Here are five favorites from us and five from you, our loyal readers:  

Our Picks: 

Cancer Cures 
With artificial intelligence playing an ever-increasing role in our lives, medtech company OncoHost is using it to help oncologists decide the optimum therapy for their cancer patients. 

The startup’s main focus is determining treatment for a form of lung cancer, with its proprietary PROphet platform scanning up to 7,000 proteins in a patient’s blood in order to see how receptive that person would be to immunotherapy.  

The platform looks for proteins that are present in the blood of patients who did not respond to immunotherapy but absent for patients who did respond. Click here for more

Life Saver 
When Israeli businessman Adam Bismut saw a man lose his life by drowning at the Dead Sea because help was too far away, he was determined to stop such tragedies from happening again. 

Bismut developed Sightbit, a drowning prevention platform that uses AI to spot dangers on and in the water, alerting lifeguards to people in peril in real time. 

Tragically, the person who devoted his professional life to helping others also gave his life to protect others, as IDF Sgt. Maj. (res.) Adam Bismut fell in battle in Gaza on January 22, 2024. May his memory be a blessing. Click here for more

Water World 
Building on a water-from-air concept devised by WaterGen, fellow Israeli startup H2oll also produces drinking water from the atmosphere, but more cheaply, more efficiently and more sustainably – and in any climate.

H2oll has added a new element to the existing technology, by way of a concentrated salt solution. Instead of cooling the whole air mass, it extracts and cools only the moisture molecules – around two percent of air content, depending on humidity – and turns them into water.

The company says it aims to address the global water crisis, especially in the developing world, where countries want to avoid expensive infrastructure, or costly bottled supplies. Click here for more

A Voice For The Voiceless 
The AI-powered Voiceitt platform is designed to recognize and translate speech by people with an underlying medical condition, disability or age-related condition that means their speech is hard to understand. 

It works either as voice to text or voice to synthesized speech, with the latter allowing the user to speak in person in real time, as part of a face-to-face conversation, or in a virtual, online meeting.   

The technology is based on machine learning and speech recognition algorithms that are customized to the user, allowing the platform to assimilate each user’s unique way of speaking. It is web based, which means that it can be accessed from any internet-connected device without having to download a program or app. Click here for more

Potato Power
Rumafeed has come up with a way to boost the amount of animal feed produced worldwide by genetically modifying the currently discarded foliage from potato harvests and making it suitable for livestock.  

Potato foliage contains glycoalkaloids, which makes it toxic, but by removing this inedible chemical compound, the foliage is transformed from a waste byproduct to a plentiful, viable food source for herds that is rich in nitrogen and protein.  

Potato hay could also be a valuable source of income for farmers, fetching as much as $600 per hectare of land where the tubers are grown, with each hectare capable of producing 3.5 tons of it. Click here for more

Your Picks: The Articles You Read The Most

Ice Cream On Demand
A machine invented by Israeli startup Solato uses a secret process to create super-fresh frozen desserts from liquid in just 60 seconds. It whips up and freezes a range of gelato, sorbet, frozen yogurt, smoothies and even iced coffee.

Solato says it is the first to market with a frozen dessert capsule machine, offering a range of flavors including Amarena cherry and mascarpone, piedmont hazelnut gelato, lychee sorbet, and classics like dark chocolate and vanilla gelato, as well as plain frozen yogurt. 

Each cup-sized capsule of concentrate liquid makes a cup of ice cream. The unique code on each capsule is read by the machine to determine how much it needs to freeze it and how much air it needs to add, to increase its volume. The capsule itself, which is biodegradable, can then be used for serving. Click here for more

COVID Spray 
An Israeli-founded company in Canada has developed a nasal technology to treat and prevent upper respiratory and topical infections such as COVID-19 and successful Phase 3 clinical trials proved it can reduce viral load in people with mild cases of coronavirus.

Enovid, the nitric oxide nasal spray (NONS) created by Vancouver-based SaNOtize is designed to treat adult patients who have a risk of progression of COVID-19.  

The patented platform technology allows for the topical delivery of nitric oxide (a naturally occurring nanomolecule with the formula NO, hence the name) to treat a variety of bacterial, fungal, and viral diseases. Click here for more

Chewing Gum Diet 
A chewing gum infused with an ancient sugar-blocking herb may help people lose weight, according to a new consumer study. 

Israeli startup Sweet Victory imbues the Indian botanical gymnema sylvestre into its gum, which blocks the taste receptors for sweetness when it is chewed for just two minutes. The company says that its effects last up to two hours.  

Of the 80 participants in a two-week trial, 87 percent reported experiencing weight loss, at an average of 1.3 kilos per two weeks. An additional 80 percent of the participants significantly reduced their consumption of sweets by the end of the trial, and said they had “better control” of their food choices. Click here for more

Screenless Laptop With Virtual Screens 
Spacetop, billed as the world’s first augmented reality laptop, looks like the keyboard to a standard 13-inch laptop, minus the 13-inch screen.

But with a dedicated pair of glasses and just 20 seconds of training, the user can actually see a dozen or more virtual screens. They can toggle between them, resize and reposition them at will, and even zoom in and out.

Sightful, the company behind the design, says Spacetop has been painstakingly redesigned “from the ground up” with no off-the-shelf components. Everything is custom-made and works on Spacetop OS, a proprietary operating system. Click here for more

Sperm Solution
Israeli scientists at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) haven developed an innovative platform to create sperm in a laboratory through a microfluidic system, which contains hundreds of microchannels for fluids to pass through. 

The sperm was grown on a special silicon chip developed in collaboration with researchers at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. The chip enables the researchers to grow cells from the testis in the microchip and add fresh cell culture media designed to support cellular growth. A 3D system was also built and integrated to allow the addition of testicular tissue cells. 

The innovation is designed to help males who receive aggressive treatment for cancer that can damage sperm-forming cells and result in impaired spermatogenesis, the origin and development of sperm cells within the reproductive organs, leading to fertility problems. Click here for more

The post Editors’ & Readers’ Choice: 10 Favorite NoCamels Articles appeared first on NoCamels.

And as Israel navigates this time of war on multiple fronts – with its troops fighting in Gaza and Lebanon as well as handling attacks from Iran, Iraq, Syria and Yemen – NoCamels asked leaders in the sector to look forwards and share their thoughts on what the future holds for the national high-tech industry, whose strength and vitality earned the country the moniker “Startup Nation.”  

Israeli readiness to embrace innovation, even when it seems somewhat risky, is a long-standing trait that is key to the sector thriving even in wartime – and crucial to it flourishing in the years to come, says Jon Medved, the CEO of Israel’s global investment powerhouse OurCrowd. 

“The fact that Israel grows and it continues to grow its tech sector during war is sort of a core element of who we are,” Medved tells NoCamels. 

“The reason that we’re so strong in the startup arena boils down, more than any other single reason, to our attitude towards risk. We are people who have learned to live with risk, even though I’m not sure we chose it.”  

In agreement with this sentiment is Limor Nakar-Vincent, the Deputy Executive Director of Business at the Binational Industrial Research and Development  Foundation (BIRD), a joint Israeli-American endeavor that brings companies from both countries together on collaborative projects. 

Nakar-Vincent tells NoCamels that the decades of conflict that the country has endured has made its people hardy, and spurred innovation and development. 

She cites the strong sense of solidarity and a highly adaptable workforce whose members often take on additional responsibilities to cover for colleagues called to reserve duty. 

“Israelis are creative and deeply motivated, which helps them navigate challenging times,” she says. “[They] are accustomed to managing through cycles of tension, and historically, periods of growth follow.” 

Going Global

Medved credits the diverse essence of Israel – a rich melting pot of Jews from around the world – with its ongoing and future success on the global stage. This “secret sauce,” he says, allows Israelis to retain ties, language skills and familiarity with global commerce and business on a broad scale – all of which are key, too, to its future success. 

It is this global outreach that is crucial for investment in the sector in years to come, Medved says, as foreign investors are “the main part of the story in the Israeli Startup Nation ecosystem.” 

In fact, he explains, even during the ongoing conflict, Israel reached a record high of 93-percent foreign VC participation in funding rounds for local startups, meaning that just 7 percent of them were solely Israeli efforts. 

And as the sector looks to sustain itself and expand in years to come, Medved believes that in the next half decade or so, Israeli startups must now look beyond becoming a unicorn or decacorn (companies valued at $1 billion or $10 billion, respectively) and seek the attainable target of a $20, $50 or even $100 billion valuation, which means a more international approach.  

“I predict that 10 years from now, there will be several Israeli companies in that $100 billion range,” he says. 

Medtech veteran Mati Gill shares this sentiment, citing a trend of Israeli startups moving into the international arena rather than opting for what he calls “the classical ‘exit’ model” of selling to a larger entity. 

“We saw a generation of Israeli startups that went public and grew globally, [while] maintaining their headquarters and R&D in Israel,” says Gill, who today is CEO of the Rehovot-based Aion Labs medtech venture studio, an initiative of the Israel Innovation Authority that works with global pharmaceutical giants on solutions for some of the most challenging diseases facing humanity. 

In fact, Gill tells NoCamels, the expansion by Israeli startups into areas outside the classic tech and SaaS space into fields such deeptech and biotech has opened new opportunities for Israeli R&D to mature into industry solutions.

Staying Power 

These new opportunities include making headway in the field of sustainability – one of the most innovative and significant in the tech ecosystem – which will create fresh avenues for Israeli startups in the years ahead. This, of course, is  alongside other major areas like cybersecurity and fintech, in which local companies have already built a reputation. 

“The double bottom line of impact investing – doing well and making money at the same time – is very valid and important,” says Medved. 

“Whether it’s in healthcare or climate, access to disabled technologies, foodtech or agtech, transportation, education or financial inclusion, you will see large numbers of Israeli startups on the front lines of this important battleground.” 

Gill, who has worked extensively in medtech innovation, also believes that healthcare – which he describes as the meeting point of technology and life sciences – is an area in which Israel is “uniquely positioned” to become one of the most relevant and leading ecosystems. 

“Our strong research and talent capabilities in both sectors, coupled with the entrepreneurial mindset of Israelis have helped birth a new cluster of startups in the tech bio space in Israel,” he explains. 

This includes significant fundraising achievements, deals and increased interest from pharmaceutical multinational corporations in the past five years alone, he adds.

Medved also highlights the need to ensure that Israeli innovation in these extremely important areas is made available in “every corner of the planet,” regardless of how economically developed a country is. 

To this end, he says, OurCrowd has partnered with the World Health Organization Foundation on a $200 million Global Health Equity Fund to help make these technological advances more equitable.  

Meanwhile, says Nakar-Vincent, the ongoing war will likely lead to growth among companies focusing on dual-use technologies, which serve both civilian and military applications. 

“This sector has garnered heightened interest, leading to increased funding and expedited development processes,” she says. 

In fact, she adds, the experience gained by many Israelis now serving in reserve duty will nurture the establishment of new start-ups in the defense and homeland security spheres.

“It’s essential to consider various forms of support for high-tech companies, especially those facing the ‘valley of death’ but with the potential to commercialize their technologies,” she explains. 

Looking beyond new innovation to the challenges of maintaining its well-respected position in the world’s tech sector, Gill believes that regulatory and geopolitical stability are vital, as well as restored trust in the country’s leadership and maintaining an independent judiciary. 

The latter refers to the domestic political turmoil over proposed judicial reform in the months preceding the October 7, 2023 mass terror attack by Hamas that saw tens of thousands taking to the streets every week to protest.  

Equally important, Gill says, is the ability to produce experienced homegrown talent in the sector and the ability to attract talent from abroad to Israel.  

Medved ties expansion in Israeli high-tech to the need to find novel ways of raising money, in particular for startups in the field of artificial intelligence, which Israeli angel investor and former military intelligence officer Alon Arvatz predicted last year would be accelerated due to its use by the army in the current war.  

“It turns out that to build these AI startups fast, you need a lot of capital and a lot of money for computing and for GPU farms,” Medved says, referring to sophisticated servers that can quickly perform complex calculations.

Ultimately, say both Medved and Gill, it is experiences of extreme challenge that makes Israelis creative, progressive and determined to succeed, and will continue to do so in the future. 

“We are great as a country at staying focused on what matters, delivering results no matter what and adapting to any circumstances – especially when our backs are against the wall,” declares Gill. 

“It’s unfortunately been part of our environment for thousands of years that our risk of survival is simply part of the nature of our society,” says Medved. 

“As a result, we don’t stop creating. We don’t stop celebrating. We move forward with laughter through tears, and if they think they can stop us, they can’t.”

The post Forward Facing: What Does The Future Hold For Israeli High-Tech? appeared first on NoCamels.

But there are other equally innovative companies whose remit falls outside of these two categories yet have just as much potential impact on our lives. Here we take a look at 10 of them: 

Electric Air Travel

Eviation became the first company in the world to develop an electric plane with its nine-seater aircraft Alice, which it designed from scratch.

In 2022, Alice made a successful eight-minute flight at Moses Lake in Washington State, reaching an altitude of 3,500ft. The company beat the world’s aerospace giants in the race to develop an electric airplane, which in most cases were focusing their R&D on modifying existing petrol planes. 

The plane runs on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that only require 30 minutes to fully charge. It has a top speed of nearly 300 mph, a range of 288 miles and can fly for an hour at a time.

Eviation hopes to launch the plane for short-hop commercial flights in the US in 2027, with the aim of shaping future air travel for both passengers and cargo. Click here for more

Sustainable Sweetness 

A heavy impact on the environment makes globally beloved chocolate a costly affair for the planet. But Israeli startup Celleste Bio has found a way to change that with its lab-cultivated beans that create cocoa indistinguishable from the rest.

Celleste Bio uses cell culture technology to create the cocoa beans, combined with AI modeling to create optimal growing conditions. The bean cells are used to make the cocoa butter needed to manufacture chocolate, which has the identical chemical profile to the original.

It takes just seven days for the bean cells to mature in their bioreactor so that the butter can be harvested.  

And because the process involves just a couple of beans that can be repeatedly reproduced, the Misgav-based company says the lab-cultivated cocoa is grown without ever needing to cut down a single tree again. 

“We are the first in the world to have been able to produce chocolate-grade cocoa butter,” said Celleste CEO Michal Beressi Golomb. “We’re really excited about it.” Click here for more 

Hunter Drones 

In southern Israel, close to the city of Be’er Sheva, Robotican has been developing a drone that can snatch its target out of the sky and even named it after a bird of prey that grapples with its enemies mid-flight. 

The Goshawk fully autonomous drone is a counter-UAS (unmanned aircraft system) designed to detect, track and destroy other craft. It sits in a metal box-like device that Robotican has dubbed its “smart nest,” waiting for its opportunity to strike. 

Once the radar system spots that a hostile drone has infiltrated the no-fly zone, the nest opens and the Goshawk takes to the air, chases it and catches it in a net.  

If the hostile drone is too heavy or if the Goshawk senses other threats, the net is sent plummeting to the ground with its victim trapped inside. Otherwise, it bears it safely to earth unharmed.  

According to Robotican, the Goshawk has already intercepted more than 250 enemy drones in its use by the Israel Defense Forces. Click here for more

Beating Bots With AI  

Tel Aviv-based Cyabra calls itself a “social threat intelligence” company, whose mission is to fight misinformation and expose online risk to individuals, institutions or even governments. 

Cyabra says unlike other cybersecurity companies, it focuses on accounts aiming to cause harm in the social sphere, rather than hackers who pose “classic threats” to infrastructure or hardware.

The company says its unique AI software can root out even the most sophisticated threats, quickly identifying malicious actors using social media and other online spaces such as comment sections, to spread false information. 

Hundreds of different behavioral parameters are fed into the Cyabara algorithm, including an account’s online behavior, the accounts that it follows and engages with and those that follow and engage with it.  

The company’s three founders are all veterans of the Israeli high-tech sector and two served in information warfare units in the IDF.  

“They developed the technical tools and skills to be able to track and fight disinformation, and then they started to use those skills for good,” said Cyabra VP Marketing Rafi Mendelsohn. Click here for more

Taxis In The Sky

Israel’s notorious traffic jams have led two companies to develop drones that can carry passengers in urban areas, by passing the clogged roads below. 

Dronery and AIR were both part of the Israel National Drone Initiative (INDI), which five years ago began preparing for the regular use of unmanned flying vehicles to carry goods as well as passengers.  

Dronery’s Chinese-made, Israeli-adapted craft can carry 220 kg in cargo and fly as far as 30 km, while AIR’s homegrown AIR ONE craft can carry up to 250 kg and for a far greater distance of 160 km. 

Successful test flights last year involved taking off and landing in urban areas while carrying mannikins.  

“We believe that this whole technology is something that can really help solve urgent problems such as traffic and such as air pollution, and help us move things from place to place in a more efficient and safe way,” said Daniella Partem, who headed Israel’s drone project. Click here for more

To Catch A Hacker 

Pentera simulates attacks across an entire organization to pinpoint potentially exploitable gaps that make it vulnerable to potential hacking attempts.  

The company takes the perspective of the hackers in order to highlight the security gaps that would be most appealing to them, rather than just searching for any and all weaknesses. 

The system carries out the assessments automatically, without disrupting an organization’s ongoing operations, and focuses on two particular kinds of threats: exploitable gaps in the external attack surface – an organization’s digital footprint that is visible and accessible to anyone – and potential openings for malicious hackers using compromised credentials like passwords.

It identifies corporate passwords and other sensitive information that were leaked online either through the dark web or other resources used by hackers that make it vulnerable to cyberattacks. 

“Our goal is to find these exploitable gaps so that security teams can remediate the issues before our adversaries have a chance to use them,” said Pentera’s Senior Director of Product Management Ofer Yavelberg. Click here for more

Man Or Machine? 

Can you tell if you are talking to a computer or a real human? It’s not as easy as it might seem. 

A game created by AI21 Labs tests users’ skills in discerning the difference between bot and person with the aim of showing just how far artificial intelligence has advanced. And it even fooled its creator Amos Meron.

The premise is based on what Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, in the 1950s called the Imitation Game – a time when machines could imitate man so well that it would be difficult to tell from one the other. The test later came to be known as the Turing Test in his honor. 

Using an array of large language models (LLMs), including ChatGPT4 and AI21’s own Jurassic-2, the test makes each bot into its own character, with a name, location and date of birth, that has knowledge of recent events and even the current weather.

The test takes two minutes, which Meron calls the sweet spot as anything shorter is not enough interaction but a longer conversation could be boring or expose the flaws in the bot. Click here for more 

Cybersecurity In The Actual Clouds 

Cyviation says it is the first-ever company to focus on cybersecurity for aircraft, with a software solution that provides multiple levels of safety without having to make changes to the planes themselves.  

The four-layer system is designed to reduce the risk of cyber attack, help manage such attacks should they occur and support airlines as they implement new and upcoming international regulations regarding cybersecurity in aviation. 

The first layer is a scan of an entire craft to create a virtual “twin” that allows the company to analyze any vulnerabilities on different severity levels.

The second is cybersecurity training for pilots, which the company says had not previously existed at all.  Similarly, the third layer of protection is security information and event management (SIEM), which trains pilots and crew in how to act should a cybersecurity incident actually occur.  

 The final layer is a set of patented devices that can detect any attack in real time, allowing the pilot to react swiftly to the threat. 

“When we look at cyber training, we don’t look at how you protect your password, we look at how you react when there is an event on the aircraft,” said Cyvation CEO Avi Tenenbaum. Click here for more 

Watchers Over The Waves

Drawing on decades of professional experience, two Israeli technology veterans created a new startup to combat cyberattacks on some of the country’s key institutions, including national water company Mekorot. 

IXDen’s founders and co-CEOs Zion Harel and Dr. Leonid Cooperman devised entirely new software from scratch with a focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning. 

Collecting information from sensors placed around the company’s infrastructure, IXDen uses those algorithms to analyze millions of pieces of data every day in order to spot any anomalies that point to suspicious activity or even to just identify a fault in the system. 

The water company has around 3,000 sites in 10 regions across Israel, including 700 water pumping stations and 20 desalination sites. The IXDen platform is active at each location, analyzing 300 million pieces of data on a daily basis and feeding it all into one centralized system. Click here for more

The post Impact Innovation: Israeli Startups That Could Shape Our Future appeared first on NoCamels.

Israeli innovation – from clean energy to agriculture technology – has made massive contributions to the world’s efforts to  deal with this phenomenon, and NoCamels takes a look at some of the companies that have the potential to make a real difference. 

Making A Splash With Clean Energy  

Eco Wave Power has become a worldwide phenomenon with its ability to transform water into electricity by using the power of waves. 

The company’s unique floating devices are placed in the water, where they rise and fall with the movement of waves, generating energy that is delivered to power stations on land. The power stations then convert that energy into pressure used to spin a generator, thereby producing electricity.

The system is already generating electricity in China, Israel, South America and the US, and the company lately signed an agreement to bring its technology to Taiwan.  

“It seems like slowly but surely the world understands the great potential and undeniable resource, which is wave energy,” said EWP co-founder and CEO Inna Braverman. 

Click here for more

Air Con Without Electricity 

With no wires, no plugs and no greenhouse gasses, Green Kinko has developed the world’s first outdoors air conditioning unit to use liquid nitrogen as a power source. 

The Kensho unit quietly emits nitrogen gas at a temperature of -10C (14F) to cool the surrounding area, providing needed relief as the world gets hotter, without contributing to the problem. It even has the option of adding an insect repellent, to keep the mosquitoes at bay while enjoying a cool breeze in the garden. 

Liquid nitrogen is already in wide use as a coolant in multiple industries, and the Shefayim based company came up with the idea of using it to cool the air while working on an unrelated project with cryogenic (very low temperature) liquids.

“We have invented a new generation of air conditioner,” said Green Kinko CEO Tal Leizer. “The technology is unique and amazing.” 

Click here for more

Taking The Pollution Out Of Plastic  

UBQ Materials says its thermoplastic material, made from unsorted household waste, is considered to have the lowest carbon footprint in the world.

Each year, the world produces more than two billion tons of household waste, most of which is unrecyclable and sent to landfills, for incineration or dumped in open natural spaces. 

The company’s patented technology breaks down the waste into its most basic molecular components and assembles them into the new raw material. It can absorb all kinds of non-sorted household waste, including organic garbage, plastics, papers, cardboard and even dirty diapers.  

The process has zero emissions and uses little energy and no water, giving it a carbon footprint 15-20 times lower than that of alternative resins. 

“By converting solid waste into a sustainable circular thermoplastic that acts as a plastic substitute, we can stop covering up our waste and start transforming and reusing it in safe, affordable and beneficial ways,” said UBQ International Advisory Board member and former White House climate expert Gina McCarthy.  

Click here for more 

A Breath Of Fresh Air  

Using data from thousands of locations worldwide, BreezoMeter’s app gives users real time information on the air quality in their immediate vicinity – even as they move about. 

The startup takes data from government air monitoring stations – using more than 50,000 sources globally, including satellite, weather and traffic data. Its AI and machine-learning algorithms are then able to track levels of pollution street by street and hour by hour, and are accurate down to five meters (16 feet). 

Its Cleanest Route feature directs pedestrians and cyclists to the least polluted route for them, giving the options a score from 0 to 100, based on air pollution, pollen and smoke in the atmosphere. It also works for motorists, who are actually exposed to higher levels of pollution as they sit behind the wheel.

And so effective is the app, the startup was bought by Google in 2022, in a deal reported to have been worth more than $200 million.

“Our mission is to improve the health and safety of millions of people by reducing their exposure to environmental hazards,” said Tamir Kessel, BreezoMeter’s head of Business Development and Strategy.  

Click here for more 

Keeping Urban Landscapes Green And Shady

Trees are one of the biggest casualties of human encroachment into natural landscapes. But one company has found a way to allow trees and technology to coexist – to the benefit of urban dwellers and nature. 

TreeTube’s proprietary tubes are massive, soil-filled cylinders made from inert plastic material (one quarter of which is recycled), which are fitted together like blocks and placed under roads and walkways alongside the infrastructure of modern life.

The tubes allow the roots of the trees to grow in non-compacted soil, unlike the earth needed for pipes and cables, giving them unfettered access to the ground, air and water they need to survive.

The company works primarily with local authorities and landscape architects, and installing the tubes is a quick and efficient process that takes just several hours. The tubes are already successfully in use in Israel, the Netherlands and Estonia, providing shade, keeping down urban temperatures and even reducing carbon emissions in the air. 

“Trees are fantastic filters,” said TreeTube co-founder Jonathan Antebi. “They are one of the utilities that have an actual return on investment to a municipality. 

Click here for more

Don’t Worry, Bee Happy  

As the world’s beekeepers warn of the dangers of rapidly disappearing colonies of the honeymakers, Israeli company BeeHero has created a way of monitoring their hives to ensure that the insects inside are happy and healthy. 

Tiny in-hive sensors (about the size of an AirPods case) act as eyes and ears for beekeepers who rely on the bees for honey and pollination of crops. 

They gather a wide range of data from inside the hives, including sound, light, temperature, vibration and humidity. The data is analyzed by the AI platform, which alerts keepers to potential issues that require their attention.

The company says its solution is in use in more than 200,000 hives worldwide and in 2022 alone saved the lives of a quarter of a billion bees, while its precision pollination program tells farmers just how many bees they need and where they need them. 

“I think what is very, very unique about BeeHero is the understanding… that there must be a way to apply Big Data, algorithms, machine learning and artificial intelligence into a legacy industry,” said BeeHero’s VP Global Strategy Eytan Schwartz. 

Click here for more

Meat With Mercy 

The world’s first steak created without killing an animal was the work of Israeli startup Aleph Farms, which grows cultured cow cells in the lab to create meals to satisfy any carnivore. 

Scientists have warned of the environmental impact of the world’s high demand for meat, which requires massive swathes of land for grazing, which not only is resource heavy but also drives up production costs. 

Aleph Farms says its bio-engineering platform, developed in conjunction with the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, means it can grow steak in the lab without the need for vast tracts of land, water, feed and other resources to raise cattle. Nor does Aleph require antibiotics, whose use in animal feed has exacerbated the growing phenomenon of antibiotic resistance.

The startup uses a combination of six unique, innovative technologies, including the bioreactors in which the cells are grown, which also allow it to drop the production costs of the meat.  

“We’re shaping the future of the meat industry — literally,” said Aleph Farms co-founder and CEO Didier Toubia. 

Click here for more

The post Israeli GreenTech Making Our World A Happier, Healthier Place  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.

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.

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.

But an AI platform created by Israeli startup QuantHealth is easing the cost and the pressure by running clinical trial simulations on drugs under development, predicting their risks and outcomes and allowing thousands of simulated trials to take place at once. 

The platform simulates both drugs and patients, “virtually exposing virtual patients to virtual treatments,” Quanthealth co-founder and chief strategy and operations officer Arnon Horev tells NoCamels. 

Crucially, Horev explains, the platform allows pharmaceutical companies to reduce their spending on clinical trials, which he says comes collectively to about $100 billion annually.  

“This is the most important value for pharma companies,” he says, although for QuantHealth there are also other patient-related considerations. 

“We want to help them to be more successful, but also to bring drugs to the market faster, to bring patients additional treatments that they wouldn’t get in the current model.” 

The platform takes a matter of weeks to construct a trial for each different drug, as compared to the months or even years required for trials involving patients. 

It uses electronic medical records for 350 million patients (all anonymous) and data on different drugs – obtained through specialist companies – and simulates how each patient with his or her own particular health history would react to a certain drug in development. 

“We are representing any patient and any treatment,” Horev says. “We’re measuring how those patients would respond to that treatment.“

And by altering the variables for the trial, such as patient age or medical background, the platform can predict the most successful outcome for a new drug. 

The platform, Horev explains, uses very deep and complex technology, which he says is the “most advanced in the industry.” What is more, he claims, it yields an accuracy rate of 85 percent when it comes to predicting whether a drug will succeed or fail.  

The platform focuses on three main categories, according to Horev: the patient population, with its wide range of variables; the treatments themselves, where it can measure multiple parameters, such as dosage, frequency and method of administration; and key performance indicators (KPIs) – determining the outcomes that will support the findings of a clinical trial.  

To prove the model’s effectiveness, the company has already run scores of simulations on different therapies, including blind tests for drugs on the market as well as simulations for drugs whose clinical trial results had not yet been released. 

The results were represented to the relevant pharmaceutical companies, showing that 85 percent accuracy.  

“This is a great sales tool for us, as you can imagine,” Horev says, “but it’s also a way to test ourselves.” 

The technology, he says, is applicable for every kind of therapy, but QuantHealth began with a focus on oncology, moving into additional areas such as autoimmune, cardiometabolic and respiratory diseases. 

Without divulging names, Horev says they are currently working with some of the biggest names in the pharmaceutical industry. 

“We are seeing a lot of need for this,” he says.

And Horev says the drugs they are working on include “very innovative” novel treatments that are still in development and “serious blockbusters” that will soon be extremely important to the companies that created them.  

Horev set up QuantHealth four years ago with his partner and company CEO Orr Inbar, both veterans of the pharmaceutical industry who understood the scale of the challenge of making clinical trials more effective. 

“We know the problems of the industry very, very well,” he says. “This problem is the biggest and the most untapped in the industry, by far.” 

The main challenge lay in the fact that there are multiple different parameters that influence a patient’s response to a new therapy, Horev explains, and until QuantHealth devised its AI platform, this had seemed insurmountable. 

“We bought a very different approach to this, in order to solve it,” says Horev, primarily crediting Inbar’s skills as a data scientist. 

He says that there are other companies working to resolve the issue of clinical trials, but repeats that QuantHealth is the most advanced in terms of technology, infrastructure and evidence gathered to support the efficacy of the platform.  

“It’s a new category that we started,” he says. “We are the trailblazers.”

And it seems as though many of the biggest investors in the industry agree, with the company completing a Series A funding round of $17 million last year.

The funding round was led by Israel’s largest VC Pitango and Germany’s Bertelsmann Investments, together with Nina Capital of Spain and Shoni Health Ventures, also from Israel. Irish-American multinational Accenture, which has two offices in Israel, also invested, bringing QuantHealth’s total funding to $21 million.

It also received several grants, among them funds from the Israel Innovation Authority, the branch of government dedicated to advancing the local high-tech industry. 

The company expects an increasing number of clinical trials to be partially conducted using computational models within the next decade, and is preparing for the day when there is no human patient participation at all. 

“The technology is not there yet,’ Horev says. “But it will be.” 

The post AI Platform Is Making Drug Trials Faster And Cheaper appeared first on NoCamels.

The first inoculations against the coronavirus became available at the tail end of 2020, offering hope across the planet after more than a year of high infection rates and terrible death tolls from the disease, as well as months of lockdowns and restricted social interactions that exacted a high price from people, businesses and entire economies. 

Some critics, however, expressed concern at the speed with which the vaccines were developed, arguing that there was insufficient exploration of the potential side effects – both immediately and later down the road. 

Now, researchers at Tel Aviv University (TAU) have come up with an answer to at least some of the criticism, having developed the world’s first way of determining the safety of vaccines through smart sensors that use impartial physiological parameters to measure a person’s reaction to the dose. 

The researchers say that while clinical trials for vaccines – including those against COVID-19 – do include safety tests, they rely on subjective reporting from participants, and not objective data gathered by professionals that offers clear and unambiguous insights. 

“In most methods used today, clinical trials designed to evaluate the safety of a new drug or vaccine employ self-report questionnaires, asking participants how they feel before and after receiving the treatment,” explained Dr. Yftach Gepner of the Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine at TAU’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine. 

Gepner led the study along with Dr. Dan Yamin and Dr. Erez Shmueli from TAU’s Fleischman Faculty of Engineering. 

Asking patients to describe how they feel after receiving the vaccine is “clearly a totally subjective report,” Gepner said, stressing again that even when Pfizer and Moderna developed their COVID vaccines, they used self-reports to prove their safety. 

In their study, the researchers showed that smart sensors could be used to test the safety of new vaccines, working with Israeli participants who were receiving their second dose of an inoculation against COVID. 

The volunteers were equipped with innovative chest sensors developed by the Petah Tikva-based company Biobeat, which measured their physiological reactions over a period beginning one day before they received the vaccine and lasting until three days after it was administered. 

Biobeat has approval from the Food and Drug Administration in the US and received CE (Conformité Européenne) certification in Europe for its devices worn on the chest – which were used in the study – and the wrist. The two wearable devices were also recently adopted as a remote patient monitoring service and integrated into the Current Health home care platform offered by Best Buy Health in the US.

The sensors placed on a subject’s chest monitored 13 different physiological parameters, including heart and breathing rates, blood oxygen levels, temperature and blood pressure.

The participants were also asked to provide their own subjective report of how they felt during this period. 

The study, which was recently featured in the journal Communications Medicine, found a “significant” discrepancy between the side effects the volunteers said they experienced and the side effects that were actually objectively measured. 

According to the researchers, almost all the objective measures identified notable changes in the physiological parameters after vaccination, even among the subjects who had reported experiencing no reaction at all.

The study also found that while the side effects did escalate during the first 48 hours after vaccination, the physiological parameters being tested then returned to the levels measured before vaccination was received. 

Responding to findings of the study, Gepner said there was now no reason to rely on self-reporting or simply wait for the appearance of rare side effects such as myocarditis. (According to Yale Medical School, this inflammation of the heart muscle was experienced by 35.9 per 100,000 people who had received a second dose of a mRNA vaccine against COVID-19.)  

Continual monitoring at home, he explained, resolved this issue – simply, conveniently, cheaply and accurately. 

“The message from our study is clear,” Gepner said. “The time has come to conduct continual, sensitive, objective testing of the safety of new vaccines and therapies.” 

The post Smart Sensors Take The Sting Out Of Studying Vaccine Safety 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Just four months after announcing a partnership with the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi to collaborate on applied research, IAI has announced similar agreements with Carnegie Mellon University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All three schools are known for their technological research and development. 

IAI’s Executive VP Technologies, R&D and Innovation Eytan Eshel tells NoCamels that the collaborations are in no small part down to the company’s understanding of the importance of automation and AI in future technologies and the need for a better vision of where these sectors are headed.  

“With AI technology, most of the time you’re not able to predict exactly what the next step will be,” Eshel says. 

“Putting our skills and researchers together with what they are doing there, I think will give us a better understanding of this domain.” 

He says that automation and AI go hand in hand and therefore the research projects will focus on both. 

“We see the future will be unmanned systems, and when you involve autonomous systems, you also need to involve AI algorithms and AI capabilities,” he explains. 

“Trying to get exposure for a very basic question: how do you create trust in the system and the externability of the algorithms? This is a very broad question that many institutes in the world are dealing with.”  

IAI specializes in technology for all three branches of the Israeli military – air, land and sea – as well as homeland security and space. It is a major manufacturer of Israel’s defensive capabilities, most notably the Iron Dome and Arrow air defense systems, as well as the producer of the country’s range of ballistic missiles. 

But Eshel is adamant that the work being done during these collaborations is strictly civilian. 

“Twenty-five to 30 percent of our business is purely civilian,” he says. This includes maintenance and support services for commercial aviation fleets and the production of non-military aircraft such as cargo planes and private jets. 

Eshel explains that IAI already has a strong tradition of fostering civilian R&D, entrepreneurship and innovation inside Israel, with close ties to the nation’s high-tech and academic communities. 

“We spend almost $400 million [per year] on purely R&D,” he says. “We have this budget in order to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship. We established an Innovation Center in Tel Aviv in the heart of the startup ecosystem, with very tight links to Israeli academia.” 

This close relationship includes the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The Tel Aviv Innovation Center also issues a call every four months for innovation proposals, both from startups and IAI personnel, and helps bring viable ideas to the proof of concept stage and for some even create a business plan. 

From there, Eshel explains, it was a natural step to open IAI up beyond the worlds of Israeli academia and high-tech, including exploring relationships abroad. 

“We are sharing research and data trying to create something unique,” he says. “We bring our data and skills and people to collaborate with their teams.” 

The company recently also opened a visitors center in Washington, DC, which Eshel says could become a hub for US startups. This would provide those young companies with the benefits of collaborating with a very advanced high-tech company that can challenge them, mentor them and help them to develop their ideas. 

It would also give IAI more exposure to the DNA of American startups, he says. 

“I think it’s a win-win solution.”  

The post Israel’s Top Defense Firm Looks To The East – And The West – For Innovation appeared first on NoCamels.

And Israeli startup EyeKnow AI is making foresight possible for the most vulnerable in society, with a prevention-focused safety platform that uses artificial intelligence to predict hazardous and violent incidents such as falls, slips and physical violence, in hospitals and care facilities.  

“Our goal is to provide an alert as early as possible via a mobile app, so they can go and intervene,” EyeKnow AI founder and CEO Tomer Sagi tells NoCamels. 

Rather than using security cameras to review a scene and understand what happened after an incident has occurred, EyeKnow issues an alert for a potential crisis before it happens, or at the very least while it is actually occurring.   

The AI platform monitors video feeds and picks up on indicators of safety hazards and violence, even integrating with any kind of store-bought camera. By detecting aggressive movements and potential threats and taking note of passage obstructions, EyeKnow’s AI is able to raise an alert before a situation spirals into a full crisis. 

Today, four years after its creation, the company’s main focus is on hospitals, where they seek to prevent violence both of patients towards staff and towards themselves, as well as other common safety hazards like slips and falls.  

According to the World Health Organization, health workers worldwide face a high risk of violence, with up to 38 percent of them experiencing physical attack at some stage of their careers. The WHO also says that patient falls are the most frequent adverse events in hospitals, happening at a rate of 3 to 5 per every 1,000 bed days, and one third of those incidents result in injury.  

To help prevent such violent incidents, EyeKnow installs a server that connects to an institution’s security cameras. They can then link up the staff to the system with the use of a mobile app or on big screens in a central security room. 

Staff and security professionals receive real-time notifications, alerting them to the location of a possible incident so that they can take preventive measures or deescalate a situation using their own procedures. 

“Every hospital has their own procedures and processes to tackle violence and prevent violence,” Sagi explains.

He stresses that a security camera on its own can only do so much. While it can be helpful to have a camera installed to oversee a childcare provider or an elderly parent with a caregiver, that camera itself cannot prevent an incident or stop one once it has begun. 

The idea for the company came to Sagi in 2019, when he began to be alarmed at the rate of abuse in daycare facilities. Indeed, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) cites daycare centers as one of the main settings for violence towards children.  

“It started from there,” Sagi says of the initial idea for what would become EyeKnow AI. “I wanted to build a system that can detect violence in daycares, to alert somebody so they can prevent it and stop it.” 

He also says that the system could be used for monitoring care for the elderly, both in nursing facilities and in private homes.  

But despite some traction in care facilities, a significant pull came from an unexpected market — the healthcare industry. EyeKnow AI was approached by an Israeli psychiatric hospital that was in search of a system to combat violence against their staff and other patients, as well as self harm among patients.  

The company was able to work with the hospital to determine early signs of aggression before they became a threat. 

The new design partnership also brought the opportunity to address additional issues faced by mental health care facilities.

With this new interest in the healthcare industry, in 2022, EyeKnow won first place in a competition jointly hosted by Henry Ford Health, a leading Michigan-based health organization, and Israeli NGO  Startup Nation Central. EyeKnow was chosen from a roster of some 40 early-stage Israeli startups creating solutions for safety and efficient care in nursing.   

“It was a surprise to me, to be honest,” says Sagi of the competition. “I knew that violence was a problem. I didn’t know it was a big problem.”  

And a year later, EyeKnow signed a contract with Henry Ford Health, which Sagi says is a relatively fast timeline in the health industry.  

While Sagi says there is always competition in the field, EyeKnow’s rivals are more in the broader sense. There are firms such as HP and other video analytics companies that do offer some violence detection capabilities, but EyeKnow says it is unique in that it is predictive technology solely focused on safety.  

“We’re looking at safety as a platform. We’re looking at identifying early signs,” Sagi says. 

With design partners in health facilities in both the US and Israel, and funding from a combination of angel investors and accelerators including Tel Aviv-based Techstars, EyeKNow AI is now eager to move forward. 

Sagi says that the platform does take time to be approved by care organizations as it provides capabilities that weren’t possible until recently, and involves multiple departments. 

But EyeKnow is hopeful that once approved, it is able to offer safety to many of the most vulnerable people in society.  

The post AI Platform Stops Violence Against The Vulnerable Before It Begins appeared first on NoCamels.

Shield, a global regulatory technology company headquartered in Ramat Gan, is currently revolutionizing the way large financial organizations monitor and analyze their internal communication channels. 

The Ramat Gan-based firm has developed an artificial intelligence-powered platform designed to detect and prevent issues such as misconduct and market manipulation through real-time monitoring and sophisticated analysis of employee communications, ensuring they remain compliant with stringent regulatory standards within the financial services industry. 

“Information breaches can lead to very complex internal and external issues for companies,’ Iftach Drori, VP Marketing for Shield, tells NoCamels.

According to financial compliance specialists Fenergo, in 2023 alone, companies worldwide were fined a total of $6.6 billion for failing to comply with standards on anti-money laundering; client verification; environmental, social and governance; sanctions and customer due diligence.

Shield’s platform leverages advanced AI to provide comprehensive communication compliance and surveillance, capturing and analyzing data from more than 100 sources, enabling proactive risk management, efficient eDiscovery and robust supervision.

The platform’s multilayered AI and semantic analysis offer transparent, contextual insights, significantly reducing false positives and ensuring regulatory compliance across various communication channels.

By analyzing the data it receives, Shield’s system lets compliance teams meet their legal obligation to fully investigate potential breaches. 

“This capability is crucial in an era where organizations face considerable fines for inadequate monitoring of business communications,” says Drori. 

“During the last couple of years, financial organizations faced over $2.5 billion in fines for not monitoring business communications such as WhatsApp,” he says. 

The company uses GenerativeAI (or GenAI), a subset of artificial intelligence focused on creating content, analysis and solutions beyond its explicit programming. GenAI can also understand, learn and generate actions based on complex patterns and data. 

Shield has integrated GenAI into its operational system in several ways, helping companies to better understand the context of personnel communications. 

This means that the platform can discern nuances in language, sentiment and intent, which is crucial for detecting potential misconduct or compliance breaches that may not be evident through a simple keyword match.

Shield’s algorithm analyzes and interprets data from communications across multiple channels, including emails, instant messaging and voice calls. 

“Such a comprehensive approach allows adherence to the industry standards on the part of compliance officers,” Drori explains. 

He says that based on historical data and ongoing communication patterns, Shield’s AI platform can predict future patterns of employee behavior or other risks.  

“This approach not only helps our customers stay ahead of regulatory compliance requirements and potential threats, but also turns this crucial data into a revenue engine,” he explains. 

Furthermore, integrating GenAI allows Shield to continually improve its surveillance models, adapting more swiftly to new communication technologies and evolving regulatory landscapes, thereby ensuring that its monitoring capabilities are always up to date. 

Drori explains that this comprehensive oversight and accuracy sets the company apart from its competitors. 

“By monitoring and analyzing over 100 million daily interactions in one organization, we empower large financial institutions to manage risks associated with communication channels,” he says.

Shield says its multi-layered approach not only enhances adaptability but also seamlessly integrates AI advancements, reinforcing its position as a leader in safeguarding financial integrity through advanced technological solutions.

“Our responsible AI system helps ultimately build trust in AI-driven solutions within the financial sector,” he adds.

The platform can be integrated in existing data security systems, providing real-time alerts that are essential for regulatory compliance, IT and surveillance teams. 

‘This adaptability has brought about many of Shield’s customers today”,” Drori says. 

Founded in 2018, Shield was self-sustaining for the first three years and only in 2022 was bolstered by $35 million in Series A and B funding rounds. 

“Startup life is a rollercoaster,” Drori says, explaining that Shield now has multiple big name clients, although divulging them is not possible due to privacy policies.  

He says that the reliability of the Shield algorithm and its successful operation have not only won the company its own recognition, but also helped build confidence within the financial sector when it comes to AI-driven solutions.

Since its inception, Shield says the platform has gathered recognition for its approach and positive results in the market. Drori says he cannot divulge the names of the company’s clients due to regulatory restrictions but asserts that many are global household names. 

He explains that Shield is hoping to further innovate by expanding its AI capabilities and enhancing its surveillance models. 

“By staying at the forefront of technological advancements, Shield wants to fortify its position as a trusted partner for financial organizations worldwide,” Drori says. 

The company also remains steadfast in its mission to uphold integrity, trust and compliance through responsible and innovative AI development.

“Shield was given this name on day one, and I think Shiran [Weitzman, the company’s CEO] picked the name because it felt as if we were shielding our clients from safety issues – and that is exactly what we are aiming to do,”’” Drori says. 

The post AI Monitoring Helps Financial Firms Stay Law Abiding appeared first on NoCamels.

“The advancement in AI and GenerativeAI increased the chances of creating new and innovative ideas that weren’t available in the past,” Lerer tells NoCamels. 

“All of a sudden, every company went up a notch,” he says, regarding the innovative potential of the technology. 

“Now let’s create something that you couldn’t create in the past.”  

Indeed, the Israeli high-tech ecosystem has embraced the possibilities that AI brings. A recent report by the government shows that Israel, with its population of just 9.5 million, is ranked in the top 10 in the world for AI development, along with such countries as the US, UK and China. 

There are 2,200 AI-based companies in Israel, Jerusalem says, and many of them are in healthcare. 

Lerer is the managing partner of medtech fund Shoni Health Ventures, which focuses on early-stage digital health and medical device startups. And he cites two medtech companies in the fund’s portfolio that use AI as the basis of their innovation. 

The first is FeelBetter, which uses AI to review a patient’s medical records and their complex medication regimen to determine whether they are on the right courses of treatment in order to improve their preventative care. 

The AI can detect which of the patients are on the verge of serious deterioration and hospitalization that could be prevented by a change in medication alone. 

“It’s an intervention that is very easy and actionable,” he explains. “And it’s working, which is amazing to see.” 

The second is QuantHealth, whose “really unique” algorithm uses big data to maximize the chances of success for studies of new medications. 

The AI adapts the parameters for clinical trials, such as age, dosing and dosage, and runs simulations of those new boundaries to identify the factors that would most improve the possibilities of a positive outcome. 

“Millions of dollars are spent on clinical studies, and 50 percent of them fail,” Lerer says. “Now a pharma company could run the clinical study before it starts, on the computer.”  

Lerer himself has had a finger on the pulse of the medtech sector for decades, while Shoni has close ties with Sheba Medical Center, the largest hospital in the entire Middle East and ranked as one of the top 10 hospitals in the world. 

The fund even has a base at the ARC Center, Sheba’s on-site innovation hub, which grants it an insight into the demands and needs of the medical profession.  

“[It’s] a strategic collaboration with Sheba,” Lerer says. “My office is within the hospital right to really create a real impact and understand the field well, to see what would move the needle.” 

He says clinicians at Sheba also often approach him “consult and brainstorm” on their own nascent ideas for medical innovation, which aside from encouraging innovation by experts in their field, also helps him to understand the unmet needs in the sector and whether they are commercially viable. 

And ideas from inside the profession are just one avenue for medtech innovation, Lerer says, explaining that the sector has been inspired by other areas of the high-tech ecosystem, such as defense. 

He gives as an example the world-famous camera pill created by Israeli company Given Imaging, that aids in the diagnosis of gastrointestinal disease. The tiny camera, he explains, was originally developed as a military tool, but was adapted as a medtech that is swallowed in order to visualize the esophagus, colon and areas of the small intestine without an invasive procedure. 

Even the present war with Hamas in Gaza, with all its terrible implications, will likely be a breeding ground for innovation, according to Lerer. 

“Taking technologies and ideas that might have originated in the army and now transitioning those to healthcare is something that I would expect to happen,” he says.  

“There are people coming back from the army all of a sudden thinking about creative ideas, meeting new co-founders, interacting with people that they’ve never interacted with.” 

There are more than 1,600 healthcare companies in Israel today, Lerer points out, and it is the number one sector in terms of startups. (He does qualify that this does not mean it draws the most investment, as that top spot goes to cybersecurity.) 

“I think there’s a bright future for healthcare in general in Israel,” he says, adding that Israeli medtech companies are raising money both domestically and internationally, and drawing in global clients.  

“Even though the current situation is not is not easy, we will overcome – like we’ve done in the past.” 

The post Medtech Veteran Sees ‘Bright Future’ For Sector In Israel appeared first on NoCamels.

Overheating is a familiar problem to many people who own a computer, and it is even more prevalent and far more consequential in the data centers that hold these sensitive servers, which we rely on for every aspect of our modern, interconnected world. 

And Sderot-based startup Zutacore has come up with a cost-effective, sustainable way to ensure that the servers do not overheat and fall or are damaged by traditional water-based solutions to this problem. 

Inside a data center, computer systems are organized using racks resembling large shelves holding many powerful servers. They are connected with cables so that they can share information and work together efficiently. 

But the servers overheat when they experience a phenomenon called heat flux – when the chips cannot get rid of heat as quickly as they create it. This is a long-standing issue in computers, and as they get bigger and more powerful, the ability to cool them becomes more challenging. 

Zutacore has developed a method of removing the heat from the computer processors with a unique two-phase cooling system. 

The technology comes as a box-shaped device attached directly to the cold plate of each individual server. The cold plate is a standard feature for processors consisting of a metal sheet placed on servers to help regulate their temperature using water, similar to a car radiator.  

But unlike these traditional cooling solutions that are reliant on water, Zutacore’s HyperCool system uses a dielectric liquid that does not conduct electricity, making it safe to use directly on electronic components. 

Emanating from the HyperCool box are two pipes – one blue and one red – that are attached to each individual server. 

The dielectric liquid enters from a storage unit on the side of the box through the blue pipe, where it absorbs the heat from the server to which it is connected. 

The liquid boils and turns into vapor, which draws the heat out from the processor. This vapor is taken through the red pipe out of the data center via an external port, just as an air conditioning unit removes excess water to the outside. 

“You have a layer of liquid that when heat comes up from the chip, boils that liquid. Vapor comes out with the heat, and more liquid comes in as the vapor leaves,” Zutacore Executive VP Product and Innovation Shahar Belkin tells NoCamels. 

He explains that this cools the chip by evenly and consistently removing heat through the boiling process. 

“If you don’t have the liquid, the system will burn right through the metal,” he says. 

As long as the liquid is boiling and leaving as vapor, it doesn’t matter how large the server is, Belkin explains. It will always do the same thing – turn that liquid into vapor and take the heat away.

The change from liquid to vapor is known as phase-change cooling, and is significantly more effective than single-phase liquid cooling systems that rely on water. This allows for more processors to be stored in closer proximity without any risk of leaks damaging the electronics.

“Water and electronics don’t mix well together,” Belkin explains. “One drop, one mistake by one employee, or one small scratch in a tube will create a leak that will kill a server.” 

He says that just one rack in a data center can have up to $3 million worth of computer equipment, with a traditional water-based cold plate, one minor leak can destroy an entire rack. 

But with the non-conductive fluid used by HyperCool, he says, “you can take a bucket of this liquid and pour it on the surface [of the server] and nothing would happen.” 

The Zutacore solution also allows data centers to fill racks that are currently only at 25 percent capacity due to the need for extra space for cooling. Placing servers closer together increases data transfer speed and saves a considerable amount of money.

“The big saving is on the network between the servers,” Belkin explains. “If you have for example 100 servers but they are distributed in 50 racks because you don’t have enough cooling, there’s a lot of networking to be done between [them], which is very expensive.” 

It also affects the speed of the cluster of servers because the information moves between them and using long cables or fiber optics means a reduction in speed of operations by 20 or even 30 percent. 

Furthermore, a more efficient cooling system means less energy consumption. The US Department of Energy says data centers can reduce this energy consumption by 20 to 40 percent, simply by implementing energy-efficient cooling strategies. 

Co-founded in 2016 by CTO Nahshon Eadelson and CEO Erez Freibach, Zutacore is now supplying its cooling solution to leading data centers across the world including those of industry giants such as Dell, Equinix and Intel. 

Belkin praises Eadelson, who developed the technology based on hands-on experience and personal vision rather than any formal education. 

“Nahshon Eadelson created the idea of Zutacore,” Belkin says. “He didn’t even finish high school and today he is sitting down with thermodynamics professors – and he can teach them. His ability to see the physics in his brain [means] he actually solved a problem where people before him did not succeed.” 

The processors using HyperCool have been retrofitted, a process that Zutacore says causes no delay in their functioning or threat to the internal operations of the chips. 

The companies carried out extremely lengthy and rigorous testing processes to ensure that the solution was safe for the chips and cooled to the levels that Zutacore claims. 

“Equinix is the largest data center provider in the world,” Belkin says. 

“They have more than 200 data centers around the world. They installed our first systems in 2019 and since then, they’ve been testing them. Only last year, they gave us a green light to start implementing in 100 of their data centers.” 

With this global expansion, Zutacore now globally has offices in California, Taiwan, India, the Netherlands and South Korea.

And the company is now expanding its scope with a partnership with one of the world’s major manufacturers of servers, the Taiwan-based Wiwynn Company. 

The strategic partnership means that Wiwynn both invested in Zutacore and integrated the HyperCool technology into the production of its servers, so that they come with the solution already installed. 

“The servers will come out of the factory with Zutacore inside, so the data centers only have to connect it to a rack or a system, and [it] will be up and running, Belkin says.

Leading industrial firm Mitsubishi Heavy Industry also invested in Zutacore in September of last year, planning a partnership that will turn the heat removed by HyperCool into a source of renewable energy, further reducing the ecoystem’s environmental impact. 

Zutacore has a strong presence in southern Israel, and its technology lab is based in Sderot, in the area close to the Gaza border that was targeted in the mass Hamas terror attack on October 7 that killed 1,200 people and saw more than 240 dragged into Gaza as hostages. 

But the company plans to keep expanding, aiming by the end of the year to have tripled the number of staff since the start of the war, while still keeping its base in the south. 

The majority of Zutacore’s personnel are from the Western Negev and Gaza border area. Some had to be evacuated from their homes at the beginning of the war.

The building housing the lab was also hit by an RPG fired by a Hamas terrorist during the attack, but fortunately the entire Zutacore team is safe and the lab was undamaged. 

But Belkin says the war has not slowed the company’s momentum or its ability to supply HyperCool to all of its customers without delay.

“Worldwide, nobody felt there was no shortage of Zutacore supply,” he says. 

“We continued working like nothing had happened. From our point of view, the company showed it can survive and its resilience.”

The post Cooling System Keeps Vital Servers Running Smoothly & Sustainably appeared first on NoCamels.

One Israeli startup is so convinced of the potential of resilin, which is found in insects, that it has begun to engineer it in the lab and is now preparing to mass produce it. 

“Resilin is an elastic biomaterial and the world’s most resilient material in nature,” Lena Ishkov, Product and Tech Project Manager at Smart Resilin, tells NoCamels. 

Ishkov explains that today, the market for elastomers (natural or artificial materials that can return to their original state after being stretched) is dominated by synthetic materials that are “not close” to being biodegradable or environmentally friendly. 

“So we come in with our resilin,” she says. “What we are trying to solve is to replace current elastomers with natural elastomers like ours. That’s our mission.”  

Resilin is found in many insects, including dragonflies and cicadas, primarily in the joints between their bodies and their wings, and according to Smart Resilin CEO Gilad Lando, is the reason why they can jump so high and take flight so well and so often. 

“Imagine how efficient this joint is so that it doesn’t break,” Lando tells NoCamels. 

He says that there have been multiple attempts to mass produce resilin for commercial purposes, but until Smart Resilin developed its own proprietary method, no method had been successful. 

“Big companies have tried to produce it,” Lando says, “but we do it in a very smart way.” 

The company’s method – developed by its chief technology officer and founder, Prof. Oded Shoseyov of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem – is to isolate the DNA in a fly that is responsible for the production of resilin. This DNA is then infused into a bacteria, water and sugar are added, and the entire compound placed into a reactor to reproduce, in a way that Lando compares to using yeast to brew beer. 

After several hours, the newly created bacteria – infused with resilin DNA and now filling the reactor – are given what Lando calls a “chemical signal” and they begin to produce the resilin itself. The bacteria are then “exploded” to separate out the resilin for extraction. 

No insects are harmed in the process, he stresses. 

At present, the company is able to produce around 500 grams of resilin a month. While still not sufficient for the commercial purposes it envisions, it is still a hundredfold more than previous efforts in the lab have yielded. 

Lando believes that in association with Smart Resilin’s partner in Slovenia, biotech development company Acies Bio, the startup can scale up to produce a ton of resilin per month by the end of 2026. This, he explains, will dramatically bring down the price of the resilin, making it suitable for a wide range of functions. 

After it has been stretched, resilin returns to its original state in nanoseconds while expending very little energy, Lando explains. Because of that, he says, it has the potential for “really amazing” applications. 

The first applications the company explored were in the cosmetic industry, Ishkov says.

“Cosmetics [companies] are always looking for new proteins,” she says. “We have a great relationship with two companies today – one of which is looking for hair straighteners and the other is for anti-aging.” 

And according to Lando, there are two very big companies in this industry that have expressed great interest in the resilin that the startup is producing, but cannot specify which for contractual reasons. 

He also cites its potential for use in sports footwear, as its elastic properties not only make it ideal as a cushion inside trainers, but it also provides a durability that would help shoes made with it last longer than the ones currently on the market. 

“Good running shoes have a lifetime of about 350 kilometers,” explains Ishkov. “And if there is technology that could extend this lifetime by 30 or 40 percent, it would be really something amazing.” 

And, Lando says, the durability that could make trainers last longer could also be applied to car tires, as well as other aspects of the automotive industry. 

At the moment, tires contain a powder called carbon black, which is made from petroleum byproducts and is non-biodegradable, to make them stronger and to extend their lifespan. (The same substance is used as a black dye in some cosmetic products.)  

“Carbon black is something that nobody wants,” Lando says. “The tire companies tell us, even if it doesn’t improve the tires, they want it because it will replace very unwanted parts of the tires, is totally green and in the end even biodegradable.”  

Smart Resilin was founded in 2021 by Shoseyov. The startup is part of the university’s tech transfer company, Yissum, which helps commercialize the intellectual property of its members and has helped the nascent company with support, suggestions and even public relations. 

Initially, Lando says, the company had funding from a range of investors, but that dried up with the turmoil in Israel first from the divisive plans for judicial reform and then from the war in Gaza that erupted on October 7 following the mass terror attack by Hamas. 

Smart Resilin is now looking for investors in its seed funding round, and Lando says they need to raise around $2 million in order to successfully scale up production of the resilin and make it viable for commercial use. 

Nonetheless, he is certain that the company has a game-changing product on its hands for a variety of industries. 

“Resilin is a very special material,” he says. “It’s the most resilient material in the world.” 

The post How Insect DNA Could Change Face Of Cosmetic & Car Industries  appeared first on NoCamels.

Tel Aviv-based startup Vectorious has created a tiny pressure sensor that is implanted directly into the heart. It is the only sensor in the world that measures the pressure in the left atrium (one of the heart’s two upper chambers) and is able to identify increases in that pressure caused by a buildup of fluid in the body. 

This data on the left atrial pressure (LAP) is then transmitted to an app for the patient and their doctor.  

Fluid buildup occurs during heart failure deterioration and is caused when the heart can no longer effectively pump blood around the body. That fluid buildup, especially in the lungs, causes the pressure within the left atrium to increase – and it is this that Vectorious’ V-LAP device measures. 

“With fluid overload, pretty much the entire system of the body starts to collapse, and the patient gets hospitalized again and again,” Gil Visokolov, Vectorious’ senior director of product, tells NoCamels. 

Through the V-LAP, both the patient and the doctor can see increases in the pressure in the left atrium weeks before any other symptoms begin to manifest. The patient is equipped with a mobile app that instructs them on the doses of a diuretic to control their fluid levels.

This helps reduce the amount of fluid in the body, eases the pressure on the heart and and avoids heart failure deterioration and hospitalization. 

Visokolov explains that cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the number one cause of hospitalization and death in the Western world, while heart failure is the greatest pandemic of cardiovascular diseases. 

In fact, according to the World Health Organization, CVDs are the leading cause of death globally. It says that some 18 million people across the world died from CVD in 2019 – representing 32 percent of all global deaths for that year.  

The V-LAP sensor is put in place via minimally invasive procedure, one of the standard ways of treating blood vessels and the heart and implanting devices into them. 

The sensor has no battery and both receives its charge and sends its data via proprietary technology developed by Vectorious. This is carried out by the patient, who measures the pressure twice a day by putting on a belt-like device around their chest while the two processes are carried out, which Visokolov says takes a short time. 

The data extracted from the device by the belt is then sent wirelessly to the patient’s mobile app that tells the dose of diuretic they should take. Should the pressure levels in the left atrium point to a buildup of fluid at a level that cannot be treated solely by taking the diuretic, the patient’s doctor is informed so that more significant steps can be taken. 

“Instead of having the patient be hospitalized,” says Visokolov, “the V-LAP system will allow you to pinpoint the treatment and to pinpoint the fluid levels.” 

The data and recommended treatment entirely rely on a physical reliable indicator – the LAP and the treatment plan supplied by physicians – without the use of artificial intelligence, he says, as the company decided to use actual diagnoses rather than predictive algorithms. 

Visokolov explains that using the V-LAP device and the patient self-management concept significantly reduce the burden on the medical system and medical professionals, who are mostly already overburdened. This is because most of the time the patients manage themselves by monitoring their LAP and taking the appropriate diuretics, and the physician needs to intervene only as an exception.

This unique concept, which is based on the most accurate and reliable heart failure indication, can reduce the need for hospitalization as it acts as a preventative therapy. 

“Heart specialists, very experienced physicians, and heart center nurses are dealing with chronic diseases,” he says. “They are overworked and overloaded.” 

Indeed, Vectorious says that intervention in the early stages of LAP increase, before symptoms appear, can lead to a dramatic reduction in hospital readmissions for heart failure and better quality of life for the patients. 

Heart failure patients taking charge of their own care, Visokolov says, is a “revolutionary” approach to CVDs. 

“We see patients feel empowered, like they finally have a sense of control,” he says. 

But not only does this method imbue the patient with a greater sense of control over their illness and as a result make them more likely to adhere to the testing regimen, he explains, it also helps with the emotional impact of being a heart failure patient. 

“Heart failure, psychologically, is different to other diseases,” Visokolov says. 

“It’s different to cancer that you fight against – you don’t fight against your heart. And it puts you in a very complex and emotional place.”  

According to Visokolov, Vectorious is the only medtech company using LAP to measure fluid buildup due to heart failure. And this, he says, is largely due to the company’s unique technology and R&D.

The startup was founded in 2011 by Dr. Eyal Orion, a physician with experience of medical devices, and Oren Goldshtein, an electrical engineer, who both recognized the need for a way to easily measure LAP without catheterization.  

And today the company has investors who appreciate the unique technology and its potential, Visokolov says, without identifying them. 

He acknowledges that the technology could be transferable and used to diagnose and treat other diseases, but says that for now the focus is on CVD. 

“The implantable sensors and our impact decisions mean that we’re not limited only to pressure sensing,” says Visokolov. “We have all the building blocks required to make the implantable sensor [for multiple purposes].”  

The LAP sensor is currently in a clinical trial involving dozens of patients in Israel and Europe, with trials also starting soon in the US. 

Visokolov says that the company has also gathered data from thousands of heart failure patients that they have been able to use to further understand the implications of left atrial pressure. 

“Before Vectorious, it was mainly theory based on catheterization, which is done every time patients are hospitalized,” he says. 

“Now we have this routine LAP data, which allows us to create a whole lot of science.” 

The post Tiny Implant Revolutionizes Treatment For Heart Failure Patients  appeared first on NoCamels.

Once batteries in electric vehicles can only be charged to 70 to 80 percent of their capacity, regulations worldwide state that they have to be replaced, Sparkion VP Marketing Elad Halperin tells NoCamels. 

“It’s not like your batteries on your TV remote,” Halperin says, “where you basically click and click, until one day it doesn’t work and you replace the batteries.”

And those discarded EV batteries, instead of being consigned to the scrap heap, are being snapped up by Sparkion from carmakers and fleet owners and used as a power source at electric vehicle charging stations.  

Sparkion says its solution combines sustainability and affordability, as the repurposed batteries still have about 80 percent of the capacity of their newer counterparts, but cost just 50 percent of the price. 

The batteries are placed together inside a large unit (which Halperin compares to a shipping container), where Sparkion’s proprietary technology enables them to be charged from both green energy and the electricity grid, and then used to recharge EVs. 

Furthermore, the batteries can be charged from the grid at off peak hours, reducing the cost for both the charging station and the vehicle owners who use it. 

Halperin explains that the process is not as straightforward as simply banding the old batteries together to create a new energy source, as there are differences between each one that have to be taken into account.  

“Each battery has something called a state of health, and batteries have different chemistries,” Halperin says, adding that Sparkion’s platform was developed to specifically deal with these challenges. 

“Sparkion provides the technology to get the batteries out, sort them, get the right batteries into the container, and maintain the right kind of throughput and energy cycles to maximize them, despite the fact that they’re not brand new [and] are now being used for a slightly different purpose,” he says. 

In fact, the technology involved took several years to develop, Halperin explains. The company was established in 2019 but only began commercial operations about a year and a half ago. The development of the technology was quite complex – involving hardware, software and electronics – is actually still ongoing, he says.

The company founders initially bootstrapped their funding before finding private investors, and in 2022, Sparkion was purchased by American industrial technology conglomerate Vontier, which focuses on smart mobility and transportation, along with Driivz, another Israeli startup in the EV charging ecosystem. 

The company earlier this month appeared at the EcoMotion conference in Tel Aviv, a joint endeavor by the Israel Innovation Authority, Ministry of Transport and Ministry of Industry.

Halperin says the sustainability aspect of Sparkion’s platform is extremely important, as it helps to reduce the number of batteries in the world. 

“Let’s face it,” he says, “the production of new batteries is not friendly to the environment.” 

Electric vehicles primarily use lithium-ion batteries, whose materials are mined in a process that consumes a large amount of fossil fuels, water and chemicals. 

And according to Halperin, by repurposing the old batteries, Sparkion is also helping to offset the environmental toll of EVs while also providing cheap and reliable energy.   

“The repurposing is critical,” he  explains. “We are happy that we can tap into environmentally related benefits.”

The platform for repurposing the batteries goes hand in hand with Sparkion’s energy management software, although Halperin says that the latter can be easily used as a standalone product. 

The AI-led software manages a charging station’s power consumption as it replenishes the repurposed batteries from both renewable energy sources and electricity grid. For example, it will draw from the grid at off-peak hours, when the price of electricity is at its lowest, and store that power in the batteries for later use. 

It also facilitates the charging of multiple EVs at one time, using power from the batteries and other energy sources simultaneously, and even deciding how to distribute that power depending on how much time each vehicle has available for the charging process. 

“You’re able to plan and then charge your energy storage system for that purpose,” Halperin says.  

At present Sparkion’s main customer base is in the Nordic countries, where electric vehicles are increasingly becoming the norm. In Norway alone, the national road federation says that 82.4 percent of new cars sold in the country in 2023 were electric, up from 79.3 percent the year before.

Halperin says that the company has its eyes on the US market, but says that the country still has five or so years to go before it catches up to its European counterparts in the ubiquity of electric vehicles. 

Ultimately, he says, the vision of Sparkion’s founders was to be both a viable company and one that helps to mitigate environmental damage. 

“If you’re able to reduce the production of new batteries by 20 or 25 percent by 2035, then you are able to substantially reduce climate change and drive to what we call the net zero transportation future,” he says, referring to an international plan to have all new vehicles be emission free by that year. 

“That’s our goal; it’s quite ambitious.” 

The post Circle Of Battery Life: Old Power Cells Get New Purpose For EVs  appeared first on NoCamels.

Sheba’s SPARC Entrepreneurship Program, a three-month course designed to support clinicians as they commercialize their innovative solutions, has just launched a new initiative dedicated to helping nurses develop the ideas that were inspired by their own professional experiences. 

Like the original SPARC program, the new incarnation for nurses is being run by Sheba’s ARC Center for Digital Innovation in Israel, which was created in 2019 with the stated aim of advancing innovation in healthcare around the world.  

SPARC brings in medical professionals from around the world, and its current third cohort includes participants from Australia, Brazil, Germany, Japan, Nigeria, South Africa and the US. It also has a permanent spot for a member of Israel’s Arab community, whose members play a significant role in the country’s healthcare infrastructure.  

The new program was the initiative of SPARC director Dr. Zohar Kaplan, who was inspired by his own first-hand knowledge of the dedication and skill of nurses, and is based on the same principles as the initial incarnation. 

“My wife is an ER nurse,” Kaplan tells NoCamels. 

“So I always knew that nurses are very keen on solving problems that are right there on the manufacturing floor: seeing the problems, seeing the challenges, tackling problems every minute not every day, and trying to solve that with creativity and thinking out of the box. They are very practical.”  

The first cohort of the SPARC for program for nurses comprises 25 members of the nursing staff at Sheba, who were selected from more than 100 applicants, each with their own innovative solution. 

Kaplan says that the number of candidates even exceeded the applicants for SPARC, which includes a trip to the US as part of the program. 

“We had 25 applicants within 24 hours, but in one week, we had more than 100 applicants,” he says. “More than a half of them [had] great ideas; a lot of them with more than one idea.”  

The SPARC team held interviews with the applicants about their ideas, before whittling the number down to one quarter of those who wanted to join. The “excellent” nurses on the program, Kaplan says, come from a wide range of fields within the profession, and with a wide range of experience and seniority. 

“We have beginner nurses and we have more high-profile nurses, including the head of the oncology sector, for example,” he says. “We have a diverse group from different departments.” 

Kaplan says that the nurses on the program have “a diversity of ideas,” and reiterates that the solutions proposed by the nurses are very much born of their professional experience. 

They include an AI platform to predict surges in demand for specific departments in a hospital; virtual reality assistance for dealing with chronic pain; drug safety measures; and even a digital way to help nurses’ efficiency in the delivery room as women give birth. 

“Nurses tend to be closer to the problems and more keen on solving those challenges that they see every day,” he explains. 

“It’s unique for nurses, especially that practical sense of: I have a problem – let’s try to fix it, let’s think out of the box, because we have a patient here and we have patients waiting, and we have to solve this now,” he says.

Kaplan gives the example of Michal Zinger, a nurse responsible for the Oncology Clinic at Sheba Children’s Hospital, a graduate of the first SPARC program who jointly created a platform to predict deterioration in cancer patients in advance. 

AMIT (Acute Managerial Intelligence Tool), which Zinger developed along with the Children’s Hospital Deputy Director Dr. Moshe Ashkenazi, was implemented at the Sheba oncology clinic some six months ago.  

While the program is shorter than the original global SPARC program, with seven sessions over three months instead of 12, the nurses also do meet with experienced entrepreneurs and businesspeople who offer them advice, including how to ensure their idea is sufficiently unique, transform it into a viable business proposal and pitch that proposal to potential investors. 

The course culminates in a pitch session, where the participants behind the best 10 or so solutions are given the opportunity to present them to a panel of Sheba officials, entrepreneurs and external investors. 

“We hope some will catch the eye of someone in the crowd beyond Sheba and bring them to life,” Kaplan says. 

Even so, he stresses that the aim of the program is to help each participant develop their idea into a commercial enterprise, and does not have a winner singled out at the end. 

“Each one of the ideas is of course unique, and we’re going to give it the proper time, and, if needed, the proper resources,” Kaplan explains. 

“This program will take them and make them understand what entrepreneurship is, both helping them promote their own ideas and showcasing them in an excellent way.” 

Having successfully tapped into solutions of the nurses, SPARC is now looking to expand to other hospital personnel whose experiences have inspired innovation, beginning with members of the logistics team and from there other clinical departments such as psychiatry. 

Kaplan cites a tour he joined of the logistics departments at Sheba, where he says the staff “were all infused with innovations and ideas, like the nurses.”  

One of the solutions discussed by members of the logistics team working in the hospital laundry was a way to tackle the issue of used syringes placed by busy doctors in the pockets of their scrubs and then forgotten.  

“We had a lot of ideas about how to manage those needles and that’s amazing,” Kaplan says.  

“That’s entrepreneurship. That’s what we want to see.”  

The post Top Hospital Fosters Innovation By ‘Practical & Creative’ Nurses appeared first on NoCamels.

Economic think tank Global Trade Research Initiative said in April that world merchandise trade is today worth $24 trillion, something that US multinational finance company JP Morgan estimates costs some $120 billion in administrative fees every year. 

And small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) see these banking expenditures taking a bite out of their profit margins. 

Which is where okoora comes in. The Israeli fintech startup uses AI to help SMEs manage their global transactions in an affordable way, with a range of services that it says used to be the exclusive domain of the banks.  

“In essence, we help [companies] conduct their foreign trade in every respect that has to do with exchanging, sending, receiving foreign currencies,” okoora’s VP Strategic Advisory Assa Drori tells NoCamels. 

This is especially the case in Israel, Drori explains, where almost all goods either come from or are sold abroad. In fact, the World Bank says Israel’s exports of goods and services is currently some 30 percent of its GDP and imports just over 25 percent.

“My shirt is imported, my computer is imported, the gasoline I put in my car is imported,” Drori says. “Also the main driver of the economy is our exports, so everyone deals with foreign currency.” 

But Drori says that in Israel in particular, banking is expensive, slow and not very friendly to small and medium businesses, and, crucially, not tech savvy. 

“You can’t do anything automated with an Israeli bank, unlike Europe or the US,” he explains.

“You can’t hook your systems up to the bank; you can’t give the bank automatic orders whether to exchange currency or send your suppliers money  – things which in Europe are pretty mainstream.”

The only way to achieve smooth international financial transactions, he says, is by purchasing very expensive banking systems already in place.

SMEs are the lifeblood of the global economy. According to the World Bank, they represent about 90 percent of all businesses, accounting for more than 50 percent of employment worldwide. And in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which has 38 member countries, SMEs account for more than 95 percent of companies and up to 70 percent of employment.  

And according to okoora, its Automated Business Currency Management (ABCM) is the sole cloud-based platform for managing an SME’s entire foreign currency transactions, including sending payments to and receiving them from abroad. 

“What we offer our clients is something rather unique,” Drori says. “We take care of their currency-based activities when they conduct cross-border business, all in one place.” 

ABCM, he explains, is an online environment for okoora’s small and medium-sized clients, which lets them connect their accounting systems to the platform. 

It also allows very small clients to automatically input invoices from abroad simply by taking a photo or scanning them with optical character recognition (OCR), which electronically converts images of text into actual text.  

“It does everything you need to do, regulatory wise, to send a payment,” he says. 

ABCM users can also open virtual accounts in multiple currencies. The platform offers services in some 100 different currencies. 

“[These are] things that the banking system in Israel cannot do,” Drori claims.  

But the platform does not work just in Israel: the company recently began operating in Europe – which the European Union says is responsible for approximately 14 percent of all world trade in goods – after a lengthy process that involved navigating through the demands of multiple regulators. 

“It’s taken us a lot of time and effort to get ourselves regulated, to be able to accept European clients,” Drori says. “But as long as we take the brunt of it and save our clients in trouble, it’s worthwhile.” 

The Bnei Brak-based company was established in 2021, when its founders realized that the financial system for foreign trading in Israel was suited to very large companies, SMEs were being left in the cold. 

“So we thought to ourselves: why don’t we automate it and make it more accessible to everyone?” Drori recalls. “And that’s how okoora was born, conceptually.” 

ABCM is available through a subscription, after which clients pay no additional fees. Part of this is because okoora created a kind of ad hoc network, enabling transactions in a range of countries. 

“If we have to send money to Bangladesh on the same day, we can use some of our vendors in order to facilitate that,” Drori explains. 

“There’s one vendor for Bangladesh and another one for Kenya and another one for Argentina. And when you put all of that together, you get something which gives a lot of value to small companies at a fraction of the costs of using the banking system.”

Today okoora has around 15,000 clients, not just SMEs, but also private individuals who also wanted to take advantage of the unprecedented services it offers, such as people who are interested in buying property abroad and therefore must conduct their purchase in a foreign currency. 

In fact, Drori says, the last year alone the system has processed more than 10 billion shekels (approx. $2.7 billion). 

So what do the banks think about this new competitor? 

Drori describes it as a “sort of a mutual relationship” in which they are competitors but are also reliant on liquidity that partially comes from Israeli banks.

“I often liken it to the little fish that hang onto the back of a whale,”  he says with a smile. 

The post AI Gives Smaller Businesses A Big Bank Experience On Foreign Trade  appeared first on NoCamels.

The user-friendly platform connects globe trotters with local doctors, sometimes through travel insurance companies, ensuring seamless medical assistance wherever they may roam.  

Available via iOS, Android and web applications, Air Doctor offers a safety net for travelers needing medical assistance abroad who can browse doctor profiles, see pictures of the clinic, read reviews and schedule appointments connecting with vetted local doctors who speak their language. 

“You will see how far the doctor is from you, which languages he or she speaks, so that you get all the information. You choose the doctor, you set the appointment, and that’s it,” co-founder and CEO Jenny Cohen Derfler tells NoCamels.

Doctors who are poorly reviewed by travelers are removed from their list, she adds.

The startup was nurtured in Cohen Derfler’s garage almost six years ago. CRO Efrat Sagi-Ofir, and VP and CTO Yegor Kurbachev soon joined the company as co-founders, and in its initial stages Sagi-Ofir and Cohen Derfler went to Greece, with the name of one Greek physician in hand, to personally recruit their first doctors. 

Cohen Derfler left her last position as chairwoman of the Intel manufacturing facility in Kiryat Gat after 20 years of working with the international company, in order to move into the start-up world and create something “from zero,” she says. 

Working with her son Yam, now VP innovation, on her second startup venture has been a bonus.

Today boasting a worldwide network of more than 20,000 multi-lingual doctors, the Jerusalem-area company has positively impacted the entire travel health infrastructure. 

It has instilled confidence in travelers, provided supplementary income avenues for medical professionals and diminished expenses for insurers when clients are able to go to a private doctor either at their clinic (rather than a more expensive hospital visit)  a private visit to their hotel or hostel or telemedicine consultation. 

Though not an insurance company, Air Doctor partners with insurance companies in 80 countries, including the US, European nations and Israel, to offer travelers seamless medical treatment. Next year it will add partnerships with insurance companies’ customers in Asia as well. 

“We work with insurers to offer our services to their customers,” explains Cohen Derfler. 

“This eliminates the hassle of claims and reimbursement for travelers, streamlining the process and ensuring access to timely medical care when it’s needed most. If your insurance doesn’t work with us, you will pay by yourself and get our invoice and get reimbursed by your insurer.”

In 2023, global travel numbers reached the pre-Covid number of about 1.6 billion, notes Cohen Derfler, providing a very large market.

“Around 10 percent of travelers get sick, so we are talking about millions and millions of people who are our potential customers,” she says, explaining that 85 percent of medical issues during travel are related to illnesses rather than major issues necessitating hospitalization. 

Air Doctor has so far raised $30.9 million, with four rounds from investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Munich Re Ventures, Vintage Investment Partners, Kamet, Phoenix Insurance Company and Mass Challenge and employs more than 75 workers on its team.

Rather than lay off their team during the Covid pandemic, Air Doctor used the downturn in travel to add video telemedicine consultations on their platform, collaborating with doctors across the world who can write prescriptions for medicines locally and in 21 different languages. 

“We have an algorithm that will connect you to a local doctor who has the ability to prescribe medicine wherever you are,” says Cohen Derfler. “This allows us to cover the whole world 24/7.”

In addition, she said, they have demonstrated that Air Doctor has reduced insurance claim costs by 54 percent worldwide.

“When you are sick, you can hardly do anything; or when you are traveling and you have a sick child, you need help,” Cohen Derfler points out. 

“I feel that we can help people in those bad times. It’s very rewarding that you are helping a person. I always say: every minute that we are talking, a doctor is helping someone that is sick in the world.”

The Israeli business publication Calcalist named Air Doctor as one of the ten most promising start-ups in Israel for 2023 and they received the award at Calcalist’s annual Mind the Tech New York conference in March. 

“There are many businesses you can make money in, but there are few businesses that you can feel that you are doing something that is rewarding, because you are doing something good for someone,” Cohen Derfler says. 

“I think with our company we feel that we are a business that is doing good.”

The post The Doctor Is In: App Connects Foreign Travelers To Local Medics appeared first on NoCamels.

Indeed, a new in-depth report from the Israel Innovation Authority, the branch of government dedicated to promoting the high-tech sector on the global stage, shows that the sector is not in the dire situation feared by industry elders at the start of the war sparked by Hamas’ heinous attack on southern Israel on October 7. 

“The picture it paints is quite a good one, taking into account the fact that 2023 was a horrible year, with regard to the political instability [over proposed judicial reforms] and the war in the final quarter that’s ongoing,” IIA Chief Economist Dr. Assaf Kovo says of the report, dubbed the “State of the High-Tech Sector in Israel 2024,” which polled hundreds of members of the industry in Israel.

“We expected results to be much worse, but frankly, in most of the parameters, Israeli high-tech managed to grow,” he tells NoCamels. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one field in the nation’s high-tech sector that does indeed appear to be thriving in wartime is military technology. 

Over the past eight months, Israel has displayed its prowess in fending off wave after wave of aerial attacks from Hamas and its allies in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and even these groups’ main sponsor Iran. 

In April, Iran launched an unprecedented 300-missile strike on Israel, almost all of which were felled in midair, an equally unprecedented feat that was perceived as an excellent showcase of the Israeli missile defense system. 

“There was very significant proof yesterday of the technological capabilities of the State of Israel, behind which are the defense companies,” Sigma Investment House CEO Yair Shani told the Globes business website the day after the attack by Iran. 

“Countries to which we want to supply defense technology will now be eager to buy, after seeing how the country is protected. This is the best sales promotion. Iran has done excellent sales promotion for Israel’s arms companies. This will give a very big boost to the industry, of course focusing mainly on defense.”

In fact, Israeli defense firms have in recent months announced a slew of new foreign collaborations in countries keen to bring their innovative technology to their own shores. 

These collaborations include the sale of Sentrycs’ counter-drone technology, which will be used at multiple military bases across Europe, and a $50 million contract with an unnamed international client for Elbit’s new air defense system Red Sky, which protects against low-altitude aerial threats.  

Sentrycs technology also found favor in the UK, which has included the Tel Aviv-based startup in its National Protective Security Authority Catalogue of Security Equipment (NPSA CSE), following a rigorous assessment of its Detection, Tracking and Identification (DTI) capabilities. 

And in January, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), which makes the Arrow missile defense system, announced the launch of an innovation center in Virginia to expand its business activities and presence within the US. 

Circling The Wagons 

The relative stability of the sector is in no small part due to those industry elders – the IIA among them – who in late 2023 scrambled to shore up a sector whose workforce was decimated by emergency military call ups and the threat of evaporating investments, based on the premise that wartime brings an uncertainty that is abhorred by market forces. 

“What we did as the Innovation Authority, as a part of the Israeli government, was trying to make government funds available to startups, but specifically to startups that had short runways of less than six months and that had significant assets, whether they are technological or business assets, in order to help them just get through this period of the war,” Kovo explains. 

“Assuming,” he clarifies, “that the war is going to end eventually and that those companies will be able to raise funds from private investors.”  

Others who worked to keep the entire enterprise afloat include OurCrowd, the country’s largest online investment platform, which in November launched its Israel Resilience Fund to support Israeli startups. By late March, the fund had received more than $17 million in commitments and planned to invest in around 40 companies by the following month. New York-based VC 97212 Ventures also recently closed a $20 million fund for investment in Israeli startups in the pre-seed or seed stage.

Kovo does acknowledge a downturn in investment since the start of 2023, but points out that the levels of fundraising for the first five months of 2024 are not too dissimilar to the sums raised in 2018 and 2019. 

The boom in investment of 2021 and 2022 should actually be viewed as an anomaly, he explains. Because while it seems there has been a massive downturn in investment in the past 18 months, one can draw more or less a straight line from 2017 levels of investment to today – with a very visible spike for the boom years. 

Indeed, with $1.46 billion invested in May alone (the second consecutive month to raise over $1 billion collectively), the sector has pulled in a total of  $4.1 billion in funding since the start of the year – a little over half of the $8 billion raised in total in 2023, but with seven months of 2024 still to go. 

Danger Signs

The IIA report does sound a note of caution, however, in particular with regards to employment within the sector. It found that while the industry employed a further 10,000 people in 2023, bringing the sector’s workforce total to almost 400,000, the 2.6 percent increase from 2022 “barely outpaced” population growth rates and raised a potential red flag about future expansion.  

Acknowledging the issue, Kovo says that companies had been more optimistic about growing the workforce in Israel and abroad back in November, just one month into the war. But, he explains, as the conflict lasted into Q2 of 2024, attitudes began to shift. 

“In March and April, it sort of turned into pessimism,” he says. “They think that they won’t be going to recruit any employees in Israel in the upcoming year.” 

Even so, he clarifies, while there has been a reduction in the rate of Israeli companies’ new hires abroad compared to other years, it is still an upward trend. 

“The increase in employees is [slowing], but it’s still positive,” he says. 

The high tech industry remains crucial to Israel’s economy, in 2023 comprising a shade under 20 percent of the country’s total GDP – approx. $92.2 billion – and 53 percent of its exports, worth $73.5 billion. 

And with the release of the IIA report, both the authority’s chairman Alon Stopel and president Dror Bin stressed the urgency of increased government investment in the sector to ensure its survival should the country again face challenges of the magnitude of the current war. 

“Israel’s government budget for R&D is relatively low,” said Stopel, explaining that most of the investments come from non-governmental sources, with a “significant portion” from abroad. 

“The resilience of the high-tech sector must be strengthened through diverse budgetary additions, including governmental, to address market failures and reduce dependency on external investments,” he said. 

Celebrating that resilience, Bin also warned that “high dependency on foreign investments” demanded a reassessment of how Israel directs resources to the sector. 

“Despite numerous challenges in 2023, Israeli high-tech continued to grow,” Bin said. 

“However, past success does not guarantee future success.” 

The post Israeli High-Tech Is Proving Its Resilience As War Wages On appeared first on NoCamels.

Lead acid is the second most common battery technology worldwide and the power cells are currently used as the starter batteries in cars, trucks and motorcycles.

The batteries have a positive plate made of lead dioxide on one end, and a spongy lead negative plate on the other end, with sulfuric acid flowing between them both to conduct the electricity. 

While they are cheaper to produce than their main competitor lithium-ion batteries, they are not as energy efficient and have a shorter lifespan. 

But Salvation Battery discovered that placing carbon nanotubes – tiny, super strong and highly conductive tubular cylinders of carbon atoms – at one end of the lead acid battery makes it last four times longer. 

The startup believes that its nanotube supplement can have a major impact on the energy storage market, even overtaking lithium-ion batteries as the first option for energy storage solutions. 

And according to Allied Market Research, the global rechargeable battery market had a value of $90 billion in 2020, and that is projected to reach $150 billion by 2030.  

“We need more storage on the grid. Most storage solutions are lithium-ion batteries, which have taken over [the market] entirely. But there’s still a lot of need for storage around the grid, in which longer-lasting lead acid can be the leader,” Salvation Battery Director David Waimann tells NoCamels.

Salvation believes that its battery can even replace lithium-ion batteries in the electric vehicle (EV) market, becoming the first choice for EV manufacturers. 

The company claims that they can run an EV for the same amount of time on a battery one quarter of the size of the batteries used in the vehicles today, saving a huge amount of space and making the car safer in the event of a collision that cracks the battery and exposes the dangerous materials within. 

According to David, while automotive manufacturers do not have a goal of making their EVs run for much longer than they do today, the ability to achieve the same distances on a smaller battery is very attractive. 

“If the battery can be less than half the size. Then it’s cheaper, and that’s better [for the car maker],” he says. 

Lithium-ion batteries are the current leader in the market of EV and energy storage, but they can be unreliable and dangerous. There are major global concerns about the mining of lithium-ion materials, an industry that is dominated by China and Russia. 

There are also concerns regarding the recycling of lithium-ion batteries. When not recycled properly, they can cause environmental pollution and fires and release toxic chemicals harmful to the health of humans and wildlife.

In contrast, lead acid batteries are more cost effective, highly recyclable, robust against overcharging and safer in terms of fire risk compared to lithium-ion batteries. Additionally, lead is less environmentally damaging to mine than lithium.

“We’re not worried about the shortage of lead in the world [and ] it’s not dominated by China,” David says. “The other thing is, it’s quite safe since lithium can blow up occasionally.” 

He explains that 99 percent of all lead acid batteries are recycled, including at least 70 percent of the ones we find in our cars. 

“You just take out the anode and cathode and [in Israel] you send them to a factory in Ashdod and they recycle it,” he says. 

Battery Council International, the top trade association for the industry in North America, states that lead acid batteries are known for being safe to manufacture, ship, use and recycle. 

Although they are the largest consumer of lead, emissions from their production constitute less than 1 percent of total US lead emissions. Furthermore, most human lead exposure comes from old sources of the metal, such as leaded paint, gasoline, pottery and water pipes, and not from the batteries. 

Salvation Battery CTO Tomer Zimrin came up with the idea for the nanotubes while researching the efficacy of lead acid batteries, and discovered a way to manipulate the battery to make it 400 percent more durable. 

Teaming up with serial entrepreneur Waimann in 2020, they founded Salvation Battery to bring Zimrin’s development to market. 

“What Tomer had found – almost by mistake – was a major breakthrough in battery technology affecting the second most important battery type in the world,” Waimann says. 

Based in Ramat Gan, the company quickly received venture capitalist backing and outstandingly positive feedback from industry experts, including, David says, technology validation from 10 international scientists worldwide.

Salvation Battery is employing a strict business-to-business model, only selling their patented nanotube technology as an addition to the batteries during the manufacturing process. 

Their initial target market is lead acid battery manufacturing in the EU and after that the rest of the world. And the company has already signed an agreement with a German lead acid battery manufacturer to begin incorporating Salvation’s nanotubes into their products. 

“We will make the specialized carbon nanotubes and put them through our own proprietary process and then we will sell these specialized nanotubes additive to all the battery manufacturers around the world,” David says.

Salvation Battery plans for its technology to be incorporated into every single lead acid battery developed, allowing them to reclaim their title as the world’s most relied upon battery. 

David even explains that the name Salvation stems from the company’s intention to regalvanize the lead acid battery industry. 

“We would like to be part of an amazing new industry in Israel, which would be supplying high-performance enhancing additives to batteries worldwide,” David says. 

The post Nanotubes Transform Lead Acid Batteries Into Super Energy Source appeared first on NoCamels.

But as reliable as Excel is, this can mean seemingly endless tables and spreadsheets that every company needs to manage manually. 

And these tasks involve long hours and repetitive processes that draw on multiple different programs and applications that, unlike Excel, are normally based in a company’s cloud server. The time and energy consumed could be put into other pressing issues. 

Now, Israeli fintech company Datarails says it is revolutionizing these arduous financial management processes by integrating artificial intelligence into the Excel program through its proprietary technology. 

FinanceOS, the company’s AI-powered financial planning and analysis (FP&A) platform, gives Excel secure access to the information it needs in the cloud, helping users automate manual tasks, simplify processes and foster collaboration across departments. 

Once Excel is connected to a company’s cloud, Datarails enables a workforce to sort through masses of information while sharing data between departments for joint analysis.  

“Typically, finance professionals need to manually update data in their Excel spreadsheets, as they are not connected to the different software they have in the cloud, where the data is stored,” Aviv Canaani, Datarails VP Marketing and Sales, tells NoCamels. 

“But with FinanceOS, they can stay within their Excel file, but stay connected through the cloud. By doing so, we are revolutionizing the office of the Chief Financial Officer.”

By enabling personnel to remain within their familiar Excel environment, Datarails says it ensures accessibility and productivity, thanks to the AI now working alongside the program. 

The platform also allows for real-time syncing of any changes across the different environments, eliminating this manual aspect of a workload. 

“It’s not only saving employers time, but it also allows them to use their brain power for other purposes rather than to make sure that their numbers are right and that there are no manual errors,” Canaani maintains. 

The platform’s algorithms analyze data from various sources, including accounting and CRM [Customer Relationship Management] systems, to generate useful recommendations. 

“This enables finance teams to identify trends, forecast future performance and make informed decisions with confidence,” Canaani affirms. 

The first thing the company does is integrate clients’ Excel program with the respective accounting, ERP [Enterprise Resource Planning] or CRM software that they are using to store the rest of the data. 

This allows them to easily create different reports and dashboards to serve their business. 

Users can easily create tailored financial reports and charts, facilitating quicker communication and collaboration across departments.

And beyond basic automation, the platform also offers advanced features such as customizable reports and dashboards. 

“It’s easy-to-use software for anyone who has a good grasp of Excel,” Canaani explains.

Alongside FinanceOS, Datarails has developed two other AI-driven features to ease workloads, which altogether, Canaani says, set the company apart from any competitors. 

“We’re spearheading everything that has to do with AI and FP&A,” he says. “We paint a complete financial picture for the CFO. No other company in our industry has this vision.” 

FP&A Genius is an AI-powered chatbot that users can ask for insights about forecasts, budgets or other financial reports, while generative AI feature Storyboards allows users to automatically create presentations within the workspace.  

Canaani gives the example of the AI platform highlighting a rise in the price of copper that could adversely impact a company’s quarterly targets – a connection that personnel may miss.   

The company says its innovative approach to integrating AI with Excel, coupled with its growth and expansion plans, now not only redefines the ways businesses manage their finances but also sets new standards for efficiency.

The platform is also designed to smoothly scale as businesses grow, with the flexibility and agility to adapt to changing requirements, including adding new users, expanding into new markets or incorporating additional data sources. 

This, Datarails says, eases the pressure on businesses to improve efficiency, reduce costs and drive growth.

Canaani says the Tel Aviv-based company, which was established in 2015, began with a mission to revolutionize financial management. He says co-founders Didi Gurfinkel (CEO), Eyal Cohen (COO)  and Oded Har-Tal (CTO) recognized the limitations of manual processes and the potential of automation to resolve them. 

“Ninety-five percent of the finance industry is a ‘blue ocean,” says Canaani, referring to the concept of an unexplored sector without real competition, which has the potential for new products to take a significant market share. 

 “Masses of data need to be explored, sorted, and used in decision making,” he says. “With Datarails, companies can connect and sync all their previously separated spreadsheets and sources of data.”  

The post AI Platform Takes Sting Out Of Financial Firms’ Arduous Excel Tasks  appeared first on NoCamels.

The Tel Aviv-based Blitz Motors was founded in 2012 by CEO Raphael Moszynski, a Belgian-born Israeli who left a career in international banking in Britain and to pursue a desire to contribute to environmental protection. 

The company is a combination of two of his passions – motorbikes and sustainability. Moszynski has been riding two-wheelers for years, even in London, where he says it is an even faster mode of transport than the famed Tube underground.  

“Our duty is to replace as many gasoline vehicles on the road as possible [with] electric and zero emission,” he tells NoCamels. He calls Blitz “sustainable mobility.” 

The electric-powered mopeds are designed for “last mile” delivery – the final stage of getting a product from business to customer – including food, letters and packages and even medication. 

According to Moszynski, the bikes have a huge impact in terms of emission reduction. He cites the example of Domino’s Pizza in Israel, to which Blitz supplies 400 bikes. The reduction in emissions caused by switching just those bikes from petrol engines to electric is the equivalent of planting 29,000 trees annually.  

“The big companies that we work with have a clear agenda [on] energy emissions, and we are basically helping them in converting riders from gasoline to electric,” says Moszynski.  

Aside from Domino’s and McDonald’s and Pizza Hut in Israel, these “big companies” include the Uber-owned UberEats online food delivery service in the UK. 

In the Israeli public sector, Blitz is working with Jerusalem and Tel Aviv municipalities, the postal service and even the national police force, having won a tender for each organization. All of them use the Blitz bikes to navigate the crowded city streets. 

“In terms of electric mopeds in Israel, we have about 80 percent of the market,” Moszynski says. “Every moped you don’t hear,” he adds, referring to the quiet motors that are typical of electric-powered vehicles, “you can assume it’s ours.” 

And for Moszynski, the electric version is not just sustainable and economical, it’s also superior to the gas-powered version in terms of usability. 

“I would say it’s even more satisfying to drive,” he says. “It’s more comfortable because there’s no noise, there’s no vibrations.”  

The company, which is traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, is solely B2B, meaning it only supplies its mopeds to businesses and not individual clients.  

In all, Moszynski says, thousands of their e-mopeds are currently being driven in Israel, Belgium, the Netherlands, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.

The UAE partnership is a relatively new one, coming in the wake of the landmark  2020 Abraham Accords, which brought normalization between Israel and several Muslim majority countries. And the UAE, Moszynski says, has “a very big delivery market.”  

The small motorcycles are all made by Blitz itself and come fitted with the proprietary electric engine as well as super fast-charging batteries. 

“Basically, we provide the full solution for that ecosystem,” Moszynski explains. 

He says that the mopeds perform to the same standards as their gas-powered counterparts, and save not only the environment but also money. 

“The savings are huge for businesses,” he says. “You’re looking at about 14,000 shekels [approx. $4,000] savings per year per bike in Israel.”  

Going back to the example of Domino’s, Moszynski says the 400 Blitz bikes it uses for deliveries save the company more than half a million shekels per year.

Like with an electric bicycle but unlike electric cars, the Blitz batteries are detachable so that a delivery person can use one battery while another is charging. 

And because the company developed technology to fully charge the batteries in 90 minutes as opposed to the standard of four to six hours, the driver never has what Moszynski calls “range anxiety.”  

Every moped is connected to the Blitz cloud servers, allowing the company to monitor the performance of each driver for safe riding and adherence to the rules of the road. 

The bikes also integrate data analytics into their technology, offering insights into the performance of each vehicle and warning of any prospective mechanical issues before they happen so that the fleet manager can preempt any problems. 

Moszynski says the ultimate goal is to get as many gasoline-powered vehicles off the roads as possible and points to looming legislation to that effect, even though the electric bikes are scarcer for now. He says that in the UK, for example, a change in the law means that roughly 150,000 delivery people around the country are going to have to switch to electric two-wheelers. 

According to global data platform Statista, the battery electric vehicles market is set to hit $422 billion this year. And with a predicted annual growth of a little over 12 percent, that figure is expected to reach $681 billion by 2028.

The company is also currently looking into an expansion of its mopeds into the US market. And because, as Moszynski tells NoCamels, it “can’t do everything alone,” Blitz is looking for partners to help it reach American cities where the bikes are most effective.  

In fact, the company is holding talks with a major American international seller that delivers a large amount of goods directly to people’s homes.  

Blitz is also exploring the option of introducing its patented electric motors with the makers of other kinds of vehicles. Moszynski compares the company to Intel, which does not make computers but rather the chips that make them run, and explains that such a move would be beneficial to all. 

“They can use our technology, making it more affordable to other people,” he says. “Because the more volume we use, the cheaper the product will become.”

The post Electric Mopeds Driving Off Gas-Guzzling Rivals On City Streets appeared first on NoCamels.

Most of the time the care manager is a trained nurse or other medical professional, says Yoni Shtein, CEO of Laguna Health, whose AI platform records and analyzes the conversations during telehealth consultations for social, emotional and cultural context. 

This technology, Shtein tells NoCamels, is designed to help the care manager to understand the true needs of a patient, avoiding potentially serious health issues without having to worry about making a note of every piece of information during a consultation. 

“The core problem we’re solving is one of care efficiency and effectiveness,” he explains.

“We’re able to advance care through a holistic model, in understanding that actually what gets people in trouble is what we now call individual determinants of health. The ultimate goal is clinical compliance.”

Shtein says that the sheer number of people who consult remotely with a care manager means that it is impossible for the latter to really get a well-rounded picture of the issues presented in each individual case.

“The majority of them are nurses who want to help people,” he says. 

“If they had one person to help per day, they would be the most sympathetic, attentive and effective in the job. Except as you might imagine, they have hundreds of caseloads per day, which means they have scripts and workflows and care management platforms, and they’re spread thin like butter.” 

Indeed, remote healthcare has become a staple for many people, with both patients and practitioners taking advantage of technology to access and provide diagnosis and treatment – obviously within the constraints posed by remote care. 

Telemedicine really began to take off during the coronavirus pandemic, when people largely confined to their homes increasingly turned to technology for solutions – especially with so many medical centers, hospitals and clinics strictly out of bounds. 

According to global data platform Statista, the number of people using online medical consultations worldwide has roughly doubled in the past five years, from around 57 million in 2019 to 116 million today. And that number is only expected to rise (albeit at a slower rate than at the height of the pandemic that lasted from 2020-2023). 

But keeping track of everyone and everything can be a herculean task when consultations are in quick succession and targets have to be met.

Therefore, Laguna Health’s platform performs several “really important” tasks as part of the contact between care manager and patient. 

Firstly, it automates note taking so that the care manager can both focus on what is being said during the conversation and save precious time afterwards, allowing them to help a greater number of patients.  

“It’s not only distracting [to take notes] during the call, it takes an additional 100 percent of your time following the call to write all the notes for everything that took place,” Shtein points out.  

Secondly, the system uses a specially built AI large language model (LLM) in order to analyze the conversation in real time. LLMs are artificial intelligence systems that are trained to both understand and generate language through the input of extremely large amounts of data. 

The AI pulls out what Shtein calls “care insights,” offering a greater understanding of the patient’s needs based on pieces of information revealed during the conversation. 

Shtein gives the example of a patient who tells the care manager that they are having trouble collecting their medication due to a lack of transportation. The system would pick out that snippet and highlight the need for a transportation service, which some healthcare companies do provide. 

“We’re able to do all of that in real time,” Shtein says, “which drives dramatically higher efficiency of care and effectiveness of outcome.”  

In fact, Shtein and Laguna co-founder and CPO Yael Peled Adam, both veterans of the tech sector, created the company after both having experienced the challenges of recovery after hospitalization, either themselves or through loved ones. 

“The goal is clinical compliance,” Shtein says.  “The way you get better is actually by adhering to the clinical workflow. What we understood is actually a lot of the barriers – 75 percent of them in fact – have more to do with your individual life situation than to the clinical set of instructions.”

The technology is built to be easily integrated into existing cloud-based healthcare systems, something which Shtein says is by now almost universal.  And for the care manager, it is a simple browser extension that he says is easy to install and operate.  

The platform is designed primarily to cater to the market in the US, where there is no universal healthcare to automatically provide everyone with access to medical treatment, leaving individuals instead to find their private coverage. 

And it is these private companies that Laguna works with, as their healthcare professionals – and not those working for medical centers – are the first point of contact in telemedicine calls. 

Indeed, while the R&D side of the company is entirely based in Israel, the headquarters, sales and marketing side of the business is situated in the US.    

The company is planning to expand to other countries, including South Africa and Brazil, and Shtein says the technology is designed to work with “a wide gamut” of languages, accents and dialects. 

He explains that the conversation between care manager and patient is automatically transcribed, and once it is in text form, it does not matter which language is spoken because the system can understand it. 

“That transcription capability is at this point in the 2020s a very well built-out muscle in the world as a whole,” he says.  

The basic goal, Shtein asserts, is to help people abide by the care they have been prescribed, while taking into account their individual needs and challenges. 

“The way to go is to help people be the best version of themselves,” he says, “leaning into their diverse care models and helping them deliver those care models most efficiently.” 

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