an animal-friendly and sustainable way.

Savir and Barak had previously jointly established the Modern Agriculture Foundation, an NGO dedicated to promoting cellular agriculture globally. Their work with the Modern Agriculture Foundation opened their eyes to the immense potential in the space, furthering their interest and ultimately bringing them to set out as pioneers in meat cultivation.    

Today, SuperMeat is made up of a diverse team of 30 people, boasting experience in multiple disciplines, including stem cell biology, chemistry and engineering technology.  Despite the challenges of the ongoing war in Israel, with some team members serving in the IDF reserves, they have continued to develop their product and remain dedicated to the company’s mission. Most of the team works from their office in Rehovot, where they focus on R&D and the manufacturing aspects. 

“I always worked for ventures that make some positive impact, whether it’s from an environmental perspective or social perspective. I’m also ideologically driven and vegan.” SuperMeat VP Business Development Osnat Shostak tells NoCamels. 

Shostak emphasizes the commitment and dedication that SuperMeat’s team has to the work they are doing, leading to the company’s innovation. 

SuperMeat begins its chicken growing process with what they refer to as a seed, which are cells that only need to be taken once from a real chicken egg, and then are able to be utilized repeatedly.  By establishing a master cell bank, which can be used over and over again, SuperMeat has created consistency and stability in the production process. 

The SuperMeat seed, also known as the chicken cell, is placed into a fermenter where it is provided with warmth, oxygen and feed and grows and matures into meat tissue, just like the meat from a chicken grown on a farm.

It is SuperMeat’s use of embryonic stem cells, as opposed to using other common cell types used in the cultivated meat space (such as fibroblasts or primary cells), which allows them to produce different types of meat tissue with a single platform.

In fact, SuperMeat opened a production to fork facility, where they offered Israelis the chance to participate in demonstrations and tastings.  

“We’ve had this substantial validation of our product, because we opened in Israel a production to fork facility, and received direct feedback on our products from both consumers and industry experts,” Shostak explains.

It was at this facility that SuperMeat conducted the world’s first and only blind tasting event, comparing cultivated meat with traditionally grown meat.  The company was thrilled with the results, as tasters continually demonstrated that SuperMeat’s product was indistinguishable from traditional meat. 

SuperMeat distinguishes itself from traditional chicken farming in many ways, offering a compelling proposition to meat companies seeking a competitive edge. 

Their meat production results in meat tissues that are edible without any need to clean or disassemble. With very little risk of contamination, the meat is produced without the use of antibiotics, nor are they using any genetic modification in the process. It’s also projected to be more sustainable than conventional meat. 

A recent life-cycle analysis of SuperMeat’s process predicts that their chicken meat can cut the carbon footprint by nearly 50 percent, compared to ambitious benchmarks for conventional chicken when produced at scale.

Alternative and cultivated meat has been a more recent topic of interest in certain religious Jewish circles, with new products needing to be classified according to Jewish dietary law.  

The Orthodox Union, which certifies food as kosher around the world, found SuperMeat’s product to meet the highest Kashrut standards, certifying it as Kosher Mehadrin. The company is able to meet those standards because they take the cell sample from the egg on day zero, before the appearance of any blood spots. This also allows them to meet Halal standards.

Whether a vegetarian or vegan will eat SuperMeat is a more nuanced issue and comes down to personal preference.  After all, SuperMeat’s product is made from a cell taken from an egg, so it is not a vegan product even though the same cell has been reused continuously for several years now.

When it comes to approval of their product, in the United States they will need to be approved by the USDA and the FDA and will be registered under the meat category. 

Many of the company’s investors and partners are leaders in the meat industry, including Agronomics and PHW Group. Ajinomoto, a leading biotechnology and food company with a lot of experience in the fermentation process, is both an investor and partner. 

When asked about their competitors in the cultivated meat industry, Shostak quickly says that each company has its own technology and at this stage in the game, they consider these other companies to be counterparts more than competitors.   

“We’re building the industry together,” she says, “and the success of one company contributes to the others.” 

Each company has its own technology, and of the several dozen cultivated meat companies, Shostak explains that only a few, like SuperMeat, are on the verge of commercializing their product. 

Efficiency and scalability are crucial for achieving cost parity and SuperMeat takes pride in its highly efficient platform, which is demonstrated by high cell densities and rapid cell growth rates, resulting in high yields and low costs.

“By the end of the decade it should be priced the same as regular chicken,” predicts Shostak.

The post Real Chicken From Lab, Without Bird, Mass Farming Or Health Risks appeared first on NoCamels.

And while there are a wealth of solutions – some deadly, some mere deterrents – to the issue of moles and similar pests ruining gardens, none are permanent and need constant revisiting as the burrowing animals inevitably return. So much so, that homeowners can begin to feel as though they really are playing an interminable game of Whac-a-Mole. 

Israeli startup Molex, however, really digs into the problem with what it says is a permanent solution in the form of an underground sound system that repels moles and other fossorial animals that burrow and live underground, by imitating their predators while not being a nuisance to humans.  

“The intention is to keep rodents out of human infrastructure and to have them stay in nature safely,” Molex co-founder Ofir Mizrahi tells NoCamels.  “We are protecting the plots without harming the animals.”

And moles, Mizrahi says, are found in every corner of the world – fauna wreaking havoc on flora everywhere they are present. 

 “It’s a global problem,” he explains. “There are very small areas in the world where you don’t have rodents – like certain islands – but it is everywhere.” 

Molex’s electricity-powered disc-shaped device is placed underground in a garden or other outdoors area, from where it emits the sounds that mimic the natural predators of the moles and other fossorial animals – those which burrow and live underground. 

It has to be installed by a technician, who hooks it up to an electrical grid or solar panels to power it. Molex also made sure that it operates on low voltage, to avoid any accidental incidents with electrics in a residential space where children are present. It is also the presence of children that rules out standard pest control solutions such as poison. 

The device, which Mizrahi refers to as an “engine,” is buried to the depth of the tunnels created by the animals, after extensive R&D to find the optimal way to combine reach and efficacy.  

The system works by utilizing the fossorial animals’ method of communication against them, imitating their habit of knocking their heads against their tunnels as a form of echolocation. 

“They just create knocks, and with the sound coming back to them, they know where they are and they know if there is a predator in the area,” Mizrahi explains. 

“We want to create tension so they feel that a specific area is not convenient for them, and then they’re going away.” 

The moles tend not to appear when people are in the area, he says, so the device only needs to be activated via a simple app when the area is deserted. Only when standing directly next to it can the sound be heard, so it does not cause any inconvenience when installed in a residential property. 

The device has a reach of about half an acre – to cover more ground, an additional box would have to be installed. And it is for this reason, Mizrahi says, that the company recently decided to focus on smaller sites such as private gardens and organic greenhouses that do not use chemicals, rather than fields for crops and golf courses, despite the demand from such locations.  

“We realized that it would take time to provide the [device] to large fields,” he explains. “It’s not that our solution would not work, but it would be very expensive.”   

The technology was developed by Mizrahi and co-founder Ram Benderman, a third-generation farmer who grows flowers, after the latter discovered about two years ago that moles were decimating his plants.    

“He started to see mounds, and he started to see the leaves were drying in his fields,” recalls Mizrahi. Benderman turned to advisors from the Ministry of Agriculture who confirmed to him that there were moles in the area. 

The two then started to explore existing options to Benderman’s mole problem but found that none of them were effective long term. 

“It was surprising for us,” Mizrahi says. “We started by ordering all sorts of devices, ultrasonic and several others. Nothing really worked, and then we realized that we needed to come up with a solution.” 

Benderman (the “ideas man,” according to Mizrahi) has vast experience in developing technological devices for the Israeli defense industry. He has spent much of the 10 months since war broke out either inside Gaza or on the northern border with Lebanon, from where Iranian-backed Hezbollah terror group has been bombing swathes of the north relentlessly. 

Getting to work on their product, Mizrahi and Benderman started collaborating with other Israeli farmers and the Ministry of Agriculture to refine their R&D. 

“Israel is not our market,” says Mizrahi, referring to the country’s limited size, “but it’s a very good place for us to do our pilots.”  

One of the Israeli farmers they are working with, he says, had moles eating their way through his passion fruit bushes and was forced to divert manpower to deal with them. 

Mizrahi compared this to hunting for landmines, adding that the process reinforced the understanding that none of the solutions on the market were permanent. 

“It’s time and again,” he says, pointing out that pest control services will not give assurances that they can solve the problem for good as they know that they will likely have to return within months. 

The company recently completed MassChallenge Israel’s Early-Stage Accelerator Program, a four-month intensive course in Jerusalem that helps selected entrepreneurs advance their nascent companies. 

“Mass challenge almost saved the business,” Mizhrai says.  “After October 7 we couldn’t do the projects that we had. It was mole season in Israel – we had everything planned for the following week, and we missed it.” 

It was also previously part of the European Union’s EIT Food entrepreneurship program, which supports agritech startups in the food sphere. While Molex was the only Israeli company among the 40-strong cohort, Mizrahi says, it did teach them a great deal about business possibilities in Europe.  

Some of Molex’s funding came from the EU program, and some came from the Agriculture Ministry in Israel, which is keen to end its use of environmentally unfriendly poison as an answer to burrowing animals that are destroying crops.  

The rest of their funds came from their own pockets and from the small number of farmers they are working with in Israel. They were in contract with a leading Israeli irrigation company but that was suspended once war broke out in October. 

Molex is currently searching for a CEO/co-founder to expand the company’s reach abroad, including cooperation with irrigation companies whose subterranean infrastructure is also being devastated by moles and their ilk. 

The company also plans to make the device into a complete kit that anyone can install themselves without input from an expert. And, as a gesture to the moles they so efficiently drive away, even create feeding stations where the banished beasts can recover from their encounter with a pseudo predator. 

The post Sound-Emitting Device Safely Keeps The Moles From The Door appeared first on NoCamels.

DirecTrain’s “Dynamic Coupling” solution is to allow trains to couple and decouple while moving – joining or separating two locomotives together on the fly in order to maximize access for smaller stations without losing the speed of express journeys that only stop at more central spots. 

Two trains, each with their own engine, are connected as they leave a starting point, and at a certain stage one can disconnect and travel onto a different line to reach smaller stations, while the other can continue on as a express service, DirecTrain CEO Alberto Mandler tells NoCamels. 

Similarly, two trains can connect when one joins a central line after collecting passengers from more remote stations, allowing two locomotives to travel as one, moving more people and at a higher speed, explains Mandler.   

“Today [trains] pass through a lot of intermediate stations and then reach the city,” says Mandler. “We can change it completely, because we are able to connect and disconnect trains on demand.” 

An experienced aerospace and electrical engineer, Mandler calls this connectivity a “main game changer” for transportation. He also points out that we can already successfully connect two planes traveling at 700 kilometers per hour in order to refuel or bring a craft to the International Space Station even as it moves at some 30,000 kilometers per hour. 

What is more, he says, the DirecTrain solution uses the existing infrastructure involved in coupling two trains, without having to make extensive – and expensive – accommodations. 

Today, automatic coupling only takes place in stations, with one moving train effectively “colliding” with a stationary locomotive at a very slow speed of less than 5 kilometers per hour in order to connect. 

DirecTrain says, however, that it can recreate this maneuver even at high speeds by adding its own unique proprietary technology to the infrastructure already installed on the trains.  

“We use these exact same components, but we help them to connect on the run instead of in a static state,” Mandler says.  

And just like the system uses existing features on a train, it also uses the same lines that they travel on without the need for additional infrastructure. 

Not only does the system allow for access to more stations by essentially using one locomotive in two separate lines simultaneously, Mandler explains, it also reduces congestion as the train with fewer stops can move faster, allowing for an operator to increase the number of trains it runs.  

“Now they don’t need to stop at all the stations, the average velocity of the trains is better, which means that the efficiency of each one is much better too,” says Mandler. 

Furthermore, he says, merging two trains, each with a driver of its own, allows one of the two drivers to use at least part of the journey as a rest period, which also increases efficiency of operations. 

Founded in 2021, the Zichron Yaakov-based startup has been self-funded so far, Mandler says, with the team investing around $1 million of their own money. 

Much of that has gone towards creating what he calls “a very sophisticated simulator” similar to the ones used in the development of aircraft components. 

“When you design an aircraft component, you want to verify all the components together before you go to production and testing,” he says. “We use the same methodology.”

According to Mandler, the simulator includes all the mechanics involved in the electronics and software and has shown that the coupling method is functional even when the two trains reach speeds of up to 120 kilometers per hour. 

 But, he qualifies, carrying out the procedure at speeds of over 40 kilometers per hour requires the train driver to cede control while the coupling or decoupling takes place. 

As such, the first prototype that is currently being produced is confined to a top speed of 40 kilometers per hour and will take place in designated locations where it is safe to slow a train down to that speed. 

Furthermore, restricting the process to a speed of 40 kilometers per hour means that the train companies do not have to undergo any change to existing regulations for railways. This is according to the certified company DirecTrains consulted with, which has the authority to evaluate and introduce such changes if necessary. 

“They verified that at 40 kilometers per hour, from the designs that we showed them, there doesn’t seem to be any requirement to change any existing regulation,” Mandler says.

The Dynamic Coupling prototype is now being developed in France in collaboration with British-French engineering company Certia, and Mandler expects it to be ready by the end of 2025.   

Train companies using the technology will license the technology from DirecTrains without having to foot the bill for the adaptations required. 

Mandler hopes that by increasing efficiency and reducing costs, trains can once again reclaim their place as the optimum mode of mass transit. 

“I go to conferences talking about the future of transportation, the future of mobility, and trains are not part of it,” he says.  

“The train needs to be the backbone of the transportation of the future.” 

The post Coupling Technology Lets Trains Join & Separate At High Speed  appeared first on NoCamels.

QueenDee (the “Dee” comes from the drones that are a substitute for bees) is harnessing the power and flexibility of drones to boost artificial pollination as the world population grows and with it the demand for food. 

The company has developed a device that attaches to the underside of a drone, which can then be guided across rows of plants and flowers to collect or distribute pollen.  

The pollen collection is carried out in two ways, QueenDee CEO Adi Arbiv tells NoCamels. 

The first method is a vacuum attached to the device, which can suck up pollen grains. And, Arbiv points out, flowers produce far more pollen than they need to reproduce, which affects the amount that the vacuum gathers. 

“When a flower produces pollen, the vast majority of the pollen never [gets to] where it’s supposed to reach,” she says. “We don’t have to collect millions of pollen grains; it’s enough for us to collect two milligrams of pollen.” 

The second method is based on electrostaticity and uses delicate fibers and brushes to gather the pollen in imitation of the hairs on a bee, called scopa, that are designed for this purpose.  

“When a bee approaches a flower, it has positive charge around it,” Arbiv says. “The pollen grains are negatively charged, so they are attracted to the bee.” 

QueenDee gives a positive charge to the fibers and brushes that it uses, akin to the charge of a bee, in order to draw the pollen to them. And In both cases, the collected pollen is then dispersed onto the flowers. 

That dispersal of the pollen grains is a process that has to be managed very carefully, says Arbiv, due to the limited amount that is gathered during the initial collection stage. 

“We don’t want to waste everything when we turn that thing on,” she explains. “We want them to be dispersed evenly across the greenhouse.”  

Furthermore, the plants that receive the pollen have to be sufficiently mature for it to be effective. QueenDee uses AI-driven software – including image recognition – to ensure that the right plants get pollen at the right time. 

“We’re trying to be very specific, and try to see exactly where the flowers are that are mature enough to get pollen, and disperse the pollen grains right above these flowers,” Arbiv says. 

“If flowers that are in a certain part of the greenhouse are younger, we’re not going to disperse the pollen there.” 

Arbiv says that the idea for the pollen device came during a 2023 hackathon centered around drone technology, where some participants were asked to focus on an aspect of agriculture.  

“We tried to figure out what were the main issues in agriculture today, and we came to the conclusion that pollination was one of the biggest issues,” she says. 

And from that prompt came the idea to use drones to enhance pollination for farming. 

“I said, we have to go there; we have to find a way somehow,” recalls Arbiv. 

Once they had won the hackathon, the QueenDee founders had to address a myriad of issues that come both with creating a startup from the ground up and with refining an idea to become a viable solution. 

“[There are] problems that arise when you try to fly a drone in a greenhouse; it’s not as simple as it sounds,” Arbiv says by way of example. 

“There are many, many challenges when you take a drone over a plant, and then when you’re trying to collect something but the drone is making too much wind – how will you handle that?” 

But with her twin backgrounds in software development and molecular biology, Arbiv had found a perfect outlet for her expertise and interests. 

“I used to focus on botany and ecology,” she says of her studies. “It’s something that has ever been close to my heart, and I’ve always tried to combine biology, agriculture and software.” 

Arbiv says she was inspired by the multitude of companies that today are taking advantage of drone technology and trying to apply it to agriculture.  

“There are drones with pesticides that spray fields with pesticides, and drones that can detect diseases and parasites and all sorts of things,” she says. “I thought it would be great to somehow contribute as well.” 

She explains that there is one other Israeli company – Edete – that is using technology in artificial pollination, which found its success in working with outdoor crops. QueenDee, however, is mainly focusing on indoor locations such as greenhouses, which can be many acres in size.  

The QueenDee drones equipped with the pollen collection and distribution devices are currently flown by an operator, using what the company says is a “user-friendly” dashboard that can also monitor temperatures and humidity levels. 

Even so, the long-term plan is to make them fully autonomous – primarily once the farmers using them have their reservations over unmanned aircraft flying among their delicate plants and flowers eased. 

“Farmers are very reluctant when you tell them that something is autonomous,” Arbiv explains. 

“They want to make sure that nothing is harmed, that you’re not hurting plants and that the flowers are not falling off the plants. Because the flowers are the future fruits, and if you cause damage to the flowers, they will have no fruits to sell.”  

QueenDee is an offshoot of Tech 19, a company in the southern city of Yeruham, some 60 km (37 miles) from the Gaza border, that provides a range of technological solutions, including in the fields of drones, satellites and robotics. 

It was also a recent finalist in a startup competition organized by Synergy7, a new Be’er Sheva innovation hub, and the Merage Israel Foundation, which share the mission of cultivating the tech ecosystem in the Negev. The competition was designed to foster and support the most promising technology startups operating within the region, focusing on the sectors of healthcare, cybersecurity, and robotics.

The startup and its revolutionary technology are self-funded, and its team employed in other places to keep paying the bills. 

“We have our day jobs, and this is our night job,” Arbiv says.

For now, at least. 

The post AI-Powered Device Transforms Drones Into Pollination Machines appeared first on NoCamels.

But one side effect of targeted therapy – a prominent facial rash that resembles acne – has caused such an adverse impact that it is even deterring some patients from continuing their planned treatment regimen. 

And this is an issue that Israeli startup EMRIS Pharma has tackled with a new carefully formulated ointment that patients apply onto their skin. 

According to the American Cancer Society, a rash is the most common side effect of targeted therapies – its occurrence and severity is dependent on the type and the dose of the treatment. This rash, which resembles acne, usually appears on the face and in some cases other normally visible areas such as the neck, scalp and upper back.  

And while the rash subsides once the treatment has been completed, it is so traumatic for some patients that they stop venturing into public or either reduce the frequency of their treatment regime or halt it altogether. 

Dr. Sharon Merims, EMRIS CSO and co-founder, tells NoCamels that around 90 percent of patients receiving targeted therapies have some kind of skin toxicity. 

Merims is a dermatologist who heads the Dermato-Oncology and skin toxicity clinic at the Sharett Institute of Oncology at Hadassah University Hospital-Ein Kerem in Jerusalem. 

“The profile of the skin rash is very troublesome because it involves the face,” Merims says. 

“[Patients] have a very unique facial rash, which is a very big problem for the quality of life. You can understand, once it’s on your face, you can’t really have a normal day to day.” 

Merims began working on a solution eight years ago along with EMRIS co-founder and CTO Prof. Ofra Benny, a specialist in drug delivery systems at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The two mulled the possibilities of a topical solution to this issue – a cause of anguish for people already dealing with the implications of a cancer diagnosis. 

What they were contemplating, she explains, was a targeted therapy to manage the side effects of a targeted therapy.

“I started thinking about an idea,” she says. “What if we can produce a blocking agent that we would apply topically, only on the skin, that would block the cancer drug from connecting to the receptor only at the toxicity site.” 

During their research into the possibility of treating this rash locally, the two found the “potent lead molecule” that forms the basis of the EMRIS ointment that does – as Merims hoped – prevent the targeted therapy from affecting the skin cells. 

The targeted cancer therapy itself is based on a substance that is an epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) inhibitor. This substance blocks the activity of the EGFR, which is related to cell growth and is found in many cells. By blocking EGFR, the treatment aims to prevent the cancer cells from growing, but also causes the skin side effect as the EGFR inhibitor attaches to EGFR on normal skin cells. 

The company itself was set up in 2023 along with its third co-founder, Dr. Lyora Aharonov, an expert in biological research with a wealth of experience in R&D management. Funding came from the Israel Innovation Authority, the branch of the government dedicated to advancing the nation’s high-tech sector at home and on the international stage. 

The startup also received assistance from Yissum, the Hebrew University’s technology transfer company, which helped license EMRIS.

The EMRIS ointment, Aharonov tells NoCamels, blocks the EGFR inhibitor from binding to the skin cells and prevents the rash from developing, leaving the skin cells healthy and functioning normally.

“The key advantage of our treatment is its targeted action,” she says. “This is a real game changer for the patient.” 

What makes this drug so unique, Merims explains, is that it is the only solution for the rash that deals with the root of the problem – preventing it, rather than merely trying to mitigate the symptoms. 

“The accepted treatment today is avoiding the sun, putting on emollients and topical steroids with a regimen of antibiotics for two months” she says. 

“That’s the protocol every patient is getting around the world. That’s the treatment for skin toxicity.” 

Within the past year, Aharonov says, the company has very quickly reached  “significant milestones,” primarily the formulation of the topical ointment that can specifically reach the necessary layer of the skin. 

The formulated ointment has already undergone animal testing, with “very positive results for safety,” according to Aharonov. 

Human trials are due to begin at Hadassah in early 2026. After that, the startup also plans to hold clinical trials in the United States, a necessary step for receiving approval from the US Food and Drug Administration. 

The  ointment is primarily designed for patients undergoing targeted therapy for advanced colon and  head and neck cancers. 

The priority, the company says, is keeping patients on their course of treatment for their cancer while improving the patients quality of life . 

“Most patients, when they have had enough of the rash – and it comes pretty early on in treatment – will skip a dose or two, or get 50 percent of the dose or stop treatment altogether,” says Merims. 

But the EMRIS solution, she says, “will help everybody on board these treatments.”  

The post Halting Unsightly Rash That Adds To Cancer Patients’ Burden appeared first on NoCamels.

Endometriosis is a chronic condition in which tissue similar to the lining of the womb grows outside of the uterus, primarily on the ovaries, bowel and other areas in the pelvic region, in what are known as lesions. 

And according to the World Health Organization, approximately 1 in 10 women of reproductive age suffer from it. 

EndoCure is developing an AI-powered robotic ultrasound system for comprehensive mapping of endometriosis lesions, leading to quicker diagnosis and customized treatment options. The system produces 3D imaging that is able to detect endometriosis lesions and other pathologies tinier than one millimeter in size that are extremely hard for current systems to detect.

Dr. Hadas Ziso, CEO and co-founder of EndoCure, tells NoCamels that today, medical professionals often perform surgery simply to find the lesions because no other way exists to accurately diagnose the condition.  

She explains that 80 percent of endometriosis lesions are too small to detect with any imaging modality and a sonographer can easily miss them. 

“The entire treatment detection process is like a vicious cycle and the patient is stuck within it,” Ziso says. 

In fact, so challenging is the detection of the disease, Yale Medicine reports that there is an average delay of four to 11 years between the onset of the symptoms of endometriosis and the diagnosis and treatment for it.  

Armed with four degrees, including an MSc in Biomedical Engineering and PhD in Medical Robotics from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Ziso originally set out to find an issue that she could help solve. 

“I really, really wanted to do something for women. I realized I don’t have the time to volunteer, so it has to be through my career,” she explains. 

Endometriosis was hardly on Ziso’s radar until she looked into unmet needs in women’s health. “As you probably know, there are many,” she says, with a wry laugh.

Ziso also initially thought that she had no personal connection to the disease, but once she started learning about the condition and speaking about it with other women, she realized that she knew several people who had struggled with it for years.  

She soon understood that endometriosis is a very complicated condition with few solutions currently available and that physicians were in dire need for better diagnosis and treatment options.  

And so in 2023, Ziso teamed up with her PhD advisor and business partner Prof. Moshe Shoham to found EndoCure, creating a tight-knit and enthusiastic team driven by the desire to bring good into the world. 

The EndoCure system integrates with standard ultrasound equipment, streaming the data using its own software as the robotic arm moves slowly and steadily around the area being scanned. The proprietary software can spot the miniscule lesions that could not previously be seen. 

Using the system, a patient can undergo a scan before surgery in order to identify where the lesions are. And, since endometriosis is a chronic condition and lesions can return even after surgery, EndoCure makes it easy to continuously monitor a patient. 

Ziso says that when it comes to treating endometriosis, there is no other solution that comes close to the one offered by EndoCure, and in fact, searching treatments for the disease will only bring up results showing just how dire the lack of options is.  

The most common area of research into endometriosis, she says, is the push for biomarker-based detection, such as saliva, blood and urine tests – much like the current COVID tests. These tests use biomarkers in the body to diagnose whether a woman is positive or negative for endometriosis. 

But, Ziso points out, these companies only provide the first step of a patient’s journey, because even with a diagnosis, endometriosis is a chronic condition that does not disappear. 

And rather than viewing them as competition, Ziso sees biomarker tests as a complementary tool for making EndoCure the most effective it can be. Once the test has indicated that a patient has endometriosis, EndoCure can find the lesions and be used to create a treatment plan. 

In the future, the system will also be able to help with detection of other conditions that leave physical wounds on the sufferer, such as chronic colitis and kidney stones.  

“No matter the discipline, if they do an ultrasound, they have the same problem,” Ziso explains.  

To date, EndoCure has raised $1 million, with funders including the Israel Innovation Authority, the government body devoted to promoting the national high-tech sector, as well as Haifa-based incubator program IN-VENTech, and veteran Israeli venture capital fund Teuza. 

EndoCure was also part of the 2024 cohort of MassChallenge Israel’s Early Stage Accelerator, and went through the program at the same time as they were conducting their first round of fundraising.  

Although not endometriosis is not a life-threatening condition, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recognizes the need for a better solution for the women suffering from the disease. Therefore EndoCure qualified for the FDA’s FastTrack approval process, which is designed for treatments for serious conditions that fulfill an unmet medical need. 

EndoCure is beginning its next round of funding, which will take them through the completion of their first human clinical trials. They aim to become commercial in two and half years.  

Ziso says she and her team have spoken to more than 30 physicians worldwide, including in the US and Europe, who specialize in endometriosis and who are eager to use EndoCure’s system. The company has actually received several letters of intent from medical facilities indicating the desire to buy the EndoCure system once it is ready.  

“They don’t have any other solution,” she says.  

The post FemTech Firm Uses AI To Treat Painful, Incurable Endometriosis  appeared first on NoCamels.

People with both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes are at very high risk of developing diabetic retinopathy, which is caused by damage to the blood vessels in the retina – the tissue at the back of the eye that captures light and translates it into sight – and can lead to blindness. 

In fact, the World Health Organization, the UK’s National Health Service and the US Department of Health all agree that diabetic retinopathy is a leading cause of blindness in the developed world.  

The only previous way to monitor diabetics’ retinal damage was with a regular check that involves dilating the pupil in order to flood the eye with light. And while a relatively short-lived experience, it is uncomfortable and incapacitating. Furthermore, it must be carried out in a clinical setting by a specialist eye doctor, adding to a long list of regular checkups that people suffering from the disease must carry out in addition to constantly monitoring their blood sugar levels. 

But AEYE Health, a startup with headquarters in Tel Aviv and New York, developed an artificial intelligence-based method to test for diabetic retinopathy by a family doctor, at a pharmacy or even in a patient’s own home, with immediate results.  

“The huge advantage in this exam is that it’s done in a fully non-invasive way, on the spot, no need to delay the patient,” AEYE Health CEO and co-founder Zack Dvey-Aharon tells NoCamels. 

AEYE Health’s proprietary technology, currently only available in the United States, is AI-driven software that analyzes an image of the eye taken with a simple store-bought camera approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, and without having to dilate the pupil. 

“We do not deal with hardware in any way,” Dvey-Aharon says. “The cameras are off the shelf, approved by the FDA [as is] our AI solution to do an autonomous interpretation of those images acquired by those cameras.”  

In fact, the technology has received two separate authorizations from the FDA – initially for analyzing images captured by a tabletop camera and more recently for analyzing images taken by a mobile camera.  

And because it is a small device, Dvey-Aharon points out that it is can be easily moved from one examination room to another, and then stored on a shelf or in a drawer.  

This ease of access and testing is key to helping people actually keep eye doctor appointments, he explains. For while the annual check is crucial to preventing blindness in diabetics, the discomfort and inconvenience actually deter significant numbers from attending. This phenomenon of failing to attend necessary medical appointments is known as the “care gap.”  

And, says Dvey-Aharon, the care gap when it comes to annual diabetic eye exams is considered one of the most important, because of how significant it is and how many people fall into it. 

“All diabetic patients really need to do this exam on an annual basis,” he says. 

“Unfortunately, most don’t actually follow through. They are aware they need to do it – they go to the person that treats their diabetes and they’re told to go and see the eye doctor. And they don’t go.” 

According to Dvey-Aharon, AEYE Health is the only company offering such a “clear solution” in the US, particularly now it has received FDA approval for mobile camera analysis. 

Furthermore, he says, it is almost unheard of for the FDA to approve an AI diagnosis that is fully autonomous instead of being used as an accessory. 

“Typically, the intersection of artificial intelligence and healthcare ends up as some sort of a decision support solution for physicians, some sort of measurement of something that physicians afterwards can use to determine,” he says.  

“This is the only area where the FDA actually allows the AI to do the screening.”  

The FDA approval came based on data in three clinical studies, which meant, Dvey-Aharon recalls, AEYE Health clearing “a super high bar.”  

He explains that building the machine learning AI technology used in the platform was a lengthy undertaking that involved collecting and analyzing massive amounts of data in order to understand how to differentiate between patients whose eyes needed no immediate further care and those who required a referral to an ophthalmologist. 

“There is no kind of a secret sauce, one element that is behind that, but actually a long, arduous process,” he says. 

“If you want to really do things differently, there is a lot of innovation that needs to take place. And this innovation is in the end based on revelations, and the revelations are done during research processes.” 

Founded in 2018 by Dvey-Aharon and COO Danny Margalit, the startup received vital funding from the Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation, which encourages cooperation between US and Israeli tech companies. 

Tal Kelem, BIRD’s Israel-based Director of Business Development, tells NoCamels that the fact that the foundation ended up investing more than planned in the startup indicates how important the organization believed the technology to be. 

Dvey-Aharon in turn praises BIRD for creating a partnership between the startup and UMass Memorial Health, the largest health care system in Central Massachusetts, and along with it a collaboration with UMass Chan Medical School.  

The FDA approval for the portable analysis platform has opened up new doors for the startup, which Dvey-Aharon says is about to announce a new collaboration with an American company that carries out millions visits to patients’ homes each year, in order to carry out blood tests or other forms of medical checks. 

“Now, they will embrace this technology,” he says.  “This is something you can actually do in the context of home health.”

The post AI Makes Vital Diabetic Eye Test As Simple As Saying ‘Cheese’ appeared first on NoCamels.

The drone was one of a small swarm sent by the Iranian-backed Houthi terror group in Yemen, and had escaped Israel’s multi-layered air defense systems due to human error caused by its lack of a discernable signature. 

Failing to identify the danger posed by the drone, the Israel Defense Forces later said, no sirens were activated to warn locals of the incoming attack and tell them to seek shelter. 

The incident revealed a potentially worrisome gap in the legendary Israeli air defenses, as the small size of the drone made it hard to detect with radar, which bounces signals off a targeted object to identify it, or with the cameras and transponders that are also used.  

Israel has been targeted by hundreds of these small yet extremely destructive drones since the start of its war against the Hamas terrorist organization in Gaza, which was triggered by the mass terror attack on October 7 that saw 1,200 people brutally murdered in southern Israel and hundreds more abducted and held hostage. 

The drone attacks have come primarily from the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon and caused major destruction in parts of northern Israel, although some have also been sent by the Houthis in Yemen. 

Seeking a solution to this problem, researchers at Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Engineering have developed an electromagnetic tag that is placed on the wings of hostile unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), making the aircraft easier to identify and track. 

The research team was led by PhD students Omer Tzidki and Dmytro Vovchuk at the lab of Prof. Pavel Ginzburg, which specializes in developing new radar and wireless communication technologies to address current and future challenges.

“Contrary to traditional airborne targets, small drones and copters pose a significant problem for radar systems due to their relatively small radar cross-sections,” the research team wrote in its abstract paper.  

“Small UAVs pose significant security issues, as has been proven in many unfortunate cases worldwide and the number of safety issues will continue to grow,” the team warned. 

“Due to their low cost and unlicensed accessibility, small drones can be used by unauthorized users to carry dangerous items, spot classified sites, interfere with air traffic, and for other undesired purposes.” 

The tag works by daubing the drone with an electromagnetic “sticker” that is recognized by radar. The radar uses AI algorithms to sense what the team calls the drone’s identity card, presented by the increased electromagnetic signal emitted by the stickers. 

The algorithm then can decipher whether the drone is friendly or hostile, allowing the security forces to respond accordingly, and can do so even in the adverse conditions that had previously proven to be a challenge.   

“We are glad to suggest a solution so that it is not vulnerable,” Tzidki tells NoCamels. “The project has a vital meaning, particularly in these days.”

The researchers say the smart tagging approach works even with challenges such as urban environments, poor visibility, poor weather conditions, low-altitude flights and the presence of additional air traffic – all of which make it harder to identify the specific signal of the drone. 

Experiments of the system were initially carried out in sterile lab conditions, and later in an external setting that simulated real-world scenarios. 

According to Tzidki, optimal results were created by the combination of electromagnetic techniques, AI algorithms and innovative radar technology.  Now more than ever, such technology is “critical for protecting the lives of soldiers and civilians,” he said. 

Identifying the drones is especially critical when there is no direct line of sight, he said, making the use of radar all the more important. 

Ginzburg also hailed the research as a simple solution to a complex problem, calling it a “significant” achievement.  

“The simplest things often work best,” Ginzburg said. 

“This project leverages fundamental physical principles to reliably and accurately classify drones. The process of identifying any drone using radar is quite complex, so achieving the capability to identify specific drones is a significant accomplishment of which we are very proud.”

The post Making Enemy Drones Easier To Detect With Smart Tag Technology appeared first on NoCamels.

And now, thanks to software created by an Israeli startup and the little sensor on the device itself, smartwatch owners can also keep track of their emotional wellbeing, including stress levels, anxiety and amount of sleep they are getting. 

NeuroBrave co-founder and CEO Dror Talisman tells NoCamels that the startup’s NeuroSpeed AI analysis software takes data about the user’s blood flow gathered by the photoplethysmogram (PPG) sensor on the back of the smartwatch, and uses that to determine the heart rate.  

“It’s a very simple, but very clever sensor,” Talisman says. 

From the heart rate, he explains, it is possible to measure any fluctuations in the length of time between heartbeats, a phenomenon called heart rate variability (HRV). And it is that HRV, he says, that can offer insights into the wearer’s state of mind as well as their overall health. 

This is because HRV is used as an indicator for emotional wellbeing as well as the correct functioning of the body’s physical mechanisms. Talisman says HRV is directly connected to the autonomic nervous system, which autonomously controls the processes in our bodies. 

The autonomous nervous system is split into two – the sympathetic nervous system, which among other things controls our “flight or fight” response to perceived danger, and the parasympathetic nervous system, which controls our rest and relaxation response. 

Therefore, Talisman explains, by measuring the HRV, it is possible to have a clear idea of the state of mind of a smartwatch wearer. 

“Through that HRV we run our AI and statistics [analysis],” he says. “And we provide, for example, emotional stress levels, which is crucial to understanding chronic stress and anxiety and a lot of the mental health issues that we have today.” 

It is, says Talisman, a platform that is “pretty unique.” 

The data is transferred to the cloud where the analysis takes place. But Talisman emphasizes that the company does not store any of the data it uses, saying that once it has been analyzed, this information “just goes away.” 

Nor is the data kept by the various smartphone companies on whose devices the software can be installed. 

As NeuroBrave operates on a B2B model, its software is delivered to the user via the third parties with which the startup works. 

“Our customers are insurance companies, healthcare providers, wellness apps, anyone that [can] provide those therapies,” Talisman says. 

He points out that smartwatches are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, in particular in the United States. 

“I used to go on the New York subway and count how many people around me had smartwatches. And now I’m actually counting how many people don’t,” he says.   

In addition to the software that monitors a smartwatch wearer’s mental health through blood flow, NeuroBrave has also created what Talisman explains are wellness solutions such as stress reduction and improved physical activity, which are also available through the business with which the company works. 

Founded in 2020, the Be’er Sheva-based startup has seen financial backing from what Talisman calls “very, very good investors,” saying that he prefers to receive external investment rather than bootstrapping, as it is a measure of the potential of the concept. 

“If I speak with 50 investors, and not one of them says, ‘okay, I’m willing to take the risk with you and give you money,’ maybe it’s not a very good idea,” he explains.

In fact, NeuroBrave is currently raising money in multiple countries, among them Israel and the US. 

Talisman says its technology is available in the US, Japan and in Europe. Israel, he explains, was not a sufficiently large market to focus on due to its small population size. 

Even so, the company has launched an initiative in Israel to help people suffering from emotional stress due to the October 7 terror attack by Hamas and the ensuing war in Gaza. 

The company set up an initiative to provide smartwatches with NeuroBrave technology – and an app specially created for Hebrew speakers – in 12 communities in the Western Negev that bore the brunt of the Hamas attack as well as to first responders and members of the security forces. 

“We said, ‘let’s do something for Israel, for the people around us’,” Talisman recalls.  

The company is also working with Ichilov Hospital (Sourasky Medical Center) in Tel Aviv, where its technology is in use in the Functional Neurosurgery Unit. The partnership is seeking a breakthrough in the brain-computer interface field – helping people with neurological conditions use AI to translate their thoughts and emotions in real time through a direct link between the brain and an external device. 

According to Talisman, this collaboration is bringing Israel into the brain-chip race, alongside Elon Musk’s Neuralink and the Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates-backed Synchron. 

While the technology is for now centered on the smartwatch, Talisman says it can be adapted for different wearable devices, adding that NeuroBrave has in fact started working with headphone and eyewear companies, as well as partnering with American wireless technology giant Qualcomm and Garmin, one of the largest makers of smartwatches in the world. 

Talisman says the company is planning massive expansion, on the grounds that there is a dearth of mental health experts worldwide. 

“Mental health is aching for a solution,” he says. “There aren’t enough therapists and you cannot just multiply them.” 

The post Smartwatch Tracks Your Mental Health Through Your Heartbeat appeared first on NoCamels.

A lack of universal healthcare in the US, unlike most of the world, means that Americans must themselves navigate between healthcare providers such as doctors and hospitals, and the insurance companies who take care of the medical costs of its payees. 

And because each US healthcare provider and insurance company exists as its own entity, getting treatment involves dealing with both sides of the equation, often with poor communication of pertinent medical information stored digitally through electronic medical records (EMRs). 

Vim says it is bringing an end to this muddled, inefficient and expensive system, with a software platform that sits atop and integrates with the plethora of digital systems in use in the US. 

“We take the learnings and understandings of the Israeli healthcare system and try to apply them on just a bigger scale, based on the challenges that you have in the US,” Vim co-founder and CTO Asaf David tells NoCamels.  

In Israel, there is a choice of four health maintenance organizations (HMOs), which are jointly funded by the government and by citizens through a healthcare tax. The four each offer their members complete healthcare provision, with a unified digital system that has comprehensive medical records for every patient available at every healthcare facility in that HMO. 

When a primary care physician (PCP) joins one of the four Israeli HMOs, David says, they receive everything they need in terms of electronic systems. They simply log in and are ready to see patients. 

“I can go to Maccabi,” he says, referring to one of the four Israeli HMOs. “I go to my doctor, I give him my card, he swipes the card, and he sees everything that I’ve done. Because everything I do is through Maccabi.”  

In the US, however, the physician must choose from an array of IT infrastructure, including how to store EMRs, which adds to the cost of already expensive healthcare. 

“You have hundreds of systems,” he says. “Some of them were built in the 90s, some would have five or 10 customers. It’s very hard to really maintain an IT system based on that.”

Furthermore, he says, a physician in Israel normally sees patients just from one HMO. In the US, however, a PCP can see dozens of different patients with different plans and different coverage for different things, making it very hard to understand what kinds of treatment the patient can be offered and for how much.

Vim Connect is designed to recreate the Israeli system, bringing together providers and insurers in one electronic platform – facilitating treatments, referrals and payments at point of care. 

David explains that healthcare is incredibly expensive in the US, accounting for almost 20 percent of the national GDP. In fact, he says, healthcare costs are the number one cause of bankruptcies in the US. 

“What we wanted to do is reduce the cost of care in the US,” he says.

The startup, which also has offices in New York, was set up in 2015 by David and CEO Oron Afek, and today has 150 people on staff, split between Tel Aviv and New York. 

The pair were looking for a way to translate skills they previously acquired in the high-sector – for David this includes setting up a short-lived digital bank was the first of its kind in Israel – to a new venture. 

David says he found the experience he gained during his service in the Israel Defense Forces also helped when venturing into the US healthcare market, in particular his time unifying disparate networks and systems within the army, which he says were tangled like spaghetti.

“US healthcare is very similar to that,” he says. “I never thought I’d need to use the same skills for anything else in my career.” 

Indeed, when he explored the complexities of the American healthcare system, he realized that they could develop a platform that would help bridge the gap between provider and payer. 

Funding for the company came from their own pockets, but by the second year, it was already making a profit. 

“We got to a place where we were making enough money to pay two salaries, and the company grew,” David recalls.

Since then, however, Vim has raised around $100 million in investment, with Walgreens, the second-largest pharmacy chain in the US, among its backers.  

Today, the Vim Connect platform is used by seven of the 10 largest American health insurance companies, including United Healthcare, Elevance Health and Blue Cross Blue Shield. 

 And on the other side of the equation, David says, there are more than 2,000 American healthcare practices connected to the Vim platform, catering to more than 20,000 physicians and covering tens of millions of EMRs. 

And according to David, working in the world of American healthcare helped him to realize how well the Israeli system functions. 

“We always complain about the Israeli healthcare system,” he says. “But then I started to learn about the US healthcare market, and I understood how much we should appreciate what we have here.”  

The post Streamlining US Healthcare, With Israeli Electronic System As Model appeared first on NoCamels.

In the meantime, as the results may take days to come in, the doctor recommends that the patient get started on a round of antibiotics, making an educated guess to diagnose a possible bacterial infection and hoping to tackle it before it gets worse. 

The doctor makes the best recommendation with the knowledge available at that moment.  

Unfortunately, inefficient testing has led to the over-prescription of antibiotics, resulting in antimicrobial resistance (AMR), which is when bacteria become resistant to antibiotics.   

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are 1.27 million deaths every year that are directly attributed to antimicrobial resistance, with the prediction that by 2050, AMR will be the cause of 10 million annual deaths worldwide.  

To tackle this issue, Israeli medical technology startup NanoSynex has developed a rapid personalized diagnostic test, which will enable doctors to prescribe the correct antibiotics at the moment they are needed most.  

“There is a clear issue of misuse and overuse of antibiotics, and one of the ways to address this crisis, other than developing new antibiotics, is to better use existing antibiotics, by boosting the development of rapid and reliable diagnostic solutions, which is what we are doing at NanoSynex,” Diane Abensur, CEO and co-founder of NanoSynex, tells NoCamels. 

NanoSynex offers laboratories better and faster solutions to determine the best treatment plan by providing rapid and accurate results for Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing (AST), tests that are used to determine which specific antibiotics a particular bacteria or fungus is sensitive to. 

By prescribing the most appropriate antibiotic treatment to patients in order to treat them earlier, and also to prevent antimicrobial resistance from spreading in the environment, they are working to prevent the growth of the superbug crisis that is threatening the world today. 

“Our company is developing a revolutionary solution for providing fast and accurate results,” Abensur explains. 

The company, which is located in Ness Ziona’s Weizmann Science Park, has designed a disposable test card that is pre-loaded with a large panel of antibiotics at a variety of concentrations. 

A sample containing the bacteria causing the ailment is taken from the patient and injected into the almost 2,000 nanowells of the test card and then incubated in a benchtop reader that NanoSynex has developed. Once they are incubated in the reader, the bacteria present in the patient’s sample metabolize and grow, emitting a fluorescent signal. 

NanoSynex uses a specific fluorescent marker that correlates the intensity of a fluorescent signal to the amount of bacterial growth.  Its proprietary software then captures images of the test cards and issues a list of antibiotics that are appropriate for the patient, as well as the minimum concentration of each antibiotic that would be needed to kill the bacteria. 

NanoSynex’s core technology was developed by Prof. Shulamit Levenberg, who at the time of development was serving as Dean of the Biomedical Engineering Faculty at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.  

Now the Chief Scientific Advisor of NanoSynex, Levenberg performed a scientific transfer of the technology to NanoSynex in 2018, and the company was founded that year by Abensur and NanoSynex COO Michelle Heymann. 

Since its founding, NanoSynex has raised almost $11 million, having received funding from sources all around the world, including from angel investors, grants, the Israel Innovation Authority and the European Innovation Council.

NanoSynex has had to become especially resilient following the mass terror attack of October 7 and Israel’s subsequent – and still ongoing – war with Hamas, the terror group that perpetrated it.  

The company has continued to operate while dealing with the shock and trauma of the war and losses as well as the Hamas rocket attacks on Israel that have impacted their ability to reach their office.  

The company has cross-trained employees in critical roles to mitigate the impact of sudden call ups for Israel Defense Forces reserve duty, and departures abroad, to ensure essential tasks can still be carried out.  

In spite of these obstacles, NanoSynex now possesses what is called a minimum viable product, and the next step for their team is to now demonstrate their product in a clinical setting. 

While there are other testing technologies available, NanoSynex says its two major advantages lay in their product’s ability to help doctors determine in a rapid and automated way both the correct antibiotic as well as the minimum concentration required of that antibiotic to inhibit growth of the bacteria. 

“Our goal is to reduce mortality and morbidity rates by fighting superbugs with rapid and precise diagnostics testing and avoid going back to the pre-antibiotic era, since developing new antibiotics takes too long and bacteria develops resistance to new antibiotics at a much faster rate than the new antibiotic can be developed,” Heymann explains.  

The ability to test up to 20 patients at once and the quantity of antibiotics that they can test for at an affordable cost sets NanoSynex apart from the many startups that are focused on more expensive niche testing.  

When it comes to the companies that have offered testing for years and continue to dominate the market, NanoSynex explains that it is their ability to process large amounts of information in a short amount of time that gives their product a great advantage.  

The team is eager to participate in clinical studies in microbiology departments of hospitals which will ultimately bring them closer to their goal of saving lives by fighting and preventing antibiotic resistant bacteria.  

The post Startup Fights Superbugs, Antibiotic Resistance With Rapid Testing   appeared first on NoCamels.

The name InNegev is a portmanteau of “innovation” and “Negev,” CEO Arnon Columbus tells NoCamels, which he says symbolizes its mission to transform the challenges of a desert into opportunities for innovation and growth. 

The hub functions as an incubator for startups in various stages of development, providing an array of services from funding opportunities to business development resources, state-of-the-art labs to invaluable mentorship programs. 

This includes staging workshops and seminars, helping to make connections with industry experts and offering strategic guidance as startups navigate the complexities of commercializing their tech. 

“We’re creating an environment where startups can flourish,” says Columbus. “Our innovation center is designed to provide everything from funding to technical support.” 

The InNegev portfolio of startups covers the gamut of R&D in environmental technology, from green energy and agriculture to meat alternatives and even water. 

Among them are Emnotion, using AI to process vast amounts of meteorological data from around the world to assess whether conditions in one microclimate could ultimately cause a weather disaster in another, and BeAir, creating water out of vapor in the air for areas with limited accessibility, with a system that requires very little maintenance.  

“The ecosystem is very active and very hectic,” Columbus says.  

InNegev has found itself coping with the fallout of an ongoing war, one that began when Hamas terrorists smashed their way from the adjacent Gaza Strip into its patch of southern Israel on October 7, murdering 1,200 people and abducting more than 200 others as hostages. 

Columbus says that InNegev quickly mobilized to help startups from all across the country navigate practically through this period of uncertainty, with foreign investors beginning to balk and a swathe of companies facing long stretches without key personnel who had received an emergency call-up to the Israel Defense Forces reserves. 

He highlights the InNegev “control room” to help young companies cope with the shockwaves of the conflict, set up by InNegev in conjunction with the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA), the government department dedicated to advancing the national high-tech industry. 

“We understood that there were so many startups having so many difficulties and barriers and stoppage points because of the war,” Columbus says. 

So the center opened its doors to all startups in Israel – many of which are based from the south – inviting them to seek any kind of help or advice. 

“If they have missing capital, or their labs are in the south and they cannot open them anymore because it’s at the border, or their investor or subcontractor does not exist anymore because of the war.  Any kind of difficulties, call in and we will help you.”  

Keeping such an extensive enterprise going is a costly affair, and Columbus is full of praise for InNegev’s plethora of strategic partners and investors, whom he says are very engaged with the center. 

“They’re really putting in the time and effort,” he says. “Our partners and investors are deeply committed to our mission, and that makes all the difference.”

These partners, many of them leaders in their respective fields, include Israeli greentech success story Netafim, which began as a kibbutz drip irrigation pioneer in the 1960s and is now a multinational corporation worth billions of dollars. 

Columbus explains that Hatzerim, the Negev kibbutz where Netafim was founded, played a major role in the creation of InNegev as an offshoot of the IIA in 2020, and remains a major backer. 

“Hatzerim was actually the partner that established this entire consortium of different organizations and industries and funds,” he says. “[It] took the responsibility to actually form this consortium.” 

Columbus, himself a veteran of the Israeli tech sector with decades of experience in high-profile positions, is the former chairman of Hatzerim shareholders’ committee at Netafim. 

Another partner is the Israel Charitable Association (ICA), an organization founded in 1891 by German Jewish philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch as the Jewish Charitable Association, which today focuses on developing agriculture in the Negev in the south and the Galilee in the north. 

“They’re donating their money to fund activities developing the Negev,” Columbus says of the ICA. “We’re getting their support in many, many different aspects.”  

For funding for the startups, Columbus says the hub normally turns to four venture capital firms with which it works regularly. He singles out Alpha Capital, a London-based VC company with offices in Israel, and Lamed Holdings, a leading Israeli business development firm based in Tel Aviv, with offices in China, Hungary and Poland. 

“It is a great partner,” Clomubus says of Lamed. “They have so many connections, and they understand the market so well; it is great to have them on board and to get their advice, and in some cases also their investment.”  

Both Netafim Vice President R&D Esteban Socolsky and Lamed owner and CEO Kobi Liberman are members of the InNegev board, along with Kfir Suisa, the global chief operating officer at SodaStream International – another Israeli international success story that is a partner to the incubator. 

With such rich resources, InNegev is now looking at expansion, aiming to see as many as 100 startups emerge from the initiative. 

“Our vision for the next phase is how to make the Negev a real international center for innovative, top tier startups fighting climate challenges and so on,” he says. 

“This is what Israel can really bring to the world, so why not do it in the Negev?”

The post Negev Innovation Hub Cultivates New Tech In Desert Climes appeared first on NoCamels.

This is especially the case with operating theaters, which are occupied for long hours in a single stretch, but because of unexpected changes in scheduling or operation length, can find themselves empty for extended periods. 

Israeli startup Opmed.ai has developed a platform that can rearrange operating room reservations in hospitals, over both long and short term periods, ensuring that each space is used efficiently and to the maximum. 

The platform uses AI to optimize schedules for the operating rooms and the surgical teams who use them, Opmed co-founder and CTO Avi Paz tells NoCamels. 

The objective is to help the hospitals reduce costs, boost revenue and improve the patient experience – simply by making the most of the rooms they have available on any given day.  

According to Opmed, every unused minute in an operating theater is a potential loss of revenue of between $50-150, while an entire unused hour can cost a medical facility up to $1,000. 

But integrating its platform, Opmed says, can lead to additional annual income of up to $1 million for each operating suite in a hospital.   

The platform works by running billions of different combinations of rooms and surgery times, focusing on short periods when rooms are unused, in order to maximize the use of space and time in the operating suites. 

“We can see many small gaps in the schedule – half an hour, an hour – here and there,” Opmed co-founder and CEO Dr. Mor Brokman Meltzer, tells NoCamels. 

The system then consolidates those gaps by shifting the time and location of operations in order to reduce as much as possible the periods in which operating rooms are unoccupied. 

“We run our predictive models, the AI component, we train the models based on the data and now we are able to predict how a certain day will look,” says Brokman Meltzer.  

The platform also predicts when a procedure will take less time than estimated, and adjusts the scheduling accordingly. 

“Some surgeons are not going to fill their block time,” Brokman Meltzer says. “They will have gaps because they overestimated, so they need to release that time. This is really a loss for the hospitals because they have such an expensive resource that is empty.” 

The Opmed platform integrates with existing electronic health systems, granting it access to hospital timetables in order to make them more efficient, while crucially, the company says, also taking into account patient needs and even reducing the wait time for an operation. 

“We can read their ongoing schedule, and optimize it based on the customer constraints and preferences,” explains Paz. 

“We can really improve the efficiency by potential revenue improvement, cost reduction and staff and room utilization,” he says.   

And, says Borkman Meltzer, Opmed is the only company that developed a system that allows them to take a hospital schedule and create “a better one” from it. 

“What makes us so unique [is] that we are focusing on that vertical, and they really feel that it is tailor made for them,” she explains.

Opmed was created in 2020, after Brokman Meltzer completed a PhD that included an examination of the complexity of planning in wartime.  

“We were looking for a place to bring those findings,” she says. “So we started to reach out to Israeli hospitals.” 

The other founders were Prof. Baruch Barzel, a physicist and applied mathematician at Bar-Ilan University and the company’s chief scientist, and Paz, who brought with him a wealth of experience from working with a variety of healthcare software during a four-year stint at Microsoft. 

It was, Brokman Meltzer says, “a really good match.” 

The team began to explore the difficulties in the day-to-day management of operating suites, talking to staff at hospitals both in Israel and the US. 

“We saw there was a need, and that they didn’t have the right tools,” says Brokman Meltzer. 

It was Paz who took the theoretical concepts and translated them into the platform that today provides a practical solution to this costly and wasteful problem. 

The company operates out of Ramat Gan in Israel and Boston in the US, with the staff divided between the two locations, Paz says. 

The startup’s 20-strong technical team – engineers, software developers and data scientists – are based in Israel, while the commercial side of the business, comprising about 10 personnel, is run out of Boston under the supervision of Brokman Meltzer. 

For now, the focus is on hospital scheduling, and the company has already partnered with multiple facilities in Israel and the US, including the Mayo Clinic, which is the top-ranked medical center in the country with branches in three states. 

In May, Opmed raised $15 million in a Series A funding round, which it said will be used to scale up its platform in order to meet the increased demand it is experiencing, in particular in the United States.  

“This funding is more than a financial milestone; it’s a validation of our vision to revolutionize healthcare operations with cutting-edge AI and optimization technology,” said Paz at the time. 

“Our commitment remains firm: to empower healthcare professionals with solutions that not only address today’s challenges but pave the way for a more efficient and effective future.”  

The post With Surgical Precision, AI Platform Cuts Wasted OR Time appeared first on NoCamels.

The carotid arteries – twin blood vessels on either side of the neck that carry blood to the face, head and brain – can become clogged by a fatty deposit known as plaque, which is caused by an unhealthy lifestyle. 

This phenomenon is known as  carotid artery stenosis. And, according to the Cleveland Clinic, one of the best ranked medical centers in the US, up to 5% of the general population could suffer from it. 

This plaque is dangerous because it narrows the arteries, thereby reducing the blood flow to the head. Furthermore, pieces of this plaque or blood clots can break off and travel to the brain. In both cases, the patient is at risk of a stroke or transient ischemic attack (TIA) also known as a mini-stroke. 

The most common treatments for a blocked carotid artery are either an incision into the blood vessel that is then used to remove the plaque or the insertion of a stent that widens the blood vessel. 

Neither of these options is ideal for different reasons, says Or Zigelboim, the CEO of Pylon Medical, the startup that has developed the new surgical treatment of carotid artery stenosis. 

Making an incision in the carotid in order to remove the plaque is “a very invasive procedure with a long hospitalization and high risk for infection,” Zigelboim tells NoCamels. 

Placing a stent via the femoral artery in the groin also has its drawbacks, despite being minimally invasive, he says, as the stent must travel through more than half the length of the body to reach the carotid artery. 

“It’s very difficult for the physician to come all the way from the femoral artery, traveling this torturous way and then navigating up to the carotid,” Zigelboim says. 

“It can take a lot of time and a lot of effort and sometimes not succeed.” 

And throughout both procedures, he says, the patient is at risk. 

Pylon’s solution, he explains, is one that resolves the biggest issue with an invasive surgical procedure, namely how to close the incision into the carotid once the plaque has been cleared. 

“The main issue with the carotid is not how you get in, because getting in is easy,” Zigelboim says. “Once you are done with the procedure, you need a way to close the puncture into the artery so that it won’t bleed.” 

The startup’s solution is a device that allows the physician to automatically suture the hole in the carotid, which Zigelboim says involves navigating a blood vessel that is a mere 2 millimeters in diameter. 

The device itself resembles a small block with a handle to turn on one side and a foot not dissimilar to that found on a sewing machine to make the stitch.  In fact, Zigelboim compares the device to a sewing machine. 

The device brings the two sides of the hole together with a knot, allowing it to heal in the same way as stitches used to close a wound for other areas of the body. 

“We are creating a closure device dedicated to the carotid artery,” he says. “The physician doesn’t have to put their hands into the carotid or suture it or do anything else.” 

The entire process of closing the hole, he says, should take around 10 seconds with the Pylon device. 

The company was formed in 2023 as part of the MEDX Xelerator, an investor and incubator based in the central Israeli city of Or Yehuda that focuses on innovations in medical devices.

Zigelboim, a veteran of the medical device sector, first approached MEDX several years ago with a different project. And although that project never got off the ground, he says, MEDX CTO Gal Atarot later approached him to create Pylon in an answer to an unmet need. 

So far, the company has raised $1.2 million from investors, among them the Israel Innovation Authority, the branch of the government dedicated to advancing the national high-tech sector that also oversees MEDX. 

Zigelboim says the company has successfully completed trials of the device in animals and plans to begin human trials next year with an eye to marketing it in 2026. 

The company is actually planning to produce an entire medical kit for procedures involving the carotid artery, with the “main” item being the closure device. 

“But we also supply all the other things that the physician needs,” Zigelboim says. “Because when you’re dealing with the carotid… you just need something small, nice.” 

The post ‘Sewing Machine’ Sutures Simplify Complex Carotid Procedure appeared first on NoCamels.

Steeped in a background of military and medical applications technology, Lumus has now set its sights on revolutionizing consumer optic tech with AR glasses designed to liberate users from the constant gaze of their smartphones, instead projecting directly onto the lenses in front of their noses.

“I would consider wearing AR glasses to be an upgrade from what we’re doing today,” Lumus VP Marketing David Andrew Goldman tells NoCamels. 

“We’re all constantly looking down at our phones… and we’re sort of stuck with these little black mirrors that we walk around with in our pockets.”

The tagline for the company is “The Future is Looking Up” because they envision a future where people won’t be looking down at their cell phones, but will be able to have their hands free and heads up, using the AR glasses to gather the information they need or want, Goldman says. 

Founded nearly two decades ago, Lumus initially focused on military solutions such as transparent displays for pilots. 

These displays, integrated into military-grade helmets like the Scorpion, allowed pilots unprecedented situational awareness and accuracy in combat scenarios. 

Expanding beyond military applications, Lumus partnered with medical innovator Augmedics for their xVision AR surgical navigation. 

This uses AR to enhance spinal surgeries by overlaying critical patient data directly into the surgeon’s line of sight as he operates, reducing cognitive load on the doctor and the length of surgery times.

About eight years ago, Lumus pivoted towards consumer technology, anticipating a post-smartphone era dominated by AR glasses. The challenge was making their optic technology consumer-ready—compact, stylish and affordable, according to Goldman.

“We use mirrors, which are the oldest optical element that exists, and we’re using them in a unique way,” he says. 

While keeping the tiny projector out of the way, content is projected onto what is called a waveguide, so called because it directs the light waves. 

This glass substrate (underlying layer), with embedded partially reflecting mirrors, is where the light gets guided through the piece of glass and projected to the users’ eyes.

“If you wanted to watch a movie, or if you wanted to do gaming, it would be possible,”  Goldman says. “We can do that with our optics, and those will fit in what looks like a natural pair of glasses.”

The waveguide is the only part of the smart glasses that doesn’t exist in another device, Goldman explains. For example, the micro display and the projector are technologies that are part either of smartwatches, mobile phones or screen monitors. 

The only new piece of technology for the AR glasses is going to be the waveguide, and that’s why it’s so critical, Goldman says.

“In Israel we have a good reputation in optics from the Weizmann Institute [of Science]. Most of our research has come out of there and we are leaders in this space, which is good for Israel,” he adds.  

In fact, a good number of Lumus’ 97 employees hold doctorates in physics, optics and other relevant areas of studies. 

Lumus is located in the Israeli city of Ness Ziona, neighboring Weizmann’s hometown of Rehovot. The two locales form the base of a growing number of manufacturing, production and technology transfer organizations. 

The company also has a production line in Penang, Malaysia through Germany’s SCHOTT, a leading international technology group in the areas of material innovations, specialty glass and glass-ceramics. It has another production facility in Taipei, Taiwan through its partner and Fortune 500 company Quanta Computer, which produces many consumer products including the Apple watch and the MacBook Pro. 

And there is an appetite for this tech among consumers, mostly younger consumers under 40, Goldman asserts.

“This market is going to come. The companies are very committed to it. They’re spending billions of dollars on R&D right now, not just in America, but also in China, in Taiwan, to some degree, but less so, in Europe,” he says. 

He estimates that smart glasses will be on the market within a few years for the early adopters. After that, he says, we will see “millions of units” become available. 

As such, Lumus is working with their manufacturing partners on building a supply chain robust enough to handle millions of orders that he is optimistic will come once consumers become more used to the concept.

“We are poised to go now, though initially it won’t be millions of sales. It’s a really big ask to go from using a mobile device to suddenly using a display near the eye, and so it’s going to start in the tens of thousands of orders a month, then to hundreds of thousands a month, and eventually… millions,” he predicts.

Lumus is at various stages with various customers whose names he is unable to reveal at this time, he says. In some cases, they are working on a real product with a target date for release and in others, they are doing pilot programs with large technology companies or just evaluating whether they want to use Lumus or one of their competitors.

Goldman explains that the Lumus AR glasses allow the wearer to remain in the present while using the technology, making it an asset rather than a distraction.

“We don’t want you to be separated from the world,” he says. “If we were to meet face to face, and you forgot my name, you would see my name through the glasses – it would be floating just above my head.” 

He ticks off some of the other improvements he believes AR glasses will help with, including real-time translations, seamless navigation without ever taking your eyes off the road, and 3D projected holograms of the people you are talking via video calls, giving you the sensation of being in the same room.

“It’s a quantum leap,” he says.

Highlighting the company’s discreet optical engine weighing in at about 11 grams per eye and the lightweight design aimed at mimicking conventional eyewear aesthetics, Goldman says the eyewear is practically indistinguishable from some of the heavier-framed glasses favored by designers such as Armani.

“That was the goal. And for the kinds of companies that we’re working with now, it has to look good,” he says.  

“It won’t be considered wearable if no one wants to wear it, right? So, we have an expression here- ‘the face is sacred space.’ No one wants to wear anything that makes them look like a dork.” 

The post New Specs Augment Reality And Make You Look Good Doing It appeared first on NoCamels.

Using proprietary technology, Petah Tikva-based startup Revealense analyzes these involuntary behaviors, such as facial movements, voice pitch and heart rate, offering insights for organizations who want to know what is going on behind a person’s eyes. 

“We analyze human behavior to help other people make the best decisions about humans,” Revealense CPO Amit Cohen tells NoCamels. 

Cohen says such technological capabilities are “critical” for two sectors – homeland security and mental health care. Both of which are reliant on careful and precise understanding of a person’s inner thoughts, albeit for very different reasons. 

“There’s a lot of similarity between homeland security and mental care,” Cohen explains. “You want to catch the bad guys and you want to help the good guys who need help. And in these two worlds, you have to be very, very accurate – there’s no room for mistakes.”  

Founded in 2022, the startup worked on its technology for two years before emerging from stealth very recently with a clutch of clients already in place. And Cohen says that because they are all connected to the security arena, he cannot name them. 

He says that the company began with a focus on mental health and homeland security not only because they were the sectors that displayed the most interest in the work they were doing, but also because once the tech was established in these two very demanding fields, it would be simpler to expand to less complex and consequential arenas. 

With that in mind, about half of the Revealense team are trained psychologists, he says, alongside a retired Israel Defense Forces general who is the advisor for the security applications of the platform. 

Cohen says that unlike other platforms that only analyze involuntary facial movements to understand people’s thoughts and feelings, Revealense takes a more holistic approach that creates a deeper comprehension. 

“It’s not only micromovements, it’s all human factors together that we’re analyzing,” he explains. 

“We’re trying to create a correlation between all of them [and] we don’t rely only on a single human factor. This is the wrong way to go, because then it can be subject to manipulation or less accuracy.” 

Such a narrow approach also fails to take into account ethical considerations such as a subject’s personal history or culture, which Cohen says are very important to Revealense. 

He acknowledges that AI and ethics do not always go hand in hand, but explains that the startup brings them together through a policy of what it calls “responsible AI.”  

“[This] is one of the main things that is the foundation of our product, because you cannot evaluate human behavior without specific elements that responsible AI brings to the table, for example your background, which affects who you are,” Cohen says. 

The platform uses videos – a media and communication tool that has become increasingly popular in recent years – to determine what Cohen calls “the cognitive stress and the emotional stress” of its subjects. 

“As we move forward to more digital services, the interaction between people is based on digital interactions, [creating] the requirement to understand what people really think and not only what they say,” Cohen explains. 

The users of the platform have a dashboard that uses AI to monitor and analyze a range of criteria. 

Blood flow and heart rate, for example, are used as an indicator of emotional stress and measured by changes in skin pigmentation. An increase in the number of times a person blinks and changes in voice pitch are also monitored as signs of similar stress. 

And while many studies say that small unconscious facial movements known as micro-expressions can reveal our inner thoughts, Cohen actually warns that these can be easily manipulated in a video. 

Instead, he says, Revealense looks for even smaller movements known as facial leaks, which he calls “the most powerful element” of the human face. 

These leaks, he explains, are the ones that actually create micro-expressions, and when analyzing a video, it is possible to spot hundreds of facial muscles moving from frame to frame.  

Because it focuses on involuntary responses, the platform is adept at spotting so-called deep fakes – advanced video technology that can mimic a person so well it is almost impossible to tell the real from the manufactured. 

But according to Cohen, it is the lack of the  very human involuntary responses measured by Revealense, which the fakes struggle to replicate, that gives them away as fabricated. 

Without divulging details out of security and privacy concerns, Cohen says that the Revealense platform has even been used by certain authorities to determine whether videos of political significance have been manipulated. 

All of us, he explains, have the same physical responses to situations that cause us stress, regardless of our own mental state or outlook on the world. 

“The bottom line is that the parasympathetic nervous system can never lie, can never be deceptive,” Cohen says of one of the mechanisms in the body that controls heart rate and breathing. 

“This is something that is inherent in us all.”  

The post Startup Can Read Our Thoughts From Our Involuntary Actions appeared first on NoCamels.

A 2022 poll by major US financial firm Capital One found that most organizations reported difficulties in handling their own data. Seventy-six percent of those polled said they experienced difficulties in understanding the data, while almost 80 percent said organizing it posed a serious challenge. 

“Without data cataloging, decision-makers struggle to understand what data they have, how the data is used, and who owns the data,” Capital One said.

The Kal Sense platform was created by northern Israeli startup Kaleidoo, a subsidiary of Tel Aviv-based artificial intelligence and big data specialist Bynet Data Communications. The platform analyzes every single piece of data that a company has, using algorithms to plough through the information to provide relevant insights. 

Kaleidoo founder and General Manager Yudi Bar On compares Kal Sense’s AI capabilities to those of the major tech offerings, such as Google’s Gemini platform or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, utilizing the same principles of large language models (LLM) and natural language processing (NLP), only dedicated to making sense of information in the professional world. 

But unlike other AI-powered platforms, Bar On tells NoCamels, Kal Sense was developed out of the realization that most data is not what he calls “AI ready.” With that understanding, Kaleidoo’s platform uniquely “pre-processes” the data so that the LLMs and NLPs can be used to analyze it. 

The platform is suitable for any company, from healthcare to insurance, and even any governmental department that is looking to analyze any kind of data, Bar On says. 

“It’s a way of [increasing] efficiency and getting the maximum quality of the data,” he explains.  

“CEOs and companies sometimes make decisions by gut feeling and we want to help them to reach a [facts-driven] decision.” 

He says that Kal Sense draws on all kinds of data generated within an organization, not just formal documents, but also information from sources such as text messages, recorded calls, videos and even social media posts.  

“If you have a lot of videos and a lot of images in your data storage, you can find exactly what you’re looking for,” Bar On says. 

The platform also is capable of optical character recognition (OCR) – the conversion of images of any text, be it typed or handwritten, into a script that a computer can read.  

Once the data is amassed, the platform uses it to provide the answers to questions posed by the searcher. 

“You want [it] to analyze text, and not only extract the text, but also understand the text, then I can ask questions regarding the text itself,” says Bar On. 

“There is a lot of data in any organization,” he says. “And if you ask the chief technology officer and the chief information officer or anyone in the organization, they probably will tell you that they cannot search and they cannot get the value from their data.” 

Bar On gives the example of the Israeli Ministry of Environmental Protection, which is one of a number of government agencies he says are already using Kal Sense for data modeling. The ministry uses the platform to analyze information provided by sensors it has placed at locations across the country. 

“[It uses Kal Sense] to upload the data from all the sensors in Israel, store it in one place called a data lake and then analyze it regarding noise, pollution or even people throwing garbage from cars,” he says. 

The most sophisticated aspect of the platform is the audio conversion, Bar On explains, as it is able to differentiate between multiple voices, perform noise reduction on background sounds and even understand multiple languages, including Hebrew, Arabic and Russian.  

All of this is then converted to text for analysis with, he says, 95 percent accuracy. 

But not only does the audio convert to text for analysis, it can also provide real time translation between two languages, allowing users to hold a conversation despite not having a common tongue.  

Bar On, who spent more than a decade working in R&D for Israeli defense tech company Rafael, says he created the company in 2019 when he realized that the AI capabilities currently being developed were lacking the function of searching all forms of data.  

“We see a lot of companies that are focusing on voice, we see a lot of companies that are focusing on video and images, we see a lot of companies that are focusing on text, but we didn’t see the combination,” he says. 

“It’s a different technology, it’s unique.” 

The platform is solely designed as B2B, and Bar On explains that its level of sophistication and complexity of programming would make it extremely difficult for individual consumers to use. 

“It’s not plug and play,” he says. “You need to integrate it [and] you need to work very hard in order to do that integration.” 

Last month, the platform was formally launched at a joint event with industry giants Dell and Nvidia, which provide Kal Sense with its servers and processors. 

And Bar On believes that almost every professional body would benefit from having the level of access to its hard to process data that Kal Sense offers. 

“We call it three-component data that we can communicate with all together,” he says. “This is why we believe it can fit any organization.”

The post AI Platform Lets Organizations Dive Deep Into Their Own Data appeared first on NoCamels.

So three years ago, the entrepreneurial long-time vegan and activist set out together with the company’s fellow co-founders — 3D printing expert Hila Elimelech, and Oshi’s current innovation lead Ariel Szklanny and director of food R&D Ron Sicsic — to create the world’s first plant-based fish filet with the taste and texture of the original. 

The company, formerly known as Plantish, selected salmon filets as its goal because of the fish’s popularity with consumers, Ron tells NoCamels.

Ron says he realized that there was no fish alternative among the plant-based meat alternatives popping up, largely because the texture and structure of fish differs to that of meat.

Therefore, unlike the relatively straightforward task of creating vegan burgers that mimic ground meat with ingredients like soy or mushrooms, the challenge of imitating the complex structure of fish filets presented a unique obstacle. 

“You can take soy, you can take mushrooms, you can take lentils, mix it together, shape it into a ball, then squeeze it a little bit, put it into the oven and in 20 minutes, you’ll have a great vegan burger,” he says. 

“If you do that, you will not get a fish filet because the texture and the structure is a lot more difficult.”

Fish filets possess intricate layers of flakes and fat lines, each contributing to its unique texture and mouthfeel, Ron explains, and no one in the food tech industry had yet tackled the problem of replicating it with plant-based alternatives. 

It took the Oshi team three years of diligent, expert work on two fronts of research and development to create both the right texture and the right taste for the alternative salmon filet currently being market tested in 15 select restaurants across the USA. 

Their solution lay in mycoprotein, a mycelium-based protein that also provides micronutrients, complemented by algae and vegetable oils. 

This innovative blend not only mirrors the nutritional profile of fish but also replicates its texture through Oshi’s proprietary technology known as modular layering. 

Ron explains that the flakes and the fat of the fish are created using two different methods and then combined in the production process.

The startup’s unique machinery meticulously constructs each filet, layer by layer of flakes and fat, ensuring an authentic fish-like experience.

“We invented machinery that can not only place the flakes one on top of the other, but it is actually shaping each flake into the right shape. It builds the fish like you build with Lego,” Ron says. 

The company is now in the process of refining its product-market fit before expanding into retail sales, he says.

The plant-based filets are a solution for an industry that Ron warns is taking an environmental toll on the marine ecosystem. 

Oceans are being overfished and filled with toxins such as microfibers and mercury, while traditional fish farming practices are unsustainable and even detrimental to human health with the overuse of antibiotics to keep disease at bay. 

Furthermore, he explains, salmon are carnivores and fish farms take fish from the oceans in order to feed them at a pace that is also not sustainable.

“That is the main thing that people should know that when we eat fish, it’s not like we’re eating cucumbers that someone is planting: we are just taking fish, and if we take too much, there are less and less fish each year,” says Ron.

“That’s what has been happening in the past 50 years,“ he says. “We have to stop it. We have to reduce the amount of fish we’re eating in order to make the ocean thrive.”

Backed by $14.5 million in funding from investors and poised for further investment rounds, Oshi has relocated its production facility to California from its initial base in the central Israeli city of Rishon Lezion, which remains as the center of research and development. 

The company was also recently recognized as one of Israel’s top 50 promising startups of the year by Israeli tech website Calcalist, for its pioneering efforts in food tech. 

For now, the cost of the Oshi filet is equivalent to premium salmon filets from the Faroe Islands and Alaska, Ron says, with the price connected to the speed of the company’s production process. 

“The pace of our machinery has not yet reached the pace of the fish farms [which raise] tons of fish at the same time,” he says. 

But as they systematically update and upgrade their machinery, he believes they will reach the optimum price in about three years. 

Rather than trying to recreate other existing kinds of fish, Ron says Oshi’s next goal is to create a new “species” of plant-based fish. 

This, the company maintains, will appeal not only to the environmentally aware consumer, but also those who like to try something completely new rather than something that merely imitates an existing product. 

“We are putting all our efforts into making it the healthiest and tastiest without trying to mimic a specific taste,” he says. 

“We believe that if we stay with just mimicking, it will be hard to penetrate to the mainstream.”

A board member of Israeli non-profit Vegan Friendly, which promotes a lifestyle free of all animal products, Ron stresses the importance of creating startups that benefit the world, be it related to health, ecology or other fields with real meaning, which can really do good. 

“I am spending my life trying to be an advocate for animals and sustainability, and for me it is a privilege to be making this ideology my full-time job,” he says. 

“I have built a few ventures before, but Oshi is the most exciting for me because it aligns with my passion and can also have a massive impact.”

The post Salmon Alternative Looks & Tastes Like Real Thing, Down To The Last Flake appeared first on NoCamels.

Nascent company CivicLabs applied to lead the initiative exactly one month before Hamas terrorists stormed across the border into southern Israel from Gaza on October 7, murdering 1,200 people and abducting hundreds more. 

Iranian proxy Hezbollah began bombing the north a day later in “solidarity” with Gaza, and swathes of the area were evacuated of their residents due to the rocket fire and fears that a similar mass terror attack could be launched from the terror group’s denizens in southern Lebanon.  

Ironically, the initiative is focused on startups in the sector of built environment – construction in populated areas, including everything from cities and parks to highways and buildings. For it is this field that will play a large part in reconstructing the devastated north when the ongoing conflict is over, even if the startups themselves do not play a direct role. 

CivicLabs is based in the northern city of Yokneam – an already established high-tech hub that has earned the moniker “Startup Village.” It won the tender to run the initiative in late December and got to work on January 1, despite the conflict. 

“We are not waiting for the war to end,” CivicLabs CEO Yogev Katzir tells NoCamels. 

The initiative has been split into two key aspects: working with the startups to help them grow and working with stakeholders that support the burgeoning companies.  

The work with the startups has also been meticulously demarcated into three areas, Katzir explains. 

The first area is collaboration with any interested Israeli startups in the built environment sector, with what he calls “soft support” for challenges as they grow. 

The second is a form of accelerator program for startups selected by CivicLabs, which will receive more substantial and sustained support. 

“Our idea was to choose specific startups and really tailor a support suit for them, either with R&D, commercial activities or fundraising,” Katzir says.  

“We are tailoring a different suit for each startup,” he explains, as each company has its own unique set of needs, be they meeting regulatory demands or even appealing to investors. 

“The aim is really to try to create a support that will match their needs,” he says. 

The final area is investment, with CivicLabs planning to bring in venture capital investors later this year for startups in the pre-seed, seed and Round A stages of fundraising.  

As far as the stakeholders – whom Katzir describes as members of academia, local municipalities, corporations and other professional entities – are concerned, CivicLabs envisions close collaboration with both the startups and indeed the entire high-tech ecosystem.  

Katzir explains that here too the relationship is split into three separate areas, albeit this time geographically. 

The first area is Israel, in particular the north; the second is the immediate region, in particular around the Persian Gulf; and the third is a more global perspective, in particular Europe, Japan and North America. 

In actuality, much of the CivicLabs vision is based around regional cooperation, Katzir explains. This focuses in particular on Bahrain and the UAE, the two Gulf states that signed the 2020 Abraham Accords to normalize ties with Israel, although there is at least one nation in the region whose normalization with Israel is expected in the coming years. 

“We also really wish to fulfill the Abraham Accords with genuine content between the GCC region and Israel,” he says. 

“We are true believers in regional cooperation. We were true believers before October 7, and we are even bigger true believers after October 7, because we see the alternatives.” 

Katzir says that CivicLabs saw the importance of “paving the innovation lane” between the Gulf states and Israel, with an exchange of assets between them. 

“In the most basic sense, it’s technology coming from here to there, and resources and delegations going from there to here,” he says. 

“In Israel, this is our competitive edge, not only regionally but also globally. Our aim is to really leverage it, maximize it and create those ties between nations, between people, between economies.” 

Perhaps it will be more of a challenge since October 7, he admits but stresses that  this just makes it even more important to establish those connections.

This international perspective can also be seen in CivicLabs’ shareholders, with two of the three being Impulse Partners from France and Shibumi International from the United Arab Emirates, although the parent company of the latter is based in Turkey. 

The third shareholder is Baran Israel, part of the Baran Group, the country’s largest engineering firm. Baran Israel CEO Zohar Nevo praised the CivicLabs initiative as a crucial one for the north ravaged by nine months of daily bombings. 

“We see a unique opportunity here to harness Israel’s advanced technological capabilities for the rebuilding of infrastructure,” he said. 

“Baran brings experience in planning, infrastructure, and construction, and we believe that this combination, along with technological innovation and smart, efficient solutions, is critical for rehabilitation and development in the northern region.”  

CivicLabs also received public funding from the Israel Innovation Authority, the branch of government devoted to advancing the national high-tech industry, and the Ministry of Regional Cooperation – a sign that the state, too, understands the scope for regional advancement through the initiative. 

Ultimately, says Katzir, the emphasis must be on the rocket-battered north and helping to restore the area to its former bustling and dynamic glory. 

For while the young companies growing up in the area might not be able to develop solutions fast enough for the rehabilitation of northern Israel, their presence does offer a sense of hope for the future. 

Nor will CivicLabs base itself solely in Yokneam, Katzir says, giving the example of a new partnership with Braude College of Engineering in Karmiel.

“I think that we have a major role,” he says. “We feel the urgency of operating to give support to the region and the startups. And hopefully after the war, create a really vibrant ecosystem here.” 

The post High-Tech Hopes For Ravaged North Of Israel, Just As It Really Needs It  appeared first on NoCamels.

Medication comes with two dates – one after which it cannot be used at all and one that gives a certain period to use the drug from the moment it is opened, usually several months. And it is that second date, which is often difficult to remember, that the Innocap smart cap records. 

“We found a problem regarding medication and expiration from the opening date,” Innocap co-founder Liron Sharony tells NoCamels. 

He explains that while the expiration date applies primarily to liquid medicines, it is also applied to many other health-related products, including vitamins and nutritional supplements and even baby formula and mouthwash, all of which are planned for future inclusion by Innocap. 

“These dates actually are approved by the health authorities and it is very critical to avoid the products beyond their expiration date,” Sharony says.

After that, he says, not only does the effectiveness of the medication decline, it can also pose a health risk.   

Innocap’s patent-protected cap is already fitted to the bottle when it is handed over to the user, and looks the same as a regular cap, save for two small dials on the top that represent the day and month of opening. 

The user adjusts the numbers on each dial to mark the date on which the product was opened, allowing them to know exactly when to discard it.

When the right date has been chosen, a button on the cap fixes the dials in place, so that it cannot change.

As well as the dial, the cap also comes with technology to allow it to connect to the user’s smartphone, without the need to download an app. 

And because there is no app involved, the digital side is accessed by a web browser. When the user taps their phone on the cap, it opens up a virtual leaflet for the product, resembling the information inside physical packaging. 

The virtual leaflet includes all the information about the product as well as the option to set a daily reminder to take it (primarily easily forgotten vitamins and supplements) and a dosage calculator based on the weight of the consumer, which the company says is of great help when administering medication to a child. 

The cap also facilitates repurchase of certain products by providing a link to the manufacturer’s website.  

Sharony created Innocap with co-founder and CEO Yves Sibony in 2020, determined to end the potentially detrimental guesswork involved for many people using medication with a defined shelf life. They spent three years developing the cap.

“People don’t write down when they opened a product,” Sibony tells NoCamels. “And if they don’t write the date of the opening, they can never know if it’s past its expiration or not.” 

This is true, he explains, for baby formula, vitamins, food supplements and drugs, and is very common indeed. 

“We are all in the same situation – we have a lot of products and we don’t know when we opened them,” he says. 

He says that although many drug companies write a warning on their packaging, telling consumers to make a note of when they opened the medication, Innocap research shows that less than one third actually follow this direction.  

“They forget – they don’t make a note on their phones, they don’t write it on the packaging,” he says. “Only 30 percent said that they do it. That’s nothing!” 

And all of the data regarding a person’s healthcare is completely anonymous, Sharony stresses, with users only identified by a random number in order to maintain regulatory medical privacy.  

Sharony compares the cap to the child-proof covers that were created by a Canadian physician in 1967 and soon after made compulsory in many parts of the world.  

“This product allows parents to give their children fresh medications,” he says.  

Sharony and Sibony created the cap after both separately having been faced with trying to work out whether medication for their sick children was still usable or had passed its expiration date. 

“We both found ourselves with kids with a fever in the middle of the night, and we reached for medication to give them and saw that it was already open,” Sharony says. 

“We hesitated – is it expired or not? And because I didn’t have a way to know, in the middle of the night I found myself driving to try to locate a pharmacy to buy my kids medication.”  

In fact, Sharony says, his own child even once had a bad reaction to out of date medication that resulted in a dash to the emergency room. 

Funding for the Herzliya-based startup came from what Sharony describes as “private angels and one small VC from Israel,” raising $1.2 million in three years. 

And Innocap has also just launched commercially, working with Israeli pharmaceutical company CTS on a very limited range of products that from last month come fitted with the smart cap. 

The partnership is for five years and, Sibony says, involves production of “many millions” of caps as the number of items fitted with them increases. 

Innocap is also in talks with another three Israeli pharmaceutical companies to manufacture caps for their products, and Sharony is confident that they have the infrastructure in place to easily scale up to meet the anticipated massive demand. 

The pair say that other smart caps have been produced to deal with this issue, but they were designed for sale directly to the consumer and not via the pharmaceutical companies themselves.  

Innocap, they say, is the only one in the world that has been developed as an integral part of the medication production itself, and their patent is a global one. 

“We are providing a platform,” says Sibony, “that gives you tools and features to manage your needs in a smart way.”

The post Smart Cap Keeps On Top Of Your Medication’s Crucial Expiration Date  appeared first on NoCamels.