Day 5 Carmel ventures panel of entrepreneurs and tel aviv university

Carmel Ventures is among Israel’s top tier venture capital firm with over $600 million under management.

the first speaker talked about Dotomi which is a company that makes media advertisement personal. They use cookies in users commuters to build a relationship and a dialogue between the consumer and the advertiser. The messages are personalized which makes them much more effective.

Later the chairman of Timet talked to us about his company that developed an automated employee performance improvement software. It is based on the following: Risk mgmt solution
Objective measurements
End user / content / technology

Finally the founder of Equivio, Amir Milo talked about his company, a Software company focused on text analysis for e-discovery
The purpose is to Saving legal documents and not have two or three times the same documents stored within a corporation. It saves money.

In the afternoon we went to Tel Aviv university

We assisted at a class:

The class is called Business entrepreneurship for engineers.
There, Ed Mlavsky talked about the BIRD project. After professor Bachenheimer talked about entrepreneurship in general through his own experiences.

Day 4 ashkelon desalination plant, Ormat, Object

Today we went to Ashkelon to visit a desalination plant. It is located 2 miles north of the Gaza strip.

The Ashkelon seawater reverse osmosis plant (the largest in the world) has a capacity of 330,000 cubic meter of water per day and produces 100 million cubic meter of water per year. It produces 13% of the countries domestic consumer demand.

I was impressed by the technology used in such a plant. The interesting part is the filtering of the water.

We tasted the water at the end. It has almost the same taste as Evian water.

We then went to Ormat which is a world leader in geothermal power. The company is probably among the oldest on Israel because it has been around for over forty seven years. Way before it was trendy to be green.

Ormat uses state of the art technology and environmentally sound power solutions.
Geothermal Energy and environment is a slow process.
Line of products are:

Geothermal power
Solar thermal
Remote power units
Industrial waste heat recovery

Microcave telecommunication network
Solar power plants
Steam power plants

Later we went to object, a 3d printing company.

They have a unique process of printing objects in 3d on a range of over 60 materials that enables professionals to build prototypes that accurately simulate the tue look, feel and function of an end product. For example a shoe:

Or different other materials:

They have 3 categories of printers

I found this concept really interesting and very useful for corporations.

Day 3 chisma and discussion panel and omrix

Today we went back to Jerusalem and visited Chiasma.

Chiasma

Investments of 400million over the time of 10years. They develop oral drugs which addresses unmet needs for well defined markets such as hormonal disorder that results from an excess of growth hormone.

There was a panel of entrepreneurs in the medical field and a venture capitalist.

First company: Medasense
Gailt zuckerman the CEO explained us how she founded the company. It all stars with a Great idea … Then the challenge is: How to overcome the obstacle?
The idea was Pain monitoring.
How do you handle Non communicating patients? How is the pain level measured?

The next step is How to raise seed money?
Start basic / agile business development

Then it is important to Learn the field
Talk with other people and Build up your team
–> reduce uncertainty without money
Get it written

Once this is reached the next step is the Perspective of investment
Each stage has to have a Financible
milestone.
Have concept ready before getting the money. A lot is networking in order to get the money. How many phone calls away are you from a Financial milestone?
Develop financial strategy and fund raising strategy.

The lesson I learned was that everything has to go step by step. And connection is key in order to have the right amount of financing the company needs. A great idea is not necessarily a great way of making money right away.

The next speaker was Steven Eitan, CEO of Exalenz.

Exalenz develops a Breath analysis solution for Liver and gastro intestinal disorders it is 99% more accurate than blood test.

Detecting h pylori Assures a continuous revenue stream. There is no existing technology for it. The device is places at 120 physicians that serve /gi/ and emergency rooms throughout the United States.
Difference in culture vs blood test.
Marketing solution Is to panel people and educate the doctors. It is more cost effective than blood test and the result is right away instead of 2 days later.
Know the market is key to be successful in the industry you are in.

The following panel speaker was Dalia Megiddo, managing partner at Expedio ventures.
It is a venture capital firm, specializing in investments in companies of all stages including early development through late stage. The firms seeks to make investments in developing healthcare technologies. It typically invests in Israeli and Israeli related companies.

The last speaker was the founder of Commwell Daniel David. a central player in the tele-health market.

Their two products are The health e care platform which is a multi-mofality , all inclusive, patient centered, home health system and The PhysioGlove is a glove based platform for capturing vital signs. Software is proprietary. It is fast and cost effective.

Omrix Owned by ethicon a j&j company
John Gethon presented us the company. They have a Decentralized management approach with Growth strategy.
Historical fact for Omrix
1995 Established
2005 started to work with ethicon as a supplier
2008 sold to jnj for 400 mil$ had 220 employees.
Today 460 employees.

The products are:

Stop bleeding made of Seal tissue.
Fibrin pad tissue will be released next year.

Day 2 Itamar medical and iscar

Itamar medical

Today we went to Itamar medical which Is a medical company which develops, markets and sells diagnostic medical devices based on Peripheral Arterial Tone.
Their two main products are Endopat which watches the endothelial dysfunction (how the heart beats) and Watchpat which watches the behavior of the sleep pattern of a patient.

The applications are for medical studies And follow ups. The results are much cheaper than blood tests and more consumer friendly.

I found this concept very interesting and hope it gets adopted widely, even more than it is now throughout the USA.

We went to Haifa for Lunch where it was pooring down rain. We were supposed to visit the Baha’i Shrines and gardens located on the edge of the city center. Unfortunately the rain prevented is from visiting the gardens but we saw them from above.

Then we visited Iscar “where innovation never stops”.

It is the world leader full line supplier of precision carbide metal working tools.
The global business of this industry is 13 billion dollars. They are market leader. Their main focus is research and development to be always ahead of the competition. They have to teams assigned for each product one that fights for it and another one against it.
Their products go through a series of tests assuring the best quality possible.

The challenge is to improve a basic metal tool in order to increase productivity. The objectives defined by the market drive innovation.

What impressed me was the location of the company on a hill overlooking a big part of the neon outing region. I believe that on a clear day we could see the libanese border since we were only 10 km south of it.
The production line is totally automated and everything is very clean.

Day1 Tel aviv stock exchange and Better Place

Tel aviv stock exchange is the engine of Israel’s economy.

Kobi Avramov made us a quick presentation of Israel’s economy:

225billion dollars in global market cap at the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.
GDP growth is on average 5% a year.
40% of GDP are exports.
30000$ GDP per capita per year.
there is a 2-3% inflation rate on average per year in Israel.

About the Stock Exchange:

Openedd in 1953 it is now a fully automatized exchange that is operated by computers electronically
It is an important vehicle for companies to raise money.
Capital gains on stocks are taxed at 25%.

Most of the ownership is Israeli based. The data for foreign investors was not available and would be hard to monitor, because trading is anonymous.

The market is not very big and the geopolitical situation of Israel is not very appealing to foreign investors. This is why the second latest nationality of companies on the NASDAQ in New York in terms of market cap are Israeli corporations. Mostly in the high tech sector.

Better place

Then , we went to Better Place which is a company that has a concept of renting batteries on cars in order to splitt the cost of the battery over time. The revolutionary concept is that there are switch stations that allow the user to switch batteries in less than five minutes in order to go on driving. The switch stations charge the batteries over time. Knowing that the full charge of the battery would take about six hours, this is a big time gain and an incentive to buy an electric car because it makes I affordable. The negative poo I have is that the range of the car is only 160 km with full charge which makes it not very practicle to drive long distances. However for countries such as Israel where they will be fully operational in march and danemark, this could really work well.

Cars have a competitive price and government incentive for users to buy them, they are environmentally friendly, the users make an Eco friendly action by buying the car. It is a very good idea In my opinion however the investment cost to beginn is huge and I don’t know how profitable the model is. We will see over time. If more than just one brand ( Renault fluence) adopts the model, it would give a choice to consumers and increase the sales even more.
The negative point is that the trunk is limited due to the battery in the back and the short range for long distance travel. We got a chance to test drive the cars. It was really interesting to drive drive in complete silence up to 70 miles an hour.
The battle between hybrid and completely electric car has begun. We will see how long it will take for the hybrid cars to be taken over by total electrical ones like better place offers.

We had a late lunch at a Restaurant called liliyot. It was a kosher restaurant run by a social entrepreneur which motto was “People Food Soul”
The concept is that the restaurant train socially difficult teenagers who dropped out of school. There are permanently 15 youth who are training to be chefs and to prepare food.
I found this concept really interesting because of the ludic side. When you eat you know that the food is. Ei g prepared by someone who struggled in life and wants to do better. When you pay for the food you know the profits benefit society in a concrete way.

FieldTrip to Israel

Hello
My name is David Aschenbroich.
I took a field trip course that is taking me to Israel with a group of ten students from Pace University.

I am quite exited to go to Israel. I have heard so much about it. I hope I will have the opportunity make my own opinion on several levels. About the culture, the historical heritage, the constant war state the country is in. Israelis are very flexible and short term Oriented is my outside view on things.

I should get a little bit of sleep before my trip.