Who are Israel's next biggest start-ups?
• By SHARON UDASIN
In the wake of Intel’s $ 15 billion decision to acquire Mobileye in March, momentum in
Israel’s start-up scene is building
faster than ever.
Israelis continue to excel
across a wide spectrum of sectors such as cyber security,
transportation technologies,
energy, water and big data, posihoning the country as an inter-
national leader in the hi-tech
community.
More and more local innovators are gaining global recognition, both from a technological and financial perspective,
inching their way toward that
coveted “unicorn” status, or the
$lb. mark.
“These companies that are
quote-unquote unicorns are
being built in a country the size
of New Jersey, surrounded by
enemies that want its destruction,” said hi-tech expert and
start-up consultant Hillel Fuld.
“The country has every excuse
to lay back and say, ‘Forget it, we
have too many challenges.’”
These challenges notwithstanding, Fuld stressed that
Israel’s innovators are pressing
on, and lead the way or come
in close second in “every single
vertical of technology.”
“We talk about the strongest
verticals or strongest trends or
companies, but across the board
it’s not an exaggeration to say
Israel is a tech superpower,” he
said.
Rather than excelling in one
specific area in the hi-tech
world, Israeli start-ups tend to
do well in “any industry where
you can apply deep learning
and machine vision to change
the rules and dynamics of an
industry,” said venture capitalist
Michael Eisenberg.
“All sorts of areas of industry that consumed software in
the past to increase productivity will now become industries
entirely composed of software
themselves,” he added.
Like Eisenberg, Dr. Yossi Maaravi, deputy dean of the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya’s
Adelson School of Entrepreneurship, said that the most
successful Israeli start-ups share
key traits, including the use of
data and machine learning in a
smart manner.
The most fruitful start-ups
may begin by focusing on
a niche area of expertise, but
they tend to expand to a broader community reach and go
after a huge market, Maaravi
explained.
Another key quality shared by
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START-UPS
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ambitious companies is their ability to “disrupt,” or do something
in a completely different way from
their competitors, he said.
“They really work in domains that
are growing, that the markets are
ready to accept such innovation,”
Maaravi added.
While it may be impossible to identify which Israeli start-ups truly have
the potential to become the country’s
next Mobileye, The Jerusalem Post is
offering its best guess of five of the
most promising candidates in an
array of sectors.
Argus Cyber Security
Tel Aviv
With autonomous cars emerging
on roads around the globe, defending
the vulnerabilities of these networked
vehicles has become an increasingly urgent challenge. A rapidly rising
Tel Aviv-based company, Argus Cyber
Security, provides comprehensive
cyber security solutions for the automotive industry, preventing hackers
from threatening commercial cars
and other networked vehicles.
Since its establishment in 2013,
Argus has raised $30 million in equity
funding, opening up offices in Michigan, Silicon Valley, Stuttgart and
Tokyo, according to start-up directory
Crunchbase. As increased connectivity helps improve road safety and transit experience, Argus looks to thwart
the accompanying security risks and
make today’s vehicles less vulnerable
to attack. The company works with
private and commercial manufacturers, suppliers, fleet managers, dealerships and after-market connectivity
providers to prevent malware installation, detect operating system anomalies and stop attacks from spreading
within vehicle networks.
Zebra Medical Vision
Kibbutz Shefayim
By
harnessing
advanced
machine-learning techniques to analyze medical images, this Kibbutz
Shefayim-based start-up aims to help
medical professionals generate automated, accurate and timely diagnoses.
After raising $8m. in 2015, just
a year after its founding, the company received an additional $12m.
investment last year. Zebra’s self-described mission involves “teaching
computers to detect and diagnose
critical medical conditions” through
algorithms that strive to assist radiologists in detecting indications that
might otherwise be overlooked, and
in understanding the medical profiles
of their patients.
Topping start-up rankings on tech
websites worldwide, Zebra hopes to
make a significant impact. An aging
global population and a rapidly
growing middle class have created
an “unsustainable course” wherein the demand for medical imaging
solutions is far outpacing the supply
of doctors who can supply these services.
Lemonade
Tel Aviv
Powered by artificial intelligence
and behavioral economics, Lemonade provides peer-to-peer insurance
for homeowners and renters. Customers can purchase insurance with
the touch of an app, interacting with
hots and machine-learning mechanisms instead of brokers and bureaucracy.
Rather than incorporating a traditional insurance mechanism, Lemonade takes a flat fee and donates
unclaimed money to a cause of the
policyholder’s choice in a “give-back”
system. People who support the same
cause are the “peers” in the company’s peer-to-peer insurance model.
Six months after Lemonade’s
launch in New York, where the company is now headquartered, the insurance became available in Illinois in
April. Lemonade is slated to roll out
throughout most of the United States
over the course of the year, according
to the company. As of December, the
company had raised some $60m., but
two weeks ago, Allianz, the world’s
largest insurer, announced that it
would be making a strategic investment in the start-up, though it did
not disclose the amount.
Hometalk
Jerusalem
The world’s largest do-it-yourself
community, Hometalk boasts some
nine million members who share
their DIY home and gardening projects, ideas and questions through
blog posts, Pinterest photos, videos
and slide shows.
Proj ects posted on Hometalk, which
receives some 40 million monthly
visits and 300 million monthly page
views, range from making nontaxic reusable cleaning wipes from old
T-shirts to revitalizing discarded furniture to planting tabletop gardens.
The majority of Hometalk’s traffic comes through a variety of social
media channels, as users share viral
posts to friends on their networks.
Unique among Israeli start-up success
stories, Hometalk is a “bootstrapped”
business: Its founders built the company with little capital and without
external fund-raising. Founded in
2011, Hometalk has offices in Jerusalem and New York.
Moovit
Ness Ziona
With more than 55 million riders in
75 countries, Moovit unifies all types
of public transportation travel under
one umbrella, enabling members of
the public to both plan their trips and
track arrival and departure schedules
in real-time.
A community-driven app, Moovit
integrates official public transportation data with crowdsourced transit
updates, in order to increase the accuracy of the information provided to
users.
In addition to beginning its own
Moovit Carpool service last year in
Israel and Italy, the company teamed
up with Uber to integrate ride-share
options in 22 of the countries where
the public transit app operates. The
collaboration with Uber built upon
previous such partnerships formed
with ride-share service Lyft in 2014
and Gett, an on-demand taxi provider,
in 2015.
After raising $81.5m. in several
financing rounds from 2012 through
2015, Moovit received an investment of an undisclosed amount
at the end of 2015 from Sound
Ventures, a venture capital firm
cofounded by actor Ashton Kutcher
and Israeli-American businessman
Guy Oseary.
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