With the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza now in its second week and a ceasefire apparently not on the horizon, tens of thousands of Israeli families in the south of the country are looking for safe haven from rocket fire from Hamas in the Gaza Strip. 

Joining the war effort, an Israeli tech company has created a new online platform to help these Israelis who have been displaced or evacuated find a safe place to stay. 

Families in the north of the country are also leaving their homes as Lebanese-based terror group Hezbollah and Palestinian groups in Lebanon and Syria have also begun firing at Israeli civilian population across those borders.  

The Israeli government has made some 50,000 hotel rooms available to house citizens who have been forced to leave their homes, but it is not enough to support them all. 

The Safe Zone platform connects the Israelis who have to leave their homes to potential hosts willing to welcome them in their own homes or in other accommodations for free.  

The app was the initiative of the CEO of the tech company, who wishes to remain anonymous, working alongside a group of volunteers. 

“It is hard to miss the fact that there is a substantial number of families who currently do not have a home or have been evacuated,” the CEO told NoCamels. 

“We saw that people were asking on social media if someone could host them. So we decided to do it in a more orderly fashion and so we built the platform, which has become the biggest platform in the country,” he says. 

Users of the app can look for a place to stay according to criteria such as geographic location, the amount of people who have to be hosted, whether they can bring their pets and even the kind of bomb shelter available in the event of rocket fire. 

“People can search by our many filters,” he says. “For example, whether they want to be hosted in a kosher home, the number of beds they need or if it is suitable for people with disabilities.” 

He says that sometimes a family is still in the location and has freed up space for guests or has opened up the entire home for hosting. 

The platform already has thousands of beds available for people who had to leave their homes, which the CEO calls “truly heartwarming.” He says that thousands of people have also used the platform already to find a safe place to stay. 

The platform is staffed by a “kind of war room” of about 20 volunteers, he says. These volunteers review a potential match between hosts and guests who have already made contact through the platform, verify that the place is suitable, and ensure that the placement is confirmed. 

Safe Zone has versions for desktop browser and for mobile, and the hosting is entirely free, according to the CEO.  For now the app is only in Hebrew, although the desktop version can be translated into other languages by the browser.

The CEO says that some hotels, youth hostels and even municipalities have taken the initiative and are using the platform to promote accommodation for those in need.  

He has also made a call for people with similar initiatives to contact the platform through the website in order to join forces and make all the efforts speedier and more effective.  

“We will keep it going for as long as it is needed,” the CEO tells NoCamels. “It’s a national effort – we want to help.”  

The post New App Helps Displaced Israelis Find Safe Haven In Wartime appeared first on NoCamels.

How do you make solar energy even more efficient and cost effective? According to Israeli startup XFloat you do it by putting large numbers of photovoltaic panels on water and making them turn to track the sun. 

Photovoltaic technology converts light from the sun into electricity using solar cells. These cells or panels can be placed on the ground, roofs and walls as well as bodies of water.  

Xfloat CEO and veteran tech entrepreneur Ran Alcalay tells NoCamels that photovoltaic (PV) panels are the most cost-efficient means to generate renewable energy, which led the company founders to explore ways of making it an even more efficient source. 

“What we see now is the huge potential of using the surface of water to build energy generation,” he says. 

“The agenda was to go and focus 100 percent on a market that is now called FPV – floating photovoltaic [panels]. It’s a fast growing market; it’s still considered to be a niche, but it’s maybe the fastest growing niche in the photovoltaic market.”

In fact, the FPV market is predicted to grow significantly, increasing by 25% annually over the next few years. 

“PV and floating is the perfect mix,” Alcalay says. 

One of the major issues with expanding the use of PV energy is the availability of space for the panels needed to absorb the light of the sun – making water an extremely viable option. 

Another issue is the limited time in which static panels can absorb the rays of the sun, which is where Xfloat’s technology comes in.  

It is the company’s intelligent water management system that allows the panels to move with the sun. The system works by installing the floating panels on top of buoyancy tanks laid out in a massive grid, which Alcalay calls “a huge floating carpet.” 

Each panel is connected to a tank, and each tank is connected to the system that follows the sun through the sky. This system, with its proprietary algorithms, pumps water in and out of the tanks in order to angle the panels to chase the light.  

“We developed the software and hardware parts together,” Alcalay says. “The whole idea was to have an autonomous system.”  

Data from the FPVs at each plant is collected via the cloud and analyzed to improve the system. 

“From early on, we understood that it’s not only about the mechanical parts, but it’s also about the data that we can generate and learn from,” he explains. 

Each project has site specific issues, he says, so in order to maximize performance, the system at every plant has individual continuous data acquisition and data processing. 

“We can teach the system to optimize itself to its location.” 

The Caesaria-based company was founded in 2017 by naval engineers and people with experience in data processing. “It’s kind of a weird mix,” Alcalay admits. 

Xfloat, he says, was the first company to provide an alternative to the fixed FPVs and is currently producing the biggest fields of the floating panels in the world. 

At the outset, the company examined static FPVs, he explains, by developing “a fully holistic approach” to the structures, and then by focusing on three key aspects to refine the titling panels.  

First, Xfloat looked at performance and how to improve the energy yield through mobile panels. And according to Acalay, the tiling movement that tracks the sun results in 20 percent more yield. 

They then took into consideration the durability of the panels, which Alcalay says should be operational for up to 30 years on the water, which he calls “a harsh environment.” 

And finally, Xfloat looked at how to become more cost effective. 

“It is very evident that in the energy industry as a whole, but specifically this [one], the financial model is the key. So you have to build everything that will support the returns of the developer and investors.” 

The company received funding from “strategic investors” and the Israel Innovation Authority to get off the ground. And in February, Miya, an international leader in integrated water efficiency systems from Spain, acquired a minority stake in the startup as part of its own expansion plans. 

The Xfloat technology is already in operation on two reservoirs in Hof HaCarmel Regional Council in northern Israel, where together they form what Alcalay says is the biggest FPV tracker in the world. 

Now the reservoirs are not only used to irrigate local agriculture in Hof HaCarmel, but have helped the regional council to reach 100 percent green energy usage.  

“Instead of building these very large installations on land, you keep those green fields open and allow them to be used for agriculture,” he says.  

The post Catching Rays: Floating Solar Panels Tilt To Face The Sun  appeared first on NoCamels.

A visit to the bakery usually involves temptation by cupcakes or pastries in enticing hues of orange, pink and purple. What if we could create those vibrant shades of sweet treats without artificial additives and as naturally as bread rises? 

Israeli startup Phytolon (a combination of phyto, the Greek word for plant, and lon, Arabic for color) has developed strains of baker’s yeast that can produce 75 percent of the colors used in the food industry – including shades of orange, red, pink and purple. 

The startup’s yeast produces the betalain pigments that are naturally found in bright red beetroot, sunny yellow cactus fruit and brilliantly purple dragon fruit. 

The special strains of yeast produce these colors through fermentation – a natural process in which microorganisms normally transform sugars and starches into products such as carbon dioxide or alcohol. Phytolon’s fermentation process results in betalain instead.

The startup says it takes a “very short time” to produce large amounts of pigment, which can then be used in confectionery, baking, dairy products and even plant-based meats. 

And unlike natural food coloring, which is traditionally sourced from plants such as beetroot or turmeric, the company says its yeast need far fewer resources to produce its pigments, making it more environmentally friendly and sustainable.

“You don’t need as much land, you don’t need as much water, and you don’t need any pesticides,” Inbal Eshet-Kessler, Head of Product at Phytolon, tells NoCamels. 

For example, says Eshet-Kessler, without the Phytolon method, producing just one kilogram of betalain pigment from beetroot means planting several fields of the plant. 

And, she says, this does not even include the process of extracting the pigments, which commonly requires the use of ultrasound, microwave, pressurized liquid, as well as other methods.

Furthermore, the non-yeast pigments soon lose their vibrant hues due to standard processing and storage, for once they’ve been extracted from plants, the betalains are less stable against heat, light and oxidation. Since the betalains from Phytolon’s fermentation process do not use plant residues, Eshet-Kessler says that the colors are more stable and “show advantageous performance”.

The technology used by Phytolon was initially developed at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot by Prof. Asaph Aharoni and Dr. Guy Polturak. They sought to better understand the ways in which plants produced their betalain pigments, something that had previously not been well studied. 

Aharoni and his team at the Weizmann Institute’s Plant and Environmental Sciences Department successfully mapped the specific genes that control the linked series of chemical reactions that lead to betalain being produced. 

By discovering this, they were able to identify the mechanism needed to produce the betalain pigment, explains Eshet-Kessler.

In 2018, the technology transfer arm of the Weizmann Institute – Yeda Research and Development – signed a licensing agreement with investment company Trendlines Group to give Phytolon exclusive rights to the technology.

Since its creation, Phytolon, which is based in the northern city of Yokneam Illit, has raised around $21 million in investment from investors, including Boston-based Ginkgo Bioworks and Israel’s Trendlines Group. 

The startup has already used its natural colorants in projects with several large US-based food companies and believes its pigment process will receive US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval by next year. 

“The compatibility with different food applications makes our solution quite broad,” Eshet-Kessler explains. 

She says Phytolon’s biggest competitors are the synthetic and natural food coloring companies that already exist on the market. But, she says, many food conglomerates trying to create vibrant colors from natural, cost-efficient sources are more likely to simply turn to Phytolon as an easy solution. 

“Using fermentation technology allows us to make everything more friendly to people and to the planet,” says Eshet-Kessler. “We make plant pigments – only we don’t use any plants.”

The post Creating Rainbow Of Natural Food Colors Is Easy As Baking Bread appeared first on NoCamels.

For people diagnosed with serious illnesses such as cancer, the treatment period can mean a maze of emotions, appointments and medical jargon that can often prove overwhelming. 

Israeli startup Belong.Life, created by the son of a cancer patient, has built an entire social media platform around the specific needs of people undergoing treatment – and their loved ones – to help navigate through this stressful time.

“We started Belong in the cancer space because it was very emotional for us,” CTO Irad Deutsch tells NoCamels. 

When Deutsch’s mother was diagnosed with lung cancer eight years ago, he found that for all his experience in data and the digital sphere, he was unable to make sense of what she was going through or use his skills to provide practical help. 

“I felt clueless,” he says. “I never went to med school and it was hard for me to navigate [and] I was her primary caregiver. 

“One year into the process, I knew a lot, but that was too late for my mother to make any impact on her journey. Maybe we couldn’t have saved her, but we could have improved her quality of life and maybe prolonged it.” 

Determined to help other families living through similar situations, in 2016 Deutch, co-founder and CEO Eliran Malki and their team sat down to brainstorm a solution. 

“We shared our knowledge and everybody in the team had similar experiences with a dad, a spouse, a grandma,” he recalls. 

“So we said, we know data, we know how to play with data and how to extract value out of it. Why don’t we do something to improve patient lives through data? That was the moment where Belong was born.” 

The Belong team created a free social media app for cancer patients to anonymously share their experiences, tips for coping with the rigors of treatment, and dealing with the inevitable emotional challenges. 

Belong also invited medical professionals working in the field of oncology to share their knowledge with app users. 

“We put into the community [space] experts to answer all sorts of questions: experts in oncology, specific tumors, mutations, radiation, palliative care, even holistic things – [for example] sexuality and cancer is a big psychological issue,” Deutsch says. 

Cancer charities and support groups warn that patients can feel a sense of isolation while undergoing treatment, often believing that others struggle to understand what they are going through. They strongly advocate joining support groups or talking to experienced medical professionals about how they are feeling. 

And in addition to the emotional support it offered, the app also has a space for the multitude of documents that accompany complex, long-term medical treatment for illnesses such as cancer. 

The app, which can be downloaded onto a smartphone or tablet, allows users to upload all their documentation into a private group so that it can be shared by loved ones who are involved in a patient’s personal treatment. 

Patients can also share this documentation with others undergoing similar cancer treatment, allowing them to learn from one another’s experiences and therapy choices. 

“What we have is patients engaging with experts, friends, mentors, for a long period of time, almost on a daily basis. The average cancer patient uses Belong 15 times a month,” he says.

The app has proved so popular that Deutsch says it is currently in use by one in four cancer patients in Israel and one in 10 in the US. 

In fact, he says, Belong has even permitted the creation of white label offshoots, allowing medical institutions to create their own version of the app for their patients. 

Killing Giants 

Determined to expand the help it offers, the company also recently introduced a virtual AI mentor to offer support and advice to cancer patients and their nearest and dearest. 

The mentor is called Dave after David, the biblical king of Israel who slew the giant Goliath. After all, Deutsch says, cancer is each patient’s individual Goliath to slay.  

The company used machine learning and massive amounts of data about the disease to train Dave to help support people through their cancer journey. 

Dave is essentially a very carefully curated, very closely monitored form of ChatGPT for cancer patients, based on verified authentic medical information and data gathered over the past seven years. 

“People go to Dave and say, ‘Hey, Dave, I’ve been doing this treatment and that treatment. Why am I given this? What is the protocol?’” Deutsch says. 

“And Dave will elaborate and explain to you in a very empathetic way what the protocols are, how the guidelines work, why decisions are being made.” 

In fact, Deutsch used the mentor himself recently, when his own father was undergoing cancer treatment. It helped him understand some of the post-surgery issues his father was experiencing and find a suitable response. 

“Dave can highlight things for you in the journey, and breach the technical gaps in you understanding complex things, in a way that you can digest,” he says.

Dave’s twin at Belong – as Deutch puts it – is Tara, an AI platform to match patients at the end of the road with conventional treatment to clinical trials of experimental therapies in which they can potentially participate. 

Tara scours all available information about the hundreds of thousands of clinical trials for cancer and matches it to the individual based on location and the form of the disease.

The platform can even scan a patient’s medical records and deduce which mutation is present in order to find a suitable trial. It can even locate clinical trials that have not yet been made public by medical institutions.

“She can read everything in seconds,” Deutsch says. The startup is now also being approached by hospitals looking for candidates for upcoming trials.  

With the success of their platform for cancer patients, Belong has also launched a parallel service for multiple sclerosis sufferers and is working on an app to help people living with Crohn’s disease, a bowel disorder with no cure that causes inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract. 

The company, which is based on Moshav Bnei Atarot near Tel Aviv, has so far raised more than $30 million. But, explains Deutsch, its business model is strictly patient centered. 

“The patient comes first,” he says. “There’s a big sign in our office: ‘First we do good, then we do well.’ And we stick to that.” 

The post Social Media For Cancer Patients Offers Support And Advice appeared first on NoCamels.

Renting or buying a new property is widely regarded as one of the most stressful things you can do, and is only exacerbated when confronted by a vast empty space without the furniture or trappings that make a house a home. 

An Israeli startup has created an augmented reality (AR) app that allows prospective tenants or buyers to envision a fully furnished living space simply by holding up a smartphone or tablet while standing inside the property. 

“Ninety nine percent of the new apartments for sale or for rent are without furniture in the US,” SparX founder and CEO Dan Lowenthal tells NoCamels. 

“In augmented reality, you add another layer on top of the reality,” he explains. “So we add the layer of furniture on top of the unfurnished apartment.” 

Lowenthal, a veteran real estate entrepreneur, wanted to improve the way in which vacant properties are shown after his own frustrating experience looking for a house for his family in the United States. 

In 2017, he moved with his wife and daughter to the US from Israel for his real estate business, and – ironically – found it difficult to pick out their own new home from a range of unfurnished options. 

“We were shown a bunch of empty apartments and it was very hard for us to envision our life in these empty spaces,” he says.

So Lowenthal and his team in Israel and the US came up with their platform – using a proprietary algorithm to allow potential home renters and buyers to furnish the property they were standing in, in real time and in front of their eyes. 

The startup received investment from the Israel Innovation Authority, the branch of the government dedicated to supporting industrial R&D, as well as Jerusalem-based Terra Venture Partners and various real estate investors.

Many people became aware of augmented reality in 2016, with the release of the Nintendo mobile video game Pokémon Go, which let players scan their surroundings using GPS to search for virtual characters that would appear on their screens. m

The game became a global sensation with more than a billion downloads worldwide in less than three years. 

Cost Cutting 

According to Lowenthal, the AR platform is also a boon for those looking to sell or rent, as staging a home can be a costly affair. 

Furnishing an empty home on a temporary basis involves renting the contents of a house – everything from dining table and sofas to bed linen and towels – to give it that homely feel. 

According to international website HomeAdvisor, staging could cost a private seller up to $2,800, while US real estate professionals say that realtors could pay that sum every month for their listed properties. 

And skipping staging – particularly in the US, where Lowenthal says such a process is standard in real estate – could be even more costly. 

Indeed, in a 2023 survey of American realtors by the National Association of Realtors, 81 percent said staging made it easier for clients to visualize a property as their home, while 52 percent of the realtors said staging affected how most buyers saw a home on the market. 

Furthermore, according to Forbes, a staged home will on average sell for 17 percent more and 87 percent faster than equivalent non-staged homes.  

Home Making

The SparX system consists of three stages. First, the agent scans the empty property and places it on the company platform. Then a range of furnishings and design choices are layered onto the scanned property. 

And finally, the prospective buyer or tenant logs onto the system inside the apartment, using the variety of preset furnishing choices to create an image of what the property looks like as an actual home. 

The platform has already been adopted by leading real estate companies in the US, where around five million homes are sold each year.  

SparX also has teamed up with several home furnishing companies to provide the interiors of empty homes for rent or sale on their platform, and clients can even purchase the furnishing seen on the app. 

“Thanks to SparX patented technology, users can immersively visualize a space’s potential and change the design by functionality, style and budget,” Lowenthal says. 

While other companies do offer technology used to show house listings, including digital imagery to furnish an empty home, none use AR to recreate a fully furnished apartment or house while actually standing inside the property, he explains. 

“The future of home visualization,” he says, “is here.”  

The post Augmented Reality App Makes Empty House Into Potential Home appeared first on NoCamels.

A bird’s eye view of the skies above Basel, Copenhagen and Paris will reveal – aside from the spectacular views – rooftops that lately have been blooming with abundance of greenery. 

These rooftops adorned with vegetables and other vegetation are known as green roofs and have become mandatory for new and freshly renovated spaces in these European cities. 

But the systems are expensive to construct, maintain and repair, and the price of installation alone can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Israeli startup Bing Klima has developed an all-in-one green roofing system that it claims practically pays for itself – topping slate, shingle and tile with solar panels whose generated energy can offset the owner’s electricity bills or be sold to the electric grid operators. 

And these green roofs also benefit the inhabitants of the metropolis below by countering rising temperatures, preventing floods and even providing free produce. 

“Urban areas and cities are getting affected by climate change more and more,” Oded Shamir, co-founder of Bing Klima, tells NoCamels.  

“Heavy rains that can lead to floods, the urban heat island effect, biodiversity, and of course, food and energy security – they are all worsened by climate change,” says the veteran entrepreneur.

Adaptive Technology

Bing Klima uses agrivoltaics, a technique that uses the same area of land to both generate solar energy and grow crops, which is normally deployed in large agricultural fields. 

The company has produced an entire green roofing system within a single patented module, making it possible to use this method on much smaller areas like rooftops. Each unit contains a solar panel, a hydroponic growing system and a water tank, which both irrigates and anchors the entire module to the roof. 

“The combination of green roofs and solar panels lets us bring fresh produce and energy generation to the places they’re needed most: cities,” says Shamir.   

The mobile modules developed by Bing Klima are designed to be easy to install, especially when compared to other green roofs and solar panels that cannot be moved once they are constructed. 

It also operates in cold weather and in poor natural light, due to the company’s patented system.

There are numerous companies worldwide and indeed in Israel that construct solar panels and green roofs. 

But, says Shamir, there are only two other companies on the planet that combine both into a single system. And, he explains, the Bing Klima system – unlike its competitors – prevents roots from growing through to the roof and causing leaks and damage to the underlying structure. 

The startup has also installed its systems on the roofs of real estate and schools.

“Partnering with schools is amazing, because the children learn about climate change, renewable energy and urban agriculture through our systems,” says Shamir.

Greenery And Genealogy 

Founded in 2020 and located on Kibbutz HaGoshrim in the Galilee, Bing Klima honors the founders’ family history even as it moves to mitigate environmental damage. 

‘Bing Brothers’ was once the biggest toy company in the world, but its Jewish owners and Shamir’s relatives, the descendants of founders Ignaz and Adolf Bing, were forced to flee Nazi Germany to England. 

“We wanted to bring the name back so people could learn about its origin,” Shamir says. 

The company founders (also two brothers) coupled Bing with Klima – Greek for slope or region and the origin of the modern word climate – and maintained the original toy company’s logo incorporating the letters B and W (for Bing Werke). 

Today Bing Klima sells its systems to green roofing suppliers in the United States and Spain. Shamir believes more European countries should follow the Spanish example as it provides roof owners with a potential return on their investment that could pay for the system itself. 

“It’s a totally different financial model, because we bring the solar energy into the building or sell it to the grid, and this money can be used to finance the green investment,” he says.

The post All-In-One Kit Turns Urban Roofs Into Energy-Producing Gardens appeared first on NoCamels.

In 1976, a Philadelphia hotel hosted an annual convention to celebrate American war vets – but just days after its close, 25 attendees had died of what was believed to be a spate of sudden heart attacks.

The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) later found that a specific bacterium – bred in the cooling tower of the hotel’s air conditioning system and spread throughout the building – was the true cause of the tragedy. 

Since then, Legionnaires’ disease – named for the veterans’ convention that had been staged by the American Legion at the hotel – has infected thousands of people every year. 

The Legionella bacteria, which attacks the lungs, is potentially deadly and can infect people who accidentally swallow or merely breathe in small droplets of infected water. 

Today environmentally friendly, chemical free technology developed by an Israeli firm is being used to cleanse cooling and heating towers of the bacteria and to prevent potential outbreaks. 

On average 1 in 10 people who are infected with Legionnaires’ will die of complications from it, the CDC reports. This figure rises to 1 in 4 for people who contract in this serious form of pneumonia in a healthcare facility.  

Cleaning Solution 

CET Enviro uses electric currents to purify the water circulating through power plants, industrial chillers and the air conditioning systems in businesses, hotels and other residential facilities.  

Every 40 minutes, the solution automatically funnels the water in these systems into a CET Enviro reaction tank placed on the roof of a building. In the tank, electrolysis generates strong oxidizing agents to inhibit the growth of Legionella bacteria by breaking the funneled water down to its basic, unbonded elements of hydrogen and oxygen.

These oxidizing agents include naturally occuring chlorine, which can rid a cooling system of the Legionella bacteria by attacking its cell walls and breaking down its chemical bonds, causing it to literally fall apart.

“Our system is always cleaning, always filtering, always moving the water around,” says Asaf Dahan, CET Enviro’s chief product officer. 

Several other companies use electrolysis to clean water too, but what sets CET Enviro apart are several secret features within the reaction tank, according to Dahan.

“Electrolysis isn’t anything new – but we’ve patented add-ons to it that have improved the process,” he says.

What’s more, says Dahan, CET Enviro uses advanced sensors within its systems to gather data that isn’t normally collected by other water-cleaning companies, including the levels of pH and foreign substances in the water. 

This allows CET Enviro to flag pollution issues within the cooling towers such as limescale and corrosion, before they become a serious problem and also cause disease. 

The company says that its automated, online system also cuts energy costs by 15 percent, decreases water usage by up to 40 percent and slashes labor costs by up to half. 

Most companies in the industrial and commercial cooling sector, according to Dahan, primarily use harsh chemicals – such as hydrochloric, sulfamic and methane sulfonic acid – to clean their water coolers.

The environmental impact of these chemicals aside, CET Enviro says they also fail to provide a permanent solution to preventing and eliminating the growth of Legionella. 

Furthermore, such products are expensive and pose the risk of accidental toxic contamination for the workers who have to handle them. 

Since its creation in 2015 by cleantech entrepreneur Tsur Ben David, CET Enviro has installed its systems in over 2,000 buildings worldwide. The firm is based in Pune, India, and conducts its R&D out of Israel. 

Multiple sectors are already using the solution, CET Enviro says, including hotels and malls, pharma giant Teva, and even global electronics leader Samsung.

“We’re always searching for ways to improve our product while trying to understand the needs of our customers,” says Dahan. “We have different data and a different approach.”  

The post Thwarting Deadly Lung Disease By Electrifying Water Reserves appeared first on NoCamels.

As the digital world expands to every area of our lives, we have become used to automated banking – with our transactions carried out instantly and with just one click. 

But behind the ease with which we move our money about is still a meticulous process of verification, known as compliance, ensuring that our transactions abide by the letter of the law and are innocent of financial crime.  

Israeli company Thetaray has developed a new AI platform that “intuits” that the billions of dollars, euros and even shekels that are moved around the world every day are untouched by the money laundering carried out by drug cartels, terror groups and even human traffickers. 

And unlike other companies that will inadvertently flag innocuous transactions, Thetaray maintains that SONAR almost always only singles out genuinely problematic requests.  

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), money laundering usually follows three steps: placement, or moving money from a direct link to a crime; layering, or hiding the money trail to make illicit funds hard to track; and integration, or making the money appear to be from a legitimate source.  

All of these steps rely on financial institutions failing to spot the origins of the money – and the statistics show that do often they slide through the cracks, however much time and manpower is devoted to thwarting such endeavors. 

Global Operations

The UNODC estimates that between 2 and 5 percent of the global GDP – some $800 billion – is laundered every year. It points out, however, that it is hard to know the true sum due to the secretive nature of the process. 

Thetaray’s SONAR is a cloud-based Software as a Service (Saas) platform that plows through all the data of a financial institution, raising a red flag about any transaction that could be illicit in nature. 

It works by ignoring the painstaking, established “rules based” monitoring of transactions that raises multiple false positives, Thetaray CEO Peter Reynolds tells NoCamels, and instead seeks out unusual yet apparently harmless behavior that might otherwise slip through the net. 

Reynolds says that this means that SONAR has 95 percent less false positives as compared to other transaction verification programs, requiring less time and effort on false alarms and making it easier to spot genuine money laundering. 

“If you and I worked in compliance, and we got 95 percent less alerts to look at and all those alerts were very detection worthy, you have much less to look at and the ones that [SONAR] did give you to look at were financial crimes,” Reynolds explains. 

People trying to launder money are just as cognizant of the rules and the violations that sound an alert, Reynolds says, and they make every effort to escape notice. 

He cites the example of someone trying to pass multiple transfers of small sums instead of two or three larger transactions. SONAR can spot these indiscernible yet nefarious activities, Reynolds says, due to what he calls its “market-leading, state-of-the-art AI.” 

More Than A Feeling

With machine learning that uses a constant stream of previous transactions to educate the platform about the difference between innocent and corrupt activities, the AI has been taught to intuit when a certain action does not “feel” right.  

“AI intuition is that ability to sniff something out and say: based on everything else we see, based on how other models look, it just doesn’t look like a normal transaction,” Reynolds explains.  

He compares this intuition to the feeling you might get from an entertainment venue that looks innocuous from the outside, but whose location or even exterior façade triggers your sense that something is out of place. It looks perfectly acceptable, Reynolds says, but an innate instinct tells you that this is not quite right. 

Founded in 2013, the Hod Hasharon-based company raised $57 million in its most recent funding round, with backers including Israeli entrepreneur Erel Margalit’s JVP and the Jerusalem-based OurCrowd. 

SONAR is used by dozens of financial institutions worldwide, among them Santander, Payoneer, ClearBank and MFS Africa, and is hosted on Microsoft’s cloud computing platform Azure. 

According to Reynolds, SONAR’s ability to weed out just the genuinely problematic transactions and ignore the “noise” is financially beneficial to companies who can relocate resources that previously went on the crucial work of monitoring transactions in order to meet international regulatory standards.  

“It’s almost like turning compliance into a profit center because you can start to process the transactions that have no risk,” he says. “The transactions that are bad, you absolutely stop.”

The post AI Money Laundering Watchdog That ‘Senses’ A Financial Crime  appeared first on NoCamels.

Israeli giants of industry such as 3D printer Stratasys and defense technology company Elbit have spent the last eight months developing innovative solutions – not to benefit their businesses, but to ease ongoing issues faced by wounded veterans. 

Restart, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of Israel’s wounded veterans, recruited these companies to design and produce innovative solutions to the specific needs of 21 vets. 

Each year, the organization’s annual Makers for Heroes program recruits teams of volunteers with relevant qualifications and knowledge to solve problems faced by the vets every day.

The teams of volunteers recently unveiled their solutions to the public at the Makers for Heroes 2023 Finale, held at Bloomfield in Tel Aviv, the country’s national soccer stadium. 

And this year’s turnout was the best the organization has seen so far, according to Restart COO Boaz Hochstein. 

“A lot of people got to be exposed to the veterans and the challenges they’re facing, as well as the organization and the solutions we’re creating through the program,” he tells NoCamels. 

Every year, Restart uses the program to address a major challenge faced by the veteran community. This year, the organization tackled complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) – a condition that leaves a person feeling pain that is disproportionate to their injuries, even years after they were sustained. 

Himself a wounded vet, Hochstein says that while many Israeli veterans deal with CRPS, the syndrome is not truly understood outside of their community – even by medical professionals. 

“We found that more and more vets have been coming to us with CRPS every year,” he says. “So this year, we chose that to be in our spotlight.”

Half of the challenges suggested by this year’s vets were directly related to the personal struggles they face due to this condition. 

Tzahi Atedgi, 47, lost the lower part of his left leg during his service almost 30 years ago, leaving him suffering from CRPS. He had not been able to stand on his leg without deeply hunching his back, and relied on a wheelchair or uncomfortable crutches for mobility.

His dream to stand straight on his leg without pain was made a reality by his team at Restart, which included volunteer specialists from Elbit.

Tzahi’s tailor-made solution came in the form of a leg brace that supports his knee, straightens his leg and elevates his foot so that he can walk with his crutches without feeling pain. 

At the Makers for Heroes finale, he was able to straighten up for the first time in years. This changed his outlook on everything, says Hochstein, helping him reconnect with his estranged family and even land a permanent job just weeks later. 

Hochstein called Tzahi’s experience one of the most emotionally rewarding solutions the program has come up with thus far.

“This is an example of it never being too late to ask for help,” he says. 

Yahel Landau, another one of this year’s vets, is a 24-year-old former member of the Border Police who was wounded during a car ramming. She had lasting foot pain following the attack, to the point where she could not find any shoes that were comfortable to wear. 

Stratasys, a leader in 3D printing, created built-in custom insoles for a pair white Comverse sneakers that let her walk pain-free for the first time since she was wounded. Four days after the Makers for Heroes finale, Landau actually wore the sneakers to walk down the aisle at her wedding, and could even take to the dancefloor at the celebration. 

“When she came to us eight months ago, she said, ‘All I want to do is dance at my wedding and not die walking down the aisle’,” Hochstein recalls. “Seeing pictures and videos of her twirling around the dancefloor was incredible.”

Other solutions from this year’s program included an app that helps CRPS patients monitor their pain and determine whether the treatments they are taking are helping them, and a custom PlayStation controller that attaches to the user’s upper leg so that they can play video games one-handed. 

Tailor-Made Teams 

Each year, the Makers for Heroes program begins with Restart accepting 50 applications from wounded veterans.

The organization then narrows that down to 20-25 proposals, based on the capabilities of its volunteers and partners. It then tries to match each vet with a team it believes are best suited to develop their solution. 

While the program officially comprises just four meetings (a brainstorming session, two hackathons and the finale), Hochstein says most teams meet once every week or two weeks. The wounded veteran is also encouraged to attend to provide input. 

Restart tries to also ensure that each team includes someone who cared for the vet during their rehabilitation. This means that the team includes someone who already knows the vet’s background and the challenges they face, and makes sure that the rest of the team does not push them too hard.

Restart was founded in 2014 to help the many soldiers who were hospitalized during Operation Protective Edge, the military operation in Gaza launched following the abduction and murder of three Israeli teenagers by members of Hamas, the militant group running the coastal enclave. 

Then-Restart CEO Niv Efron told NoCamels last year that the program was created after some members of the high-tech sector visited wounded soldiers. 

“They wanted to volunteer and give something back,” he said. “But they didn’t want to just make them happy – they wanted to do something meaningful.”

Restart hopes to soon mass produce some of these solutions and offer them to other wounded veterans in Israel, and even non-vets dealing with similar challenges.

Hochstein cites one of last year’s solutions as an example – a magnet clip for crutches that ensures they don’t clatter to the ground every time a person sets them aside. 

“This year, we gave out copies of the product to almost 30 different veterans who needed them,” he says.

Hochstein hopes to open up product distribution so wounded veterans can simply apply for them online, and have volunteers offer service repairs when needed.

“It’s the first time we’ve actually done this in such a widespread way,” says Hochstein. “We’ve taken big leaps this year into becoming more substantially impactful.”

The post Tech Innovators Come Together To Help Israel’s Wounded Warriors appeared first on NoCamels.

Israel has long been known for its innovation, earning its moniker of startup nation for its technological advances in medicine, climate change, agriculture and more.

And that innovation has reached the country’s wine market, with sellers and growers alike turning to unique methods of growing, development and even hiring workers.

And as Jews all over the world toast to celebrate Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year), NoCamels celebrates some of those Israeli innovators whose creativity and hard work helped to fill the wine glasses we hold aloft.

Modern Solutions To Ancient Traditions

A trailblazer in the field of modern desert viticulture, Prof. Aaron Fait of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has played a major role in reviving the once-common wine industry in Israel’s hot, sandy south.

Grapevines are not new to the Middle East’s desert environment, Fait tells NoCamels.

In fact, he says, there is evidence of wine production throughout history in Israel, including presses and quite large-scale production of grapes found in the northern Negev. It was only the advent of the Ottoman Empire in the 13th century that wrought the end of desert viticulture.

But the Israeli wine boom of the past three decades has encompassed the Negev and revived a lost art, Fait explains. Today Israel has hundreds of different wineries of varying sizes, including several dozen in the Negev alone.

A plant biochemist originally specializing in tomatoes, Fait moved to what he calls the more “fun” field of viticulture when he arrived in the Negev from Europe in the 1990s.

He says he saw small wineries sprouting up in the desert and “felt it was really the moment to get into it.”

Because of the desert climate that is vastly different to the conditions in the north and the center of the country – home to most of Israel’s wineries – different growing methods have to be used, Fait explains.

But, he says, the wine growers were experiencing difficulties as they were trying to use the same growing and irrigation practices as vintners in the center and the north of Israel.

“To customize practices that can deal with the environment means a multi-level approach,” he says.

“I felt that there was a lack of understanding and lack of knowledge on how to really grow grapes. And this is why I started multidisciplinary research.”

The first thing to consider was which grapes could thrive in the arid climate of the Negev, and Fait carried out trials of 30 different varieties.

The study showed that white grape varieties were better suited to the climate, mainly because they mature faster and require less exposure to the harsh elements than red varieties. Similarly, grapes in the desert are not grown in clusters on the traditional vine as this also increases exposure to a burning sun in cloudless skies.

Developing greater green canopy cover for the grapes also helped with the issue of irrigation and water conservation, he says, with water scarcity a fact of life in the desert.

And now with the world’s climate changing, Fait is advising wine growers around the world who are dealing with an industry in flux.

“Wine is not dying, but the wine sector needs to adapt,” he says, just as he has done over the past 30 years.

Community Cultivation

Tulip Winery has innovated in a more unusual way – bringing the community of adults with special needs that houses the vineyard into the wine-making process.

Kfar Tikva (Village of Hope), some 10 miles from Israel’s major northern city of Haifa, is a residential community of around 200 adults with cognitive, developmental and emotional disabilities.

The village encourages residents to be as independent as possible in all aspects of their lives, including where they live and work, how they spend their leisure time and even in the relationships they form.

The winery sees itself as a “social business.” To support this ethos, the winery employs members of the community in various areas of the business, including the grape harvest and bottling process.

Kfar Tikva residents also work in the visitors’ center, where guests at the winery discover Tulip’s wine-making processes, sample the products and even learn about the village itself.

“The idea [for the partnership] came from the Itzhaki family who established the winery, as they wanted to do something good for the world and for the community,” Lotan Wiessman Atar, Tulip’s marketing and export manager, tells NoCamels.

Tulip CEO Roy Itzhaki and other members of the family simply knocked on the door of the Kfar Tikva manager and told him about the idea, she says.

“He couldn’t have been happier.”

The winery started in 2003 in a single small room in Kfar Tikva, producing just 7,000 bottles. Twenty years later, it employs 40 people from the village and produces 400,000 bottles annually, while still using a boutique winery system.

“[The Kfar Tikva staff] bring us joy,” she says. “They appreciate the little things, have a lot of patience and every employee makes us the family that we are.”

Pairing Your Wine With Your Palate

Designed by wine connoisseurs for wine novices, Tel Aviv-based Winest recommends the perfect plonk for your taste and even delivers it to your door (within a certain distance).

The company’s website invites users to answer a short survey about their tastes and palates, asking questions about preferred coffee, scents and even salad dressing to work out which wine best matches with each individual.

Co-founder and COO Katya Shokhina, a self-admitted wine lover, tells NoCamels that Israel, with its growing wine industry, aspirational attitudes and strong service-based sector, was the natural location for such a company.

“People need more comfort, more convenience, more care,” she says. “They want to be part of a lifestyle where it’s not hard to get your products.”

Shokhina says that the company is based on the “crucial” concept of a digital sommelier. But to maintain a truly expert experience, all the suggestions come from a list compiled by renowned Georgian sommelier Tazo Tamazishvili.

His list of wines from around the world spans famous, beloved brands and the products of small, innovative wineries that few have even heard of.

“Learning about wine is a part of the process of drinking,” Shokhina says.

“We want our service to be useful for people who are not wine enthusiasts and who do not know much about wine and also for people who are digging into wine and who want to know more.”

A Truly Rosh Hashanah Wine

A little north of the Sea of Galilee, sits a creator of wine whose main ingredient is a staple of the New Year holiday – the pomegranate.

Taking its name from the Hebrew word for the fruit, Rimon Winery was founded in 2004 by father and son Gaby and Avi Nahmias, who come from three generations of Israeli agriculturalists.

The award-winning winery was the very first in the world to make wine from the fruit. The key to this successful innovation, according to Rimon, is its use of pomegranates specially cultivated by the adjacent Moshav Ben Zimra to have a higher sugar content than normal.

The wine is made by taking out the many grains found inside the pomegranate, extracting their juice and fermenting it over a period of several months before aging it in French oak barrels. The process is slower and cooler than those involving grapes, in order to preserve the health benefits for which pomegranates are famous.

Rimon produces over 700,000 bottles each year – a range that includes port, dessert, dry and even rose – selling to wine lovers in Israel and abroad.

The post A Rosh Hashanah Toast To Israel’s Wine Innovators  appeared first on NoCamels.

A model embryo grown in the lab and not the womb, using stem cells and not egg and sperm, could be the future of research into pregnancy and drug testing and even provide bespoke organ transplants, its creator says. 

What Prof. Jacob (Yaqub) Hanna of the Weizmann Institute of Science and his team have created is not a viable baby, he tells NoCamels, but rather a model of an embryo mimicking the stage of development a fetus in utero would have reached by day 14. 

All of the actual development of a fetus happens in the first weeks, Hanna explains. After that, a pregnancy is “just growth,” he says. 

Because these first weeks are so integral to embryonic development, this is the period in which the majority of nonviable pregnancies fail. 

“Most of the developmental defects happen by week five,” Hanna says. “We detect them later, but they happen very early.” 

He explains that studying the early weeks of pregnancy is crucial to understanding these developmental defects, but most women do not even know they are pregnant at this stage. 

And even when they do know, Hanna says, “there is no ethical justification” for removing tissue from the embryo for research that would in any event require hundreds of thousands of samples. 

“One sample here, one sample there – although we are desperate, this is never going to be enough,” he says. 

It was the need to understand these crucial first few weeks of gestation that first led Hanna to build the model embryo using stem cells. The models can then be used to try to understand why defects develop and also to observe the impact of new medications and therapies on an embryo. 

The models are constructed in two ways: either by using tissue from embryos that were donated decades ago or by taking a skin or a blood cell and “erasing everything in it to go back to embryonic stem cell state.” 

The latter method was developed by Prof. Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University, and earned him a 2012 Nobel Prize. 

It is also the preferred method to construct the model, Hanna explains, as it contains the genetic DNA of the cell donor, particularly in cases in which the models will be used to develop organ tissue for transplantation. 

Hanna says that in human pregnancy, organ development – organogenesis – begins at day 15, and is expected to be completed by week eight.  

Tailor-Made Organs

Hanna explains that he and his team at the Rehovot-based Weizmann Institute are now working on a model embryo that replicates development at a later stage than the current 14 days, with the aim of generating organ tissue for transplantation. 

He clarifies that the process of growing any organ begins at day 15 and while it takes almost the entire pregnancy to fully complete, by day 40 “all the ingredients” are there. 

“Then you just wait for them to mature, proliferate, mature more. But all the cell types, all the layers of all the organs are there,” he says.

Hanna gives the example of a leukemia patient who is facing death because he cannot find a blood cell donor who is a match. 

A skin cell from that patient can be transformed into a naïve stem cell (stem cells that have not matured into a specific form) and from that a model embryo can be developed to 30 or 33 days, complete with bone marrow, where the blood cells are made, for transplantation. 

“We have his identical stem cells, can do a bone marrow transplant and save his life,” Hanna says. 

He believes this to be the best way to obtain all the different cell types that are needed by different patients. 

“Rejection is impossible because it is the same DNA [with] no cells from a donor and we save his life. That is our dream, and we think it’s feasible,” he says.  

And so convinced is Hanna that this is the future of medicine, he and several peers have founded a medtech company in this field, called RenewalBio.

Ethical Issues

Hanna is firm that the model embryo absolutely cannot grow into a viable fetus, and is incapable of feeling pain or approaching any form of cognitive development at all. 

“We call them developmental restricted cells,” he says of the cells used to develop the model. This involves removing a single gene so that “there is absolutely no neural tissue.” 

Do not assume that the model embryos are identical to human embryos, he stresses. “They’re not; there are differences.” 

He says that the team even sought counsel from local rabbis, imams and priests on the ethical aspects of the research. 

“This cannot be defined as a human being because it can never be born,” he says. 

Hanna draws a parallel between his work and IVF treatment, whose introduction in the 1970s was also met with questions and uncertainty. He explains that an embryo can only be implanted into the uterus when it is less than 60 cells, and by day 5, an embryo already comprises 70 to 100 cells. 

“It’s more of an aggregate of important tissue,” he says. 

According to Hanna, no other researchers are working on the same principles as him and his team, but he is definite that the process, particularly because of its sensitive nature, should be open for everyone to see and evaluate. The research was recently published in the Nature journal. 

“We report as soon as we have results; we actually want to hear back from the public,” he says. “We want the public to know that nothing is done in the shadows or the dark.”  

The post Scientists Grow Model Embryo In Lab, Without Egg Or Sperm  appeared first on NoCamels.

An Israeli company has produced an insulin-based therapy that strengthens the digestive system of babies born prematurely, helping to stop them from developing life-threatening complications.

And for these babies, every day of proper development is crucial. 

Elgan Pharma says that the preemies who were given its unique therapy reached the ability to absorb all the needed nutrition via their digestive tract and have the central line (a catheter inserted through a vein in their chest) removed significantly faster, in an average of 10 days instead of 15.  

Premature babies are generally born with digestive tracts that are too underdeveloped to break down and absorb nutrition on their own. 

These babies are both tube-fed and given a catheter through a vein in their chest or umbilicus, so that nutrients can be delivered directly to their bloodstream. 

But this places the immunocompromised infants at risk of complications, including the life-threatening illness necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC). This disease can cause a major inflammation of the intestine, lead to necrosis of the colon and intestine and even leave babies permanently disabled. 

Elgan’s ELGN-GI treatment is administered orally to the preemies while they are still being tube-fed in order to develop their digestive system more quickly and reach a stage where they can absorb nutrients unaided.

“Part of the reason we founded the company was to figure out if there was a way to help preterm infants to transition faster to a normal functioning digestive system and thrive,” Miki Olshansky, founder and CEO of Elgan Pharma, tells NoCamels.

“And this is exactly what our drug does.”

Elgan – an acronym for Extremely Low Gestational Age Neonates (babies born before the 32nd week of pregnancy) –  is now planning to launch its final clinical trial of the therapy at the end of the year, a necessary precursor to receiving regulatory approval from the United States’ Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  

The trial, taking place at more than 30 health centers in Israel, Europe and the US, will include 400 preterm infants born in the 26th-32nd week of pregnancy. A parallel trial will study the impact of the therapy on 60 babies born before completing the 26th week of pregnancy.

Key Ingredient For Life

Insulin is a hormone produced naturally in the pancreas by most people, but it has other important roles such as stimulating a baby’s digestive tract to function after birth.

It is the key ingredient in the company’s medicine for infants. And, according to Elgan, by giving it orally it also aids in the growth and function of the gastrointestinal tract (GI) to compensate for early delivery. 

In fact, says Olshansky, preterm babies are underdeveloped when they are born because they miss out on the insulin normally produced in the GI tract when their mother is in her third trimester of pregnancy. 

And in the first several days following the birth of a baby, a mother’s milk also has plenty of insulin to help her newborn’s GI tract quickly mature. However, in the case of premature babies, it is not enough to help the digestive system develop to the point where a feeding tube is not needed. 

Elgan says its insulin-based medication compensates the baby for the critical GI development it did not receive in utero.

“Our treatment really harnesses nature’s solution for getting the GI to work well and function,” says Olshansky.

“We take insulin, just as it is found in mother’s milk – and we formulate it in a way that it is dissolvable and stable – so that preemies can receive it orally.”

Olshansky says that premature babies cannot simply be given injectable insulin, as these jabs include stabilizers not approved for infants’ oral intake by the FDA. The drug is also incompatible with the nutrition the preemie receives through a feeding tube, due to its acidity. 

Most importantly, currently approved insulins are injectables indicated for the treatment of diabetes and are not approved for any other condition and cannot be administered in any other way.

According to Olshansky, developing the treatment was a challenging task that few other companies worldwide have ever tackled, to the point that Elgan has no natural competitors. 

In fact, she says, the last time a drug was approved for use specifically for neonates was in 1991.

Neonatal intensive care units are extremely stressful, she explains, and any drug developed for premature babies “has to be perfect.”

And, Olshansky says, Elgan’s results speak for themselves. In a clinical trial, highest-risk preemies who ingested this medication were 80 percent less likely to develop necrotizing enterocolitis – a response unseen with any other drug tested, according to the company.

Elgan was founded in 2018, but research on using insulin to promote a preemie’s development dates back over 20 years and was conducted by two members of the company’s advisory board: Prof. Naim Shahadeh of Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa, and Prof. Raanan Shamir of Schneider Children’s Medical Center in Petah Tikva, who first tested their theory on rats. 

After publishing numerous studies proving the efficacy of insulin in animals, they founded the company with Olshansky. 

Elgan took its first steps as part of NGT, then an incubator for early-stage healthtech startups that encouraged Arab and Jewish entrepreneurship and today a VC fund.

The company is based in Nazareth, where it continues to develop its products in the effort of solving prematurity’s highest unmet medical needs. Elgan was most recently awarded a $2.5 million grant by the European Innovation Council (EIC) to support its final clinical trial.

“There’s a lot of hope that this drug will have a huge impact on the outcome of these babies,” says Olshansky. “And we’re proud to be the ones spearheading the field.”

The post Insulin-Based Drug Gives Preemies A Fighting Chance appeared first on NoCamels.

Indoor drones developed by an Israeli startup are on security patrol.

They’re flying along the corridors of office buildings and they’re keeping an eye on warehouses, factories, data centers and other premises.

The AI-powered drones drop from their ceiling-mounted docking stations autonomously, fly their pre-planned route and raise an alert if they spot intruders, doors that should be closed, maintenance issues, missing fire extinguishers and more.

The job they do has traditionally been carried out either through human inspections or by fixed security cameras.

But unlike the human guards who would otherwise be on duty, the drones don’t get bored, they don’t need to nip outside for a cigarette, and they are ultra-reliable.

They also report far fewer false positives than sensors (think of the last time you heard a burglar alarm that was actually triggered by a burglar).

Indoor Robotics, based in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv, says it’s at the forefront of what’s called the “indoor monitoring market” with its Tando drones.

The future, says CEO Doron Ben David, is drones. They’re fitted with extra-high-res sensors and cameras that record 360-degree video and use AI to interpret what they see.

The company deployed its first indoor drones commercially a couple of years ago. Their biggest market currently is out-of-hours patrols in office buildings, after the workers have gone home.

But they also patrol factories, data centers and other sites on a 24-hour basis, flying over the heads of employees and avoiding obstacles.

Ben David says Osem’s Bamba factory, in Kiryat Gat, southern Israel, is among their customers.

Their drones constantly monitor warehouses where the country’s favorite peanut snack is stored. The biggest day-to-day risk is that a forklift operator will weaken the base of the huge metal stacking shelves by bumping into it – and fail to report it.

The potential consequences could be catastrophic. The drones fly up and down the aisles, inspecting every support and every shelf, checking that the ground-level plastic shields are in place, making sure no screws are missing, and looking for signs of damage.

The shelving can be 30 meters high, says Ben David, which makes it virtually impossible to carry out regular and reliable human checks. But flying that at that altitude is no problem for the drones.

They typically go on patrol every half hour, returning to their docking station for a quick battery top-up – giving them around 10 minutes of flying time – then returning to their work.

All of this is without any human intervention. The drones are completely autonomous, flying, recording and reporting all by themselves.

If there is an emergency or an unexpected issue, they divert from their usual route to investigate.

Ben David says the company has made two key technological breakthroughs that allow the drones to function: mounting them on the ceilings and navigating them through the interior of a building.

“Our drones are actually located on the ceiling of the of the facility, which is a concept we are very proud of,” says Ben David.

“We were the first company and currently, as far as we know, the only company worldwide to implement such a solution.”

The big challenge, he says, was disconnecting the drone from the ceiling and starting the propellers without it hitting the ground.

The even bigger challenge was navigation. “When you’re outside, you have GPS, but when you get indoors, you need centimeter accuracy,” says Ben David.

“We had to develop our own method for indoor localization and mapping. When we started, we couldn’t find any solution that was good enough, so we did it ourselves.”

Indoor Robotics has clients in Israel and the US, and its drones also patrol a United Nations building in Spain.

Other companies are developing floor-based robots, but they don’t have the same reach or maneuverability, says Ben David, and they need human supervision.

He says the startup’s closest rival is Swiss company Verity. It has drones able to monitor warehouse inventory, but doesn’t cover other venues like Indoor Robotics.

Indoor drones are a fraction of the cost of human patrols, says Ben David, who was former chief technology officer at the Space, Missiles and Systems division of Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI).

They’re also cheaper and more effective than surveillance cameras. He says an average shopping mall has 300 security cameras. “If you design the mall to work with our products, you could probably put in 100 cameras and five drones and get better coverage,” he says.

But indoor drones are still a surprise to most people, and that’s one of things that Ben David has to deal with.

He tells how a new cleaner at their own offices unexpectedly encountered a drone one morning at 5am and tried to fight it off with a broom.  

“We really are disrupting a very old-fashioned industry,” he says, “and it takes time to gain trust.”

The post Indoor Drones Are On Patrol, Flying In A Building Near You appeared first on NoCamels.

An Israeli startup is using artificial intelligence to make a person’s face unrecognizable, in order to safeguard their privacy in medical imagery. 

RealizeMD subtly alters facial features through an AI process of manipulation, turning the patient into someone else entirely and preserving only original properties of the specific area that underwent reconstructive or cosmetic treatment. 

The anonymized pictures can then be used freely in before-and-after imaging for medical procedures. 

Founded in 2020, the Givatayim-based company uses proprietary algorithms that preserve the integrity of an image only in the parts that show the outcome of reconstructive and cosmetic procedures. This, the company says, makes the images suitable for clinical use without violating patient privacy. 

The company was formed after a relative of RealizeMD CEO Uri Neeman was diagnosed with breast cancer. The person was reluctant to undergo vital preventive medical intervention, including a mastectomy, fearing that the lack of sufficiently anonymous before-and-after images could expose their identity. 

According to the company, Neeman’s family member was not alone in this experience. This inspired Neeman to research the issue and its implications for patients, and a year later, RealizeMD was born.

Together with his team, Neeman developed a platform that is now past the minimum viable product (MVP) stage – the initial phase for a new startup in which it creates a first workable and marketable version of its product. 

Legal Duty Of Care

The platform, which has both mobile and desktop versions, enables physicians to work with images of just a single person or an entire database of patients. 

For as well as the concerns of those undergoing the treatments, medical professionals around the world must abide by standards enacted since the advent of the internet, which protect the privacy and confidentiality of their patients. 

In the US, for example, physicians are bound by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (more commonly known as HIPAA) while for European Union member states, it is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). 

These legally binding safeguards on patient privacy now mean that medical professionals cannot fully show examples of successful procedures that they have performed. 

“The medical aesthetic industry has a lot of privacy regulations that are very difficult to overcome when it comes to showing their before and after images. We are using our technology to completely change that,” Neeman tells NoCamels. 

He says that physicians have possession of thousands of before-and-after images showcasing “the wonderful work they’ve done,” but that they are essentially unusable.  

The RealizeMD platform is both HIPAA and GDPR compliant, which Neeman insists is crucial for the company, and suitable for the fields of plastic surgery, dentistry, ophthalmology and medical aesthetics. 

Citing the importance of cooperation with medical professionals in these fields, Neeman says RealizeMD recruited New York-based plastic surgeon Dr. David P. Rapaport as its chief medical officer. 

“He was able to share with us the problems that he has when trying to overcome the inability to show his experience,” says Neeman.

RealizeMD allows a physician to upload images from a successful surgical procedure to its server. And, the company says, within 20 seconds, they will receive an anonymized version of each, disguising every identifying feature save for the impacted area. The user even has the option of a range of new faces to ensure total anonymity.

These images can be used to show prospective patients the results of previous surgeries while protecting the identity of the ones who underwent the treatment. 

“You gain confidence by seeing that someone very similar to you has undergone the treatment,” Neeman says. 

“Everyone knows that Photoshop can make you pretty, but the only question is, is that real? Can you really achieve such results? And the only way to understand that is if you can see people who have undergone these surgeries,” he explains.

Physicians and medical institutions will be able to access the platform via subscription. And according to Neeman, there is high demand for this tool in the medical community. 

“Just on our MVP, with a few clinics, we have already north of a million images,” he says. 

Neeman explains that while the problem of patient confidentiality in before and after images is something that other companies have sought to address, they took a different, less automated approach. 

“They don’t have the same technology and they’ve chosen the route of manual Photoshop creation and filtering technologies,” he says. 

Earlier this year, the startup was one of the winners of the annual Early-Stage Accelerator Program held by the Israeli branch of MassChallenge, a global nonprofit accelerator dedicated to supporting impactful, emerging entrepreneurs. 

The winners were invited on an all-expenses paid investor roadshow to New York and Boston, to meet with business leaders, local officials and potential investors.

The company has so far raised $1M in pre-seed funding, and in April received its first patent in the US, where it expects to go commercial by the end of the year. 

It has since applied for a second patent, and, with an eye on a global market, is taking legal measures to expand both worldwide.

Neeman says he is dedicated to “bringing this change in this world and creating this new knowledge.”  

The post AI Startup Gives You A New Face To Protect Your Medical Privacy appeared first on NoCamels.

An Israeli startup is helping plants signal potentially fatal stresses by giving them jellyfish protein that lets them light up when their picture is taken. 

This, Plantell says, not only shows when plants are in trouble but can also help to develop agricultural products that are less harmful to crops. 

Crops make up 85 percent of the food we eat, yet the United Nations says around 40 percent of that is lost to stresses like pests, disease and weather-related conditions. And in many cases, farmers only notice that their crops are failing when it’s too late to act. 

Researchers at Oxford University say that even when a farmer does try to take action to tackle the stress, those steps – usually spraying excessive amounts of environmentally unfriendly fertilizer and pesticides – often further exacerbate the problem. 

Plantell believes it has the answer. It develops genetically modified strains of crops to include green-fluorescent protein (GFP), which is found in the jellyfish Aequorea victoria and is responsible for its fluorescence. 

The GFP has been modified to monitor one of the earliest signs of stress in plants: the release of free radicals, unstable atoms that naturally form during chemical reactions in animals and in plants and cause cell damage, disease and aging. 

Plants release an overabundance of free radicals when they are stressed, and the GFP reacts to them by undergoing a fluorescent change, illuminating the affected parts of the crop in colors that are not visible to the naked eye.

“This technology will help us to create a new generation of biochemical products that will reduce stress in plants, and increase their productivity,” Matanel Hipsch, CEO and co-founder of Plantell, tells NoCamels. 

Test Center 

In its lab in the central Israeli city of Rehovot, Plantell uses highly sophisticated cameras that are sensitive to fluorescence to screen the crops for signs of stress. 

The plant’s picture reveals in less than a minute whether it is indeed stressed and what the causes are, depending on the distribution of light and its intensity in the image. 

The startup uses its technology to fine-tune the biochemical products (fertilizers, pesticides, and other plant products whose ingredients are of natural origin) developed by agro-chemical companies. 

“Farmers right now are buying biochemicals for their crops, but in many cases they are using too much at inappropriate times,” Hipsch says. 

“With our technology, we can fine-tune how much they use it, when and for what to use it, and how long they should wait between each application.” 

Plantell has already used its fluorescent imaging capabilities in a six-month pilot with the Haifa Group, a global supplier of specialty fertilizers based in the north of Israel. This, Hipsch said, led to the discovery that a Haifa Group product actually helped crops become more resistant to external stressors. 

Hipsch says Plantell can screen thousands of different chemical compounds that can be or are already in use for biochemicals by testing them on their GM crop strains. 

“This means that we can assess ingredients that can be used in new biochemicals, validate them, and create these products with agro-chemical companies,” he explains.

The startup receives royalties on the biochemicals made using its technology.

Lighting The Way

Since their discovery in the 1960s, GFPs have been used by researchers to monitor the movement of viruses, artificially introduced genes and proteins within plant cells. 

Hipsch says that Plantell is specifically using the protein to help other agricultural firms estimate the stress in plants and develop and improve their products, and not for purely research purposes. 

There are a handful of Israeli companies using various methods to monitor and protect crops, such as CropX, whose advanced sensors gather data from the soil, and Evogene, which uses biotechnology to create pest-resistance.

Hipsch, however, says that the Plantell solution is more sensitive to stress than these other solutions and can differentiate between different kinds of external stressors.

Plantell’s technology began as research by Dr. Shilo Rosenwasser of the Department of Plant Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 

He, Dr. Nardy Lampl and Hipsch worked to further develop the technology and Plantell was born.

The startup is now based out of the Hebrew University’s satellite Agricultural Faculty in Rehovot.

Plantell has raised capital from its pilot with the Haifa Group, as well as from the ASPER-HUJI Innovate, the Hebrew University’s center for innovation and entrepreneurship.

The startup was also a finalist at this year’s MassChallenge Israel core accelerator program, a four-month intensive course that helps entrepreneurs advance their nascent companies.

Hipsch sees his fledgling company as integral to feeding the world as its population continues to grow. 

“By 2050, there will be more than 10 billion people worldwide,” he says. “We need to keep up and cope with this growing population – and what we grow in our agricultural fields must keep up, too.”

The post Jellyfish Protein Lets Stressed Plants Light A Fluorescent Alarm appeared first on NoCamels.

 An Israeli startup has bioengineered milk protein to create a wide range of dairy products – using mushrooms and no cows. And, the company says, their products are healthier, greener and cheaper to create. 

Haifa-based ImaginDairy uses freely available DNA codes for milk proteins to recreate their DNA, the company’s CEO and co-founder Eyal Afergan tells NoCamels. The data is even available on the website of the US government’s National Center for Biotechnology Information.  

There are two major proteins in milk – whey and casein, Afergan explains. These proteins are present in every single milk-based food. Casein makes up about 80 percent of the protein in bovine milk, and whey about 20 percent. 

Using a process called precision fermentation, ImaginDairy has recreated these proteins in the lab in order to generate every kind of dairy product. And according to the company, the taste is identical to the original. 

This process modifies microorganisms to create certain proteins and other compounds by inserting genes into their existing DNA. Afergan says that the process has been in use in the food industry for more than four decades. 

“We aren’t using something unique,” he says. What is unique, however, is the way in which it is applied. 

The modified DNA is inserted into a “specific location” inside the DNA of the fungus, Afergan says, which then causes the mushroom to produce the milk protein. 

“We basically hijack the fungi’s regulatory elements and production facility and the fungus starts to produce our target protein,” he says.

Mushrooms are easy and cost effective to grow, doubling in size every 24 hours, and they can be picked just four days after they are visible in the soil.  

Once the harvested mushroom has produced the required milk protein, Afergan explains, ImaginDairy adds plant-based fats, carbohydrates and other ingredients in order to create the specific dairy products, such as milk or cheese or even ice cream.  

Plant-based fats are commonly found in foods such as flaxseeds, coconuts, hemp seeds, avocados, olives, nuts and sesame seeds. 

Afergan, whose background is in biochemical engineering, says the company’s proprietary process was developed over the last 20 years by Prof. Tamir Tuller, ImaginDairy’s co-founder and CSO, who heads the Computational Systems and Synthetic Biology lab at Tel Aviv University.  

Quality Production 

According to Afergan, the ImaginDairy production method is superior to animal-created dairy foods in a variety of ways. 

The ImaginDairy process is far cleaner and vastly less ecologically costly than using animal farming to obtain milk. Dairy farming, he points out, takes a vast environmental toll on the planet’s resources. 

Indeed, according to the World Wildlife Fund, there are currently 270 million cows being used in dairy farming across the globe. And demand is rising in many parts of the world as populations grow, and non-Western nations that traditionally consume less milk are incorporating more of it into their diets. 

This, the WWF warns, is placing growing pressure on Earth’s natural resources such as freshwater and soil, increasing greenhouse gas emissions and eating up environmentally critical areas such as prairies and forests to create pastures for the cows to graze. What is more, overgrazing and the trampling of animal hooves can cause extreme damage to the earth that could take hundreds of years to recover from. 

“Our process is by far much, much more eco friendly,” says Afergan. 

Because the production process is lab-based, he explains, the company uses more than 90 percent less water than the traditional dairy industry. It also produces 97 percent less carbon emissions and requires just one percent of the land needed by the traditional dairy industry. 

Just as importantly, ImaginDairy says, its process produces zero methane – a greenhouse gas that is one of the biggest causes of global warming and one produced in great amounts by a cow’s digestive system. 

The lab-developed dairy products are also beneficial to the health of the consumer, Afergan claims. 

“We keep all the superior nutritional benefits of milk, but remove the lactose,” he says of the sugar found naturally in milk. 

He points out that around 65% of the world’s population cannot properly absorb lactose, a statistic supported by the US Department of Health and Human Services. 

The ImaginDairy process also has no cholesterol, hormones or antibiotics in its products, he says, and because no cows were physically involved in the creation of the protein, it is even suitable for vegans.

The company is not the only one in the world using precision fermentation to create milk proteins, but Afergan says that the way in which they are working leads to uniquely high volumes of dairy products.   

The conversation surrounding dairy farming today is about its high cost and low volume, he explains. 

Big Business 

The dairy farming market is worth huge amounts annually. In 2022, it was valued at around $893 billion, and is expected to reach $1,243 billion in the next five years.  

“ImaginDairy wants to change the equation,” he says. 

“We use state-of-the-art technology [that has] allowed us to drive productivity very high. Think about a cow that gives you one liter of milk a day versus 40 liters of milk. Our technology allows us to push… to produce more and more milk.”  

Funding for the project came initially from the government-owned Israel Innovation Authority; the Kitchen Hub, a food tech project by Israeli food giant Strauss and various venture capitalists.

And now ImaginDairy has recently received investment from the Danone Group – one of the world’s largest dairy companies and producers of alternative milks. 

While its dairy products are not on the market, the company has already developed a range of products, including yogurt, milk, ice cream and cheese, on a commercial scale. 

The products have received a Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) classification from the US Food and Drug Agency, which means that they can be sold in American stores. 

The United States is the company’s first targeted location, with the Israeli market next on the list.  

“Our technology enjoys the benefits of both worlds,” Afergan says. “The planet  from an environmental perspective and nutrition-wise from the dairy, so it’s a win-win for everyone.”

The post Using Dairy DNA, Startup Is Making Milk From Mushrooms appeared first on NoCamels.

For people living with advanced kidney failure, hemodialysis treatment can be a lifeline to a normal existence. 

A MedTech company in Israel has created a contactless, robotic device to ensure that the hemodialysis process runs as smoothly as possible – without a very common side effect that can disrupt treatment and threaten the health of the patient. 

Hemodialysis uses a machine to clean waste from a person’s blood when the kidneys can no longer do this vital job, but the way in which the machine accesses the blood can cause its own set of medical issues.  

The human kidney, which is roughly the size of a computer mouse, filters the blood in the body every half hour. Without that process – or the medical alternative – a person is at elevated risk of high blood pressure, heart disease and even stroke or death. 

Each hemodialysis treatment takes around four hours, three to five times each week, with access to the blood gained through a surgically created portal, called a fistula, in the patient’s arm. 

To create the fistula, the patient must undergo vascular surgery to connect an artery to a vein, explains Shai Policker, veteran medical entrepreneur and board member at PatenSee, the startup behind the innovation. 

Invasive surgery aside, Policker tells NoCamels, each fistula takes several months to “mature” and be ready for use in dialysis. Those fistulas, he says, are the lifeline of the dialysis patient. 

The fistula is used to pump unfiltered, deoxygenated blood out of the body into the dialysis machine and the cleaned blood back in. But because it is artificially created, the fistula is vulnerable to a narrowing of the blood vessels that has no external signs, known as asymptomatic stenosis. 

PatenSee has developed a contactless, portable device that uses AI to inspect the ongoing condition of the fistula and alert medical professionals to early signs of stenosis – allowing for preventive measures rather than corrective action once the blood vessels have already started to narrow. 

When stenosis occurs, the blood flow through the fistula slows, adversely impacting the pace and quality of the treatment, making the process more painful or even causing a dangerous blood clot. 

Without detection, stenosis can also cause the fistula to become completely blocked, rendering it useless and forcing the patient to undergo another round of painful surgery that requires days of hospitalization. 

“We are using veins as if they are arteries,” Policker says. “Sometimes it will block the fistula and the blood vessels within two or three months. Sometimes it can work well for a year or a year and a half and only then be lost. But in almost all cases something will happen. Something like 20 to 30 percent of patients will get some vascular access event within a year. So it’s a big issue.” 

While there are no immediate visible symptoms, trained medical personnel can manually check for signs of stenosis, a “look, listen and feel” process that monitors the flow of blood through the fistula and, according to Policker, takes just 10 minutes or so. 

But this is often not possible due to staffing constraints in a busy renal unit, especially in the United States where Policker says each clinic can treat up to 30 hemodialysis patients at a time. 

“It’s like a factory,” he says. 

Even when these checks do take place, they involve physical contact with a painful area in an immunocompromised patient, putting them at risk of infection. 

No Contact, No Risk 

PatenSee’s device, which is mobile and can be used anywhere, requires no physical inspection of the fistula and takes a fraction of time of the manual process.  

Policker says he became aware of the issue several years ago, and as part of his role as CEO of Israeli MedTech incubator MEDX Xelerator challenged entrepreneurs to present solutions to the problem. 

PatenSee came up with the idea of replacing the entire physical exam with a set of optical and sound tests carried out mechanically. 

The first part of the test is to create 3D imaging of the fistula, which involves analyzing its contours when the arm is in various positions. 

The second part is the use of a laser vibrometer, which Policker likens to an eavesdropping device used in spy movies. This device “listens” to the blood flow through the fistula on several frequencies. 

Both parts collate the results using AI and present an image of the state of the fistula that Policker says is at least as accurate as a manual check by a trained clinician. What is more, the machine can be operated by someone with minimal training, and the results sent for inspection by a physician.  

Should the examination reveal early stages of stenosis, the patient can be referred for a 20-minute procedure that reopens the fistula.

The device has undergone successful preclinical trials in an Israeli hospital and Policker says the company is now in talks with several large dialysis providers around the world, including in Europe and the United States.  

There is high demand from medical institutions around the world to host the clinical trials, he says. 

According to the International Society of Nephrology, more than 850 million around the world suffer from some form of kidney disease – twice the global number of diabetes patients. Of that number, up to 10 million need hemodialysis or a transplant. 

In the United States alone, around 800,000 people are living with renal failure, of whom more than half a million are receiving dialysis treatment. The American Kidney Fund lists renal disease as one of the top 10 causes of death in the US, leading to more annual fatalities than breast or prostate cancer.   

Policker says that the device could be used in the future to check for thrombosis (blood clots) in other parts of the body, but for now the focus is on fistula used in hemodialysis. 

There are other medtech companies looking for solutions to stenosis in fistulas, but Policker says that while a number of them are “reasonably good,” they are not in widespread use as they still involve touching the patient – risking infection and causing discomfort. 

PatenSee received funding from an incubator that got it through the development stage and initial trials, and is now raising additional funding from private investors to finance the clinical trials.  

He believes that the device should be ready to market within two years or so. While it will be initially pricey, he concedes, “there is an ability to take that hardware and make it very small and very cheap.” 

Acquiring approval from the US Food and Drug Agency (FDA) and its counterpart the European Medicines Agency (EMA) should be a “relatively simple regulatory process,” Policker explains, as the device requires no physical contact with the patient at all. 

PatenSee’s innovation, he says, “gets rid of those emergency life-threatening situations.” 

The post Robot Monitors Dialysis Patients For Signs Of Serious Side Effect appeared first on NoCamels.

An Israeli startup has created an organic formula for protecting plants against insects and fungi using an essential oil as its base ingredient. 

BotanoHealth’s BH-B spray uses thyme oil, which co-founder and CEO Yaniv Kitron tells NoCamels has known anti-mold and anti-fungal properties.   

Pest attacks on crops are expensive. According to the US Food and Agriculture Organization, up to 40 percent of global crops are destroyed by pests each year, costing some $220 billion. 

This has encouraged the commercial use of pesticides in agriculture. In fact, the US alone says it uses roughly one billion pounds of pesticides every year – around one fifth of the total amount of pesticide used worldwide annually.

But ongoing research points to negative long-term effects of pesticides, which contain a variety of chemicals toxic to rodents and insects. As the soil absorbs these chemicals, the pesticide residue can harm future crops, livestock and even contaminate surrounding bodies of water. 

Thyme oil contains the chemical compound thymol, which acts as a natural antimicrobial agent by killing microorganisms like bacteria and fungi. 

Although it is a common ingredient in everyday products like cosmetics and mouthwash, to date it has not been widely used in large scale-agriculture for practical reasons. 

“In order to get good efficacy, you need high concentrations, high dosages. And high doses of essential oils can corrode the plant or produce,” Kitron tells NoCamels.

His company’s answer was a formulation that would boost the effectiveness of the thyme oil without increasing its concentration – and even cost less.  

“Usually fungicides based on these active ingredients will have 20-25 percent [composition] of thyme oil, where our product has 1 percent. So it becomes a much cheaper product. And the good thing is it maintains its efficacy, sometimes even more efficacious,” Kitron says. 

BotanoHealth’s unique formula uses nanotechnology known as nanoemulsion, which reduces the active ingredient of thyme oil to extremely small droplets before it is added to the fungicide mix. 

This creates a more even distribution of the oil on the plants and produce it protects. 

Natural Medicine 

The company says it only uses ingredients that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) classifies as Generally Regarded as Safe (GRAS). 

And because these ingredients have already been thoroughly vetted by the US Environmental Protection Agency, the BotanoHealth fungicide spray could go directly into the American market.

“We use the very same products that people use in their gardens. We saw the missing link was to bring those safe ingredients to agriculture,” Kitron says. 

Similarly, he says that unlike most American produce treated with pesticides, crops sprayed with their fungicide can bypass the European Union’s Minimum Residue Levels (MRLs), which dictate how much chemical residue can be left on produce. 

BH-B was also given the seal of approval from the Organic Materials Evaluation Institute (OMRI) in the US, which independently reviews products such as pesticides and fertilizers for their organic standards.

Analysis by the US Department of Agriculture found that up to 70 percent of produce sold in the United States has chemical residue from pesticides. The bulk of the pesticide market is chemical, which is why Kitron wanted to create a product that did not rely on these ingredients.

“When we compete with chemicals, there are several issues where we know we have certain advantages,” he explains. 

“There are certain crops that you cannot spray chemicals on. For example, with grapes or tomatoes or blueberries in their final week or two [of growth], most chemicals cannot be sprayed because they will decompose before the fruit reaches the consumer.”

The formula’s active ingredients are crucial to helping the thyme oil spread across the plant’s surface, something which Kitron compares to soap breaking up oil molecules and allowing them to disperse throughout water. 

In order to ensure the stability of these active ingredients, which can be volatile and quickly evaporate, the formula also includes polysaccharides – carbohydrates that help stabilize the ingredients and eliminate the pungent odor that can come with their evaporation. 

The fungicide targets gray mold and powdery mildew. During its latest field trial in Spain, using the spray retained more than 20 percent more produce than chemical pesticides. 

Furthermore, Kitron says, the fungicide can remain active for up to two weeks, unlike the average chemical product that lasts for two days at most. 

The treatment is used as part of the Integrated Pest Management (IPM) program, which takes into account the life cycle of pests, achieving the best results when infestation levels are still low.  

Worldwide Appeal

BotanoHealth started their online sales in 2021. The company is also currently selling in stores in Israel, the US and East Asia, and is undergoing the registration process in eight different Latin American countries like Guatemala and Honduras. 

“We started about two years ago, and the first crop that had good traction with our fungicide was medical and recreational cannabis in California,” Kitron says. 

BotanoHealth has sold an average of 10-20,000 liters of fungicide products a year and has raised almost $1 million in funding, backed by investors that include Israel’s Ministry of Economy. 

The company was also part of this year’s cohort of startups selected for MassChallenge Israel‘s four-month Early Stage Accelerator Program, in which the Jerusalem-based nonprofit provided mentorships, workshops and networking opportunities.

Kitron says that the fungicide is not just suited to modern farming methods favored by developed nations, but also less sophisticated systems in the rest of the world. 

“A very large portion of global agriculture is very simple and basic, which is what we saw in Ethiopia, India, and many places in South America,” he says.

“You will see that the person who is spraying pesticides is a 12 year old who’s going barefoot, who won’t even think about a mask. They’re spreading some generic product that’s already past its expiration date. 

“Nobody’s thinking about what it’s doing to him or all the kids watching him. It affects all of us and the food that we eventually eat – but he’s the first.”

The post Essential Oil Pesticide Keeping Crops Healthy And Organic appeared first on NoCamels.

Music has long been lauded as a rapid mood improver, as it boosts the brain’s production of dopamine and serotonin, aka “happy hormones.” 

But now an Israeli startup is using music and its positive impact to determine potential mental deterioration in the elderly, by simply having them perform tests that involve listening to a range of musical instruments. 

The test, which is being developed by Herzliya-based Neurosteer, will soon be submitted for clearance by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the early detection of Parkinson’s Disease as well as Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. 

During the 15-minute examination, patients are directed to complete a series of musical tasks, such as pressing a button every time they hear a particular melody or identify a specific instrument, while sensors on their scalp record their brain activity. 

The sensors are connected to a highly sensitive, pocket-sized electroencephalogram (EEG) device specially designed by the company. An EEG device is normally a stationary machine found only in medical centers, which is used to diagnose brain disorders by recording electrical activity in the brain. 

The Neurosteer device also detects electrical activity in the brain’s frontal lobe and separates it into different neural networks. It then uses proprietary AI to assess the interaction between those networks in real time, offering an insight into how well the brain is functioning. The device has already been approved by the FDA for general use.

Mood Lightener 

The startup’s musical tests and AI algorithms were developed by Neta Maimon, a lecturer at Tel Aviv University (TAU) School of Psychological Sciences and the School of Music. 

She says that music was chosen as a stimulus because of its impact on the brain. 

“With music, I can actually put the patient into the optimal state to conduct the tests,” Maimon tells NoCamels. “It’s a very general kind of test, and you don’t need to have musical experience to [take them].” 

Multiple academic studies have shown that music improves a person’s performance while undergoing both mental and physical testing. 

And given the widely accepted principle that music can improve your mood, the startup hypothesized that music-based tasks could test people in an enjoyable and performance-enhancing environment. 

Neurosteer founder and CEO Nathan Intrator, a former professor at TAU School of Computer Sciences, tells NoCamels that music activates the brain so strongly that it can produce almost the same amount of endorphins as produced when carrying out energetic exercise such as running. 

“This enables us to interpret the brain. We induce a certain condition using music, and then look for the response,” he says. 

Brain Business 

Neurosteer says that its unique EEG device offers numerous advantages over a traditional brain scan. 

The traditional device is limited in both diagnosis capability and in patient accessibility. Not only is it restricted to use in laboratories, clinics or universities, it also requires the patient to place up to 256 electrodes onto their scalp and remain still for an extended period.

Furthermore, EEG recordings must be interpreted by qualified specialists, who will then send the results to the doctor who ordered the test. This can potentially lead to weeks of waiting for the patient. 

On the other hand, Neurosteer’s portable device can be operated not just in a clinic, but also in residential facilities. It also has only three electrodes in the adhesive strip placed on the head. 

Unlike Neurosteer’s musical challenge, practical tests of cognitive capabilities (thinking, communication, understanding and memory) commonly focus on correctly identifying the day, month and year; writing a brief, grammatically correct sentence; and memorizing a few objects to be repeated back a short time later. 

But, says Intrator, the outcome of these practical tests can actually be swayed by the environment. If the person carrying out the test is ill-tempered or does not connect well with the patient, for example, the results can be adversely affected. 

This, he explains, is one reason why Neurosteer uses AI and not a person to oversee the outcome of the test. The use of AI also means that the results can be processed and presented in real time.  

Intrator established the startup to address the unmet need of a more efficient and less cumbersome way to interpret brain activity than the traditional EEG.

“My colleagues thought I was crazy, because I was trying to reduce the number of electrodes [in the EEG],” he recalls. “But I realized that I had to try.”

After several years of development at Tel Aviv University, he founded Neurosteer in 2015.

The startup has raised $8 million thus far, mostly from investors who Intrator says share his devotion to his work. 

In 2022, Neurosteer won the Alzheimer’s Innovation Challenge, a competition launched by multinational healthcare company Roche and Israel’s Start-Up Nation Central to find effective and innovative solutions for patients suffering from this form of dementia. 

The brain sensing technology is currently being evaluated in several clinics in the US and in Israel.

Intrator envisions a situation in which brain activity is monitored by a GP in an annual checkup along with blood pressure, heart function and weight. 

“I want someone to take a 15-minute test, and know at the end of it whether they are at high risk of Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s or other diseases, all before the person even knows that there’s a problem,” he says.

The post Testing For Dementia In The Elderly With Mood-Lifting Music appeared first on NoCamels.

Ziv Better, a nine-time Paralympic swimming medalist who lost nearly all of his eyesight during his service in the Israel Defense Forces, is no stranger to doing laps virtually blind.

But now a new vibrating headband device is giving him what he says is an added sense of security every time he enters the pool. 

Israeli startup EyeCan is developing the smart headband, which alerts swimmers in real time whenever they move from the center of their lane or are approaching an obstacle.

According to both Better and the company, visually impaired swimmers bear the risk of getting disoriented, deviating off the lane, or colliding with obstacles head on – such as the edge of the pool.

The device is equipped with a camera that continuously scans the bottom of the pool and the area in front of the swimmer. This data is then sent to the “brain” of the headband, a processor located at the back of the device, which dispatches alerts to two chips located on either side of the swimmer’s head.  

The chips use bone conduction, a kind of technology that sends sounds to the inner ear through the bones of the skull without having to block the ear itself. 

Amit Fisher, CEO and co-founder of EyeCan, says this is an essential product for the blind or visually impaired swimmer, as there is currently no technological solution allowing them to swim independently.

“Almost one third of the world’s population suffer from vision complications – 2.2 billion to be exact,” he tells NoCamels.

“But in today’s world, blind and visually impaired swimmers get hit on their head with a ‘tapper’ [a soft, pole-like stick held by another person] every time they reach the edge of the pool,” Fisher explains.

And for the most part, tappers are reserved for Paralympic swimmers. They’re used by the para-swimmers’ coaches so they know when to turn as they swim towards the walls of the pool at high speeds.

People who swim for leisure or for exercise do not normally have a person waiting at the edge of the pool with a stick. Fisher says that when these swimmers become disoriented or injured by hitting obstacles like floating lane dividers, it diminishes their motivation to keep swimming and training.

“The important thing is that feelings of independence and self-confidence are getting damaged,” Fisher says.

Swimming With Style

The Tel Aviv-based startup is developing its smart headband in two central ways.

It is continuing to train the processor’s algorithm by equipping swimmers with wearable cameras, and using the videos they record while in the water to help identify obstacles and whenever they stray from the center of the lane.

Whenever a swimmer deviates from their lane or approaches an obstacle, the EyeCan developers at poolside will send vibrations to their chip, an “off-the-shelf” piece of technology that needs no special development. 

EyeCan is also working on a cameraless prototype used by visually impaired swimmers in order to receive feedback on the device’s efficacy and comfort. 

Fisher believes that both kinds of tests are crucial, explaining that it is very difficult to understand what is suitable for blind people when you aren’t living with the disability yourself.

“It’s important to receive their input every step of the way,” he says. 

“What we gain from this, as an early-stage startup, is being able to develop the algorithm, and have users test it at the same time.”  

Most swimmers who tested the product wanted a natural-looking and inconspicuous product, he says. As such, the headband will resemble regular swimwear, and will be made with the same materials as goggles. It will also come in shades of blue to blend in with the water.

EyeCan was established in 2022 by Fisher and co-founder Tomer Etinger – both of whom have family members with disabilities – after the two studied industrial design to make products for people with disabilities.

As part of their studies, they visited Beit HaLohem (Warrior House), a rehabilitation, sports and recreation center for disabled veterans in Tel Aviv.

It was there they first met Better, who lost nearly all of his eyesight during the 1982 Lebanon War, when as an officer he stepped on a mine while trying to save one of his soldiers. Better was the first person to test the prototype, and today serves as an advisor to the startup.

“There are many people who are visually impaired and are afraid to even start [swimming],” Better told the Israeli media.

“This product can get more and more people – from young children to the elderly – into the water to swim.”

EyeCan says it has no direct competitors and says that there are in fact not enough products on the market designed for visually impaired people. 

Students at Loughborough University in England were developing two wearable devices using tech like infrared beams and computer vision to determine the presence of obstacles and the proximity of the swimmer to the pool wall. But neither has issued updates since 2021.

EyeCan has thus far received a grant from the Israel Innovation Authority of a little over $30,000, and is currently in the process of fundraising. Fisher believes that with investment, the final product will be ready for market within 18 months.

The company was also part of 8200 Impact, a five-month intensive acceleration program for startups that aim to solve significant social problems through technology. The program was created by former members of the IDF’s 8200, a specialist unit monitoring signal intelligence. 

When the product is fully developed, Fisher envisions it being distributed by leading sport brands such as Speedo and Nike, as well as by organizations that support blind and visually impaired people.

“Swimming is a kind of therapy,” says Fisher. “It is really important for us to make swimming independent.” 

The post Smart Headband Gives Blind Swimmers Confidence In The Pool appeared first on NoCamels.

An Israeli startup is developing a way to make brand new plastic products from the moth-eaten shirts, torn pants, and other unwanted clothes that we normally throw away. 

TextRe uses synthetic fibers such as polyester and nylon from textile waste, and combines them with certain substances, including a reduced amount of plastic and other unnamed materials, in order to create plastic pellets.  

The startup says the process can be seamlessly integrated into the production lines of plastic manufacturing companies, who will mix the pellets with virgin polymers and ultimately produce a more sustainably sourced plastic product. 

“Our purpose is to replace the use of virgin materials with recycled ones, and receive the best characteristics [like elasticity and durability] that we can,” Lee Cohen, co-founder and CEO of TextRe, tells NoCamels. 

If Looks Could Kill

Of the estimated 100 billion garments produced worldwide every year, close to 92 million tons end up in landfills, according to illuminem, a platform that monitors businesses’ performance on sustainability and ethical issues.

Just one percent of these garments are recycled and around 12 percent are turned into lower quality products such as cleaning cloths, carpet padding and sound insulation. 

The rest could take hundreds of years to decompose, harming the environment in the process.

To recycle them, synthetic fibers are separated from the piece of clothing, shredded into small pieces of plastic, and then melted down, usually to spin new yarn. 

However, few items of clothing are recycled because each one is made of a different combination of synthetic and natural fibers, in addition to having various accessories like studs, zippers and buttons. 

These factors make it a challenge to separate the synthetic fibers from the garment for effective recycling, and the process today is labor-intensive and slow. 

But if the materials are not properly separated from one another, they cannot easily be recycled. 

“It’s a big challenge, because technology has not developed enough to accurately separate the fibers,” explains Cohen.

With TextRe, however, the synthetic fibers do not need to be so meticulously separated in order for the startup to effectively turn them into brand new products. This requires much less time and effort than if they were being recycled into a lower-quality product. 

The startup’s own tests have shown that their technology can successfully turn the separated synthetic fibers into pellets that are then injected into a mold to create a new plastic product.

In fact, TextRe says it has made prototypes of several plastic pellets that can be used in new products.

“Realizing that most of our clothes are made from plastic – like polyester – made it natural to think of ways to upcycle it for plastic industry applications,” Cohen says. 

The Tel Aviv-based startup, which was founded in 2021, is now completing a proof of concept to demonstrate its technology’s feasibility. 

It is working with a leading Israeli company that produces plastic, which is testing the process on its own production lines. 

Cohen declined to disclose more about the process itself, citing company privacy. 

Castoff Challenge

End-consumers, companies, and even governments have all been increasingly seeking a solution to the textile waste problem, especially as public awareness has grown in recent years.

The European Commission is drafting at least 16 pieces of legislation that will make fashion companies take more responsibility for the environmental impacts of the clothes they produce.

These measures include a requirement for fashion companies to collect a minimal amount of their textile waste rather than discard it all. The governments of European Union member states even agreed that they should ban the destruction of unsold textiles in order to encourage more reuse and recycling.

“This is a great incentive for textile brands to find a solution that they can also earn money from,” says Cohen.  

She believes that these regulations also incentivize companies to start replacing virgin materials with recycled ones. She says, however, that there is a dearth of quality recycled substitutes on the market today that hold up when compared to new polymers – which is where TextRe comes in. 

“We were able to overcome some of the challenges within the process, given the fact that these fibers have different characteristics than conventional plastic products, which we continue to develop and improve to create valuable recycled plastic products,” says Cohen. 

There are a number of existing companies that turn textile waste into new materials. 

These include Virginia-based Circ, which uses water, pressure, and what it calls “responsible chemistry” to separate synthetic fibers from plant-based materials and turn it into high quality fiber, and German company Kleiderly, which takes clothing waste and recycles it into a sustainable alternative to oil-based plastics.

But Cohen says that solutions such as these involve expensive and unsustainable processes that consume a lot of energy – which is counterproductive to the ethos of sustainability. 

In July, TextRe was announced as one of the winners of the 2023 MassChallenge Israel core accelerator program, a four-month intensive program that helps entrepreneurs develop their nascent companies. 

In the coming months, TextRe and the other MassChallenge winners will participate in a roadshow to Boston and New York, where they will meet with investors, customers, partners, and business leaders and officials.

While the startup is primarily bootstrapped, it is presently in the process of fundraising of $2 million, and hopes to bring its product to market within the next 18 months. 

“The second largest polluting industry in the world today is the fashion industry,” says Cohen. 

“But we believe that this waste can actually be used over and over again as a raw material, instead of continuously sending it to landfills.”

The post Green Garments: Startup Turns Old Clothes Into New Plastics appeared first on NoCamels.

The next time you see a fruit fly buzzing around your bowl of apples and oranges, you should think twice before swatting it away.

These tiny insects may be the solution to a better-balanced diet and a more sustainable future in agriculture, according to Israeli startup Flying Spark.  

The Rehovot-based company, which was founded in 2015, makes healthy, natural protein alternatives using its signature ingredient – the larva of a fruit fly.

“For human beings, the best thing is animal-derived protein,” Eran Gronich, veteran entrepreneur and founder and CEO of Flying Spark, tells NoCamels. “And the fruit fly’s nutritional values are the best in class.” 

Flying Spark uses larvae from the Ceratitis capitata (commonly known as the Mediterranean fruit fly), which originates in sub-Saharan Africa. 

The company even breeds its own fruit flies to make the cholesterol-free protein powder, which it says has a high dietary fiber content and a low glycemic index. 

The powder can be used in a wide range of food products for humans, pets and marine life, Flying Spark says. It can deliver a calcium boost via your smoothie, bring more nutrition into your dog’s dinner and even improve the flavor of your goldfish’s food.  

“It [contains] the essential amino acids, minerals, iron, calcium, magnesium, vitamins, and good fatty acids,” says Gronich. “It’s really the best protein you can get.”

And Gronich says because the white substance has no smell and no taste, it can be incorporated into any product. And it is even kosher.

Fan Of The Fly

In a fruit fly’s seven-day lifespan, it multiplies its body mass 250 times, which is what initially drew Gronich to seek the insect’s potential as a sustainable protein source. 

“Why should we eat a protein derived from insects? Because it’s cheaper, it’s much more sustainable, and it’s healthier,” says Gronich. “This was the inspiration for Flying Spark.”

He says that other insects used in food, such as grasshoppers or crickets, do not come close to meeting the protein benefits and nutritional profile offered by the fruit fly. Furthermore, the company says, the quick growth cycle is unmatched in the insect world.

Flying Spark’s technology allows the company to use all parts of the larvae, enabling low-cost cultivation that conserves 99% of the water and land used in traditional livestock farming. 

As such, the powder has a significantly lower environmental impact than conventional plant-based or animal protein sources. 

Its nearly zero waste production process also means no greenhouse gas emissions, which is made possible by its large-scale, eco-friendly production facilities. 

The company grows its flies from small colonies and then harvests the eggs, which could be upwards of 350 for each female. After the eggs develop into larvae, they are grown in tray towers in a vertical farming process. 

Flying Spark cultivates its larvae in a closed environment with climate controlled rooms which eliminates seasonal constraints and allows for its year-round production process.

Just one milliliter of larvae contains some 15,000 eggs, and Gronich says that the company is “growing billions or trillions” of them at any given time. 

Sustaining Future Generations

Founded in 2015, the company currently houses its R&D in Israel and its production facilities in Thailand. It was listed on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange in 2021. 

Flying Spark has raised around $15 million from its main investor Thai Union Group, a leading seafood producer, and other private investors. The European Union has also funded the company to the tune of 50,000 euro.

Gronich hopes their products can lead the way for a new standard of sustainability in agriculture by encouraging finding natural protein sources. 

His vision is for Flying Spark’s fruit fly protein to help replace human dependence on fish, chickens, cows, and pigs as one of our primary protein sources. 

“The meat industry is a very unsustainable industry. Basically, the bigger the animal, the more damage it causes to us and to the environment,” says Gronich. 

“If we can replace about 70 percent of the agricultural land that is going to feed those animals with our protein, that would be great,” he says. 

The foodtech company also extracts the oil from the larvae and packages it into skincare and anti-aging products. 

The oil is high in Omega-7 and Omega-9 acids, which some believe can provide moisturizing benefits to your skin. 

The company primarily sells to customers, pet food producers and cosmetic companies in Asia, and Gronich says it hopes to transition into the international business-to-consumer (B2C) market. 

He believes that the growing world population, food insecurity and climate change will ultimately lead to the same diet of bugs for the entire planet. 

“When we are nine or ten billion people, everyone will eat protein from insects because there will be no choice.”

The post Looking For Sustainable Protein? Try A Pinch Of Fruit Fly Powder appeared first on NoCamels.

Autistic individuals will soon be able to practice and improve their social skills through realistic conversations with avatars powered by generative AI technology.

Autism is a developmental disorder that affects how people interact and communicate, often hindering diagnosed individuals in social situations. In many cases, autistic individuals struggle to initiate conversations, respond to the initiations and non-verbal cues of others, maintain eye contact, and take on another person’s perspective.

The web-based Skill Coach application developed by Israeli startup Arrows lets users engage in conversations in a variety of scenarios – from chatting with a stranger in a café to making small talk with a work colleague. 

Not a single scenario is scripted, and the avatar’s responses vary in each encounter. Users can also set themselves a specific goal, such as learning how to handle disagreements, before the start of a conversation.

Throughout every conversation, the AI platform identifies what it sees as conversational missteps and provides users with real-time recommendations through textual feedback, as well as visual cues that appear discreetly on the screen. These cues include symbols to indicate that the user should elaborate on their most recent remarks (a plus sign) or ask a followup question (a question mark). 

And as soon as the conversation ends, the Skill Coach app will provide detailed textual feedback such as whether a response was rude and the user should be less direct next time.

The AI was trained using a leading, evidence-based international program that aims to enhance the social skills of autistic adults. In the coming months, the web app will be tried out for the first time by early adopters who struggle with social interaction.

Family Ties 

The inability to interact and form social bonds can lead to anxiety and depression. And according to clinical psychologist Dr. Jana Rundle, individuals with autism may be three times more likely to have episodes of depression compared to the general population. 

Arrows founder Eran Dvir found that this was the case with his 17-year-old autistic daughter, who struggled to practice and improve her social skills outside of scheduled speech therapy sessions. 

“When they are children, [autistic people] usually have a shadow teacher or an integrator who helps facilitate their social lives,” he tells NoCamels, referring to professionals who help neurodivergent youngsters.

“But what happens is when they grow up, it’s no longer appropriate to always have [another person supporting them 24/7], and the problems are still there.”

Seeking a solution for his daughter while studying for a Master’s in human-computer interaction, Dvir had the idea to guide autistic adults through social situations using tech.  

He initially explored integrating this kind of technology into augmented reality glasses, where the aforementioned visual cues would offer social recommendations in real time.

Though the technology was tested on dozens of autistic individuals, he says that the hardware for augmented reality glasses has not advanced enough, and needs several more years to fully reach its potential. 

And so Arrows, which is based in Tel Aviv, has since pivoted to developing its Skill Coach software – at least for now.

A Virtual Guide

The company’s software centers on visual feedback cues and was created with the assistance of the Arrows’ scientific director – an Israeli psychologist and expert in autism whose identity is still under wraps. 

The realistic avatars that facilitate the conversations were created by an Israeli startup that specializes in AI-generated photos and videos, and the generative AI was developed using a range of software from several Israeli companies.

The startup is also already collaborating with the Israeli offices of IT giant Cisco to embed Arrows’ visual cues into video conferencing platforms. This will allow autistic people to receive real-time feedback during video conversations.

He stresses that this does not replace the need for a psychologist who helps autistic individuals with social interactions face-to-face, but allows people on the spectrum to practice their social skills at will – something that isn’t possible with scheduled in-person sessions. 

The company is planning to conduct a pilot by next year, which will focus on social interactions in the workplace.  

Once the pilot has been completed successfully, a subscription to the software will be available to both medium and large companies trying to boost diversity and inclusion. Therapists will also be able to offer the platform to patients for use when they are not in session.

“Because the conversation is with a virtual avatar, it is not only a safe space for the individual to practice, but it is also available for them at all times,” explains Dvir.  

Arrows was one of the winners of the 2021 HackAutism event, a yearly program where ​​entrepreneurs, experts and investors come together to develop 10 viable, sustainable projects that address the challenges experienced by autistic children and adults and their families.

The startup has thus far raised over $150,000 in funding, most of which was received as a grant from the Israel Innovation Authority. 

There are other coaching services for autistic individuals – both in-person and virtual – but Arrows’ says its platform with its real-time feedback sets it apart. 

“I think that our experience and our excellent team, with the uniqueness of the visual cues and the evidence-based program, makes us more competitive right now,” says Dvir. 

“And our focus on autistic individuals is a niche that not many other software companies are trying to cater to.”

The post AI Avatars Help Autistic People Hone Social Skills On Demand appeared first on NoCamels.

A startup in Israel is launching what it describes as the world’s first completely hands-free underwater “smart scooter.”

KikFin has produced a jetpack with fins that straps onto a swimmer’s back and propels them though the water faster than Olympic champion Michael Phelps.

It also attaches to surfboards, helping beginners as they learn to catch a wave.

Swimmers have always welcomed an underwater boost – ever since sailors first adapted torpedoes during World War II.

Technology has moved on since then, and there’s now a huge range of sea scooters (also known as diver propulsion vehicles) on the market.

They provide an extra oomph for amateur snorkellers and professional scuba divers alike.

But the one big drawback has always been that swimmers have to hold tight to the handles as they’re pulled through water. Until now.

Amihay Mines, CEO of KikFin, says his jetpack is a game changer, not just because it frees up the user’s hands, but also because it “bio-mimics” dolphins and other mammals.

The hydrodynamic wings allow the swimmer to change direction with the slightest movement of their head.

“It literally feels like you’re flying underwater,” Mines tells NoCamels. “The water just flows all over your body.”

Swimmers also control the five-speed motor remotely controlled with a glove that responds to a push of their finger.

KikFin incorporates specially developed wireless technology, currently used only by the military, that allows communication through both air and water.

It also comes with a safety feature that can limit the swimmer’s depth or distance from their start point, and an app that tracks their speed, location and performance.

It will be aimed initially at recreational users when it launches commercially early next year.

But Mines says it will also offer huge advantages to professional divers in any sphere  –  oil and gas rigs, rescue services, fish farms, the military and beyond – who needs to use their hands.

Kateryna Sadurska from Ukraine, the freediving world champion, tried the KikFin.

“It brings an amazing feeling,” she said. “Your arms are free, you don’t need to use your fins. It’s much easier to do safety and enjoy being underwater and feel yourself like a water angel.”

Mines was a keen surfer growing up near Palmahim beach, in central Israel. He studied mechanical engineering at university, where he started working on an early version of the KikFin.

At the time, it was designed to fit onto a surfboard, opening up a new world to surfers with disabilities through a group called Wave-ability. 

“My passion was to see people with disabilities take the control and enjoy the thrill and the excitement of catching a wave,” he says.

“I designed that fin with a professor of hydrodynamic in my university, creating a thruster to attach to a surfboard.”

The next step was to modify the fin for able-bodied swimmers, giving them extra speed and agility.

It was a long process of trial and error. “It took four years of working from six in the morning until two at night,” he says. “Countless underwater machines broke or let water in. More than 1,000 fins went into the garbage.”

Eventually Mines and his small team, based in Tel Aviv, perfected the KikFin. “It’s literally a dream come true,” he says. “I was flying underwater in my dreams, and now I’m doing it for real.

“When people see me on the beach with the KikFin and realize it’s a proper working product they get so excited and want to know when they can buy one.

“There are many underwater scooters on the market but there isn’t that’s anything like as sophisticated or as much fun.”

Different versions of KikFin are available. For swimmers and surfers it is worn as a vest, and for surfers and stand up paddleboarders (SUP), it fits on their board.

It provides a particularly useful boost for beginners, who often give up because they can’t otherwise gain enough speed to catch a wave.

KikFin propels users underwater at 9km an hour and on the surface at up to 12km an hour. An average swimmer can manage 3km an hour. Michael Phelps, winner of 28 Olympic swimming medals, achieved 8.8km an hour when he broke the world record for 100 meters butterfly.

The device works at depths of 40 meters and has an hour of power at full speed and uses a rechargeable battery that can be changed underwater.

It’s been tested in over 5,000 hours of underwater swimming at Eilat, Israel’s Red Sea resort, with 50 testers aged 12 to 80.

There is another device currently on the market, Cudajet, which is also a hands-free jetpack. Mines says it doesn’t have the wings that make his device so maneuverable, or the underwater wireless control.

The post Hands-Free Underwater Jetpack Gives Divers And Surfers A Boost appeared first on NoCamels.

An Israeli startup is countering the effects of rising urban temperatures by making cities greener, with smart infrastructure that helps create green walls, roofs and pergolas to bring down the heat.

Growing urbanization has led to phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect. This is when temperatures in a city increase relative to outlying areas due the impact of urbanization – such as densely-packed buildings retaining the summer heat and a shrinking number of green spaces as the population expands. 

BioShade’s green infrastructure comes in the form of lightweight PVC pipes containing a hydroponic system that feeds the plants using a water-based nutrition solution instead of soil.

The plants sprout through holes in the pipes, which can accommodate their root systems as they grow. The pipes also contain sensors that measure parameters such as water acidity and air temperature within them, to ensure that the plants are growing under peak conditions.

The sensors are connected to the startup’s platform, which uses bespoke algorithms to detail how much carbon dioxide the plants have captured, how much they have reduced heat stress in their surroundings, and even whether the plants are sufficiently fertilized.

The BioShade platform can even send alerts when a green installation is under attack from pests such as aphids. And because its sensors continuously monitor the condition of the plants, the system itself is low-maintenance, and only requires an in-person visit every six months.

“We want to create more green spaces in places where we cannot plant trees or have different kinds of urban greenery,” BioShade CEO and co-founder Peleg Bar-On tells NoCamels. 

​​“We can lower [the temperature in a small area] by about 10°C around the system, which essentially is biomimicking – or emulating the functions of – a tree,” he says.

“By growing it in this closed-loop system, we’re able to deploy it in places that don’t contain any soil, like rooftops and walls.”

Green spaces are crucial to life in a city. They can provide a cooling effect to counter the urban heat island effect by reflecting infrared radiation. Buildings, roads, and other infrastructure conversely absorb and re-emit the sun’s heat more than natural landscapes, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.

In addition to this, greater access to green spaces has numerous health benefits, the European Environment Agency says. People in urban areas with more green space have also been shown to have less mental distress, anxiety and depression when compared to individuals living in areas with less. 

Green spaces influence physical activities, with studies showing that people with access to them are more likely to engage in exercise, and would also do so more frequently.

The BioShade team grows the plants themselves and acclimatizes them to the hydroponic system before installing them for its clients, which range from municipalities to businesses and schools.

The Tel Aviv-based startup uses different plants for different locations. For example, the greenery used on a pergola in hilly Jerusalem will need to be resistant to colder conditions, as opposed to vegetation used in the more temperate coastal region of central Israel.

BioShade already has several custom installations throughout Israel. In Herzliya in central Israel, it is currently building a structure that will provide green shade for the roof of a new school.

And as part of a pilot project with the city’s municipality, the BioShade team has created a climatic insights dashboard for the students to analyze how its system will capture CO₂ and conserve water and energy while growing the plants.

Another one of its systems can be found in the bustling Dizengoff Center shopping mall in Tel Aviv in central Israel, where the startup even hosted a delegation from Sydney, Australia to showcase the invention.

Beyond that, BioShade has embarked on pilots with the municipalities of Tel Aviv and the southern desert city of Be’er Sheva.

From Gray To Green

Installing vegetation on walls, roofs, and other kinds of infrastructure isn’t anything new, and there are dozens of companies worldwide already doing so. 

But Bar-On says that the traditional green walls produced by these companies use plastic molds filled with soil, and that over time these plants struggle to grow because there isn’t enough space for their roots, unlike the BioShade system.

Additionally, he says that this kind of green infrastructure requires far more maintenance than BioShade’s autonomous system.

More than half of the world’s population – over 4.3 billion people, or 55 percent – now live in urban areas, especially in highly dense cities. As people continue to move to cities, green spaces and all the benefits they provide are shrinking. 

And this trend of urbanization it shows no signs of slowing, as people continue to flock to cities in search of better career opportunities and greater access to education and culture. By 2050, more than two-thirds of the world will be living in urban areas, according to Our World in Data at Oxford University.

Bar-On first had the idea for the company while learning about these challenges when studying for his Bachelor’s degree in Agroecology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

“I started to get more into the challenges that we now face, like climate change, and the lack of greenery around the world,” he says.

“And I thought to myself, how can we receive the benefit of trees and other kinds of natural organisms in cities [that don’t have any room for them]?

He co-founded BioShade together with Ziv Shalev in 2021. The startup was first based in CityZone, Tel Aviv’s Open Innovation Lab where startups receive support to build technologies and products tackling urban challenges. 

It received an initial investment from the Cactus Capital venture capital fund, and has been bootstrapping since. 

Most recently, BioShade was a semi-finalist of the 2023 Asper Prize, a competition which recognizes startups using innovative technology to create a global positive impact.

Bar-On says that while trees remain the best organism for reducing heat stress, planting them is not always ideal.

“Unfortunately, they’re not the best solution for cities, which have become so dense and industrialized that trees might conflict with the interests of residents and other players in the urban environment.

“I say, if you can plant the tree, you should do it. But where it is not possible, then you should definitely consider other types of open greenery and vegetation cover technologies.”

The post Hot In The City? Startup Using Plants To Cool Urban Areas appeared first on NoCamels.

Meet the kitchen robot that can prepare a chicken Caesar salad, spaghetti Bolognese, teriyaki steak, chicken penne alfredo, all at the same time.

And then it does the washing up.

The Beastro is an all-Israeli invention that provides the chef in any commercial kitchen with an extra four pairs of hands.

It follows their instructions to the letter, weighing out ingredients from an array of feeders, cooking and stirring the pot for the exact times specified, and preparing up to 75 dishes an hour.

“Anything you do in a pan, a wok or pot, you can with the Beastro,” says Yair Gordin, CEO of Kitchen Robotics, the startup behind the machine.

“Our customers use it to make omelet for breakfast, Thai kitchen, Indian kitchen, Italian kitchen, Cuban kitchen. It takes less than five minutes for the chef to define the recipe. It’s very simple.

“You tell it to put 5ml of oil into the pot, then 25g of chopped onion, then to heat it a specific temperature for one-and-a-half minutes, then add exact quantities of pre-cooked pasta and cream and mushrooms, and then cook it for another minute and a half.”

The Beastro has a robotic arm that picks up the pot to collect ingredients, as needed, from any of the 12 liquid feeders – water, oils, cream, sauces, for example – and the 23 non-liquid feeders  – chopped tomatoes,  vegetables, chicken, meat, pre-cooked rice or pasta.

The pots are “stirred,” or rotated over the heat, then cleaned and sterilized after each use in the built-in dishwasher.

It can replace two out of three kitchen staff, says Gordin, in an industry that battles a constant recruitment crisis, driven by low pay, monotonous work and unsociable hours.

Beastro still needs human intervention and more complex tasks are, for the time being, beyond its reach, says Gordin.

Raw ingredients need to be ready washed and chopped. It also can’t handle some larger items , such as a halved avocado or a whole egg.

And once a dish is cooked, it needs somebody to present it on a plate, add a garnish and actually serve it.

But it’s a huge help for many routine and time-critical tasks, and chefs who were initially skeptical about a robot in the kitchen now swear by it.

“It’s not 100 per cent automation. It’s 80 per cent,” says Gordin. “Michelin-starred restaurants will not use our robots and [Israeli street food eatery] Falafel Shlomo will not use our robot.”

But he says that for the vast majority of restaurants in between, leasing one of their robots will ease a huge burden.

A couple of Beastros are currently up and running, one at a bank in Tampa, Florida, cooking meals for its 750 employees, another at an educational establishment in Miami, Florida.

It’s much easier to get regulatory approval in the US than it is in Israel, says Gordin.

“By the end of this year, we’ll have 10 units working,” he says. “In 2024 we’re planning to deploy another 100 units.”

He says little has fundamentally changed in kitchens over the last 400 years, except for the switch from coal to gas or electricity.

Kitchen Robotics is one of 75 companies globally that is turning the old-fashioned “analog kitchen” into a digital one.

“Most of them trying to create a robot for specific dish, like pizza or pasta,” he says. “But there are only two companies in the world have robot in real customers’ kitchens.”

The other is Miso Robotics, the US company behind a robot that deep fries, but doesn’t cook. Gordin says his company brought its robot to market in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost.

He’s proud of the investors he’s attracted, including Ziv Amiram, co-founder of Mobileye, Israel’s most successful startup, and Compass Group, the world’s biggest catering firm, with over 500,000 employees.

He says the Beastro reduces food waste by 33 percent, and its cooking is absolutely consistent.

“A chef can invent a beautiful and tasty pasta dish but every week he has a new sous chef, and instead of cooking it for five minutes he does it for one-and-a-half,” he says. “The customer isn’t happy and the sous chef needs to do it again.

“Or the customer orders pasta without onion and gets it with onion. This impacts dramatically the restaurant’s profit, and the amount of food it wastes.”

He says the Beastro also provides the restaurant with precise data on use of ingredients and can help plan what it buys, based on past knowledge and future predictions of weather, sporting events, holidays and other factors that drive demand.

It frees chefs from many mundane tasks in the kitchen, so they can devote themselves more to creating new recipes, and readily share them with chefs across the world.

Gordin, a software engineer by training, recalls the inspiration for Beastro – watching a waitress struggle with a simple coffee order.

And how his first thought – designing a robot that would create a perfect cup – evolved into a robot that can now cook the perfect dish.

The challenge now, over and above the Beastro rollout, is to design the next-generation robot which can do more, such as deep frying for McDonald’s or KFC.

The post Kitchen Robot Gives Chef Four Extra Pairs Of Hands appeared first on NoCamels.

An Israeli startup is developing a new protein-based cancer treatment that it says has the potential to address one of the most important oncology targets. ExoProTher says its therapy solely affects the mutated cells that form tumors, and, unlike other treatments, does not affect healthy cells.  

Now being tested in the preclinical stage, the drug uses the p53 protein, which suppresses tumors. The p53 molecules bind to damaged DNA and tell cells with irreparable DNA damage to go into apoptosis (cell death). This prevents cells with damaged DNA from grouping together and forming tumors. 

Israeli scientists Lana Volokh and Alex Tendler co-founded the startup (whose name derives from EXOsome PROtein THERapy) in 2017, to develop a drug using protein from chicken cells. 

They say there are no apparent side effects from the treatment and claim it could even replace chemotherapy, which is one of the most common cancer therapies. More than half of oncology patients worldwide were treated with chemo in 2018. 

Chemotherapy targets cancer cells to stop them from reproducing but healthy cells are also damaged during the process as the drugs cannot distinguish between them. This causes multiple negative side effects such as hair loss, intense nausea, anemia, and damage to memory and concentration. 

Tumor Terminator 

P53 was first discovered in 1979 when scientists noticed the protein sticking to infected cells and signaling antibodies to fight infection. In 1989, the gene that produces the protein was determined to be a tumor suppressant. 

Dr. Tendler claims nobody has succeeded in developing a therapy based on the p53 protein delivery until now. 

“Twenty years ago, it was discovered that when the healthy protein interacts with the p53 mutated cells, the mutated proteins prevent the healthy ones from working,” he tells NoCamels.

“We solve the biggest problem by the usage of protein from other species. We use the protein from chicken cells, which is proven to be able to perform its function in human cells, but not to the point where the mutated human proteins can prevent it from working,” he said. 

“We solved this problem by usage of xenogeneic protein (protein originating from other, non-human, species). We use the protein of chicken origin. We successfully demonstrated that chicken p53 protein is able to perform its anti-cancer function in human cells while it is not inhibited by mutated p53 protein.”

Dr. Volokh says nobody has previously considered using chicken protein. 

 “Our approach is distinct from all of the current companies in the active substance, how we deliver the protein, and how the whole product is going to look,” she says. 

“Chicken protein is similar enough to function in human cells but not to the point where the mutated protein molecules can prevent them from working,” Dr. Tendler explains. 

The two scientists decided to explore p53 protein as cancer treatment when they realized that even though the cornea (the outer layer of the eye) is continually exposed to UV radiation from the sun, it is extremely rare to see that part of the body stricken with cancer. 

“It turns out that there is a huge amount of p53 protein in the cornea, already packed in the nanovesicles released by corneal cells,” says Dr. Tendler. 

Nanovesicles are tiny sacs particles that transport materials in and out of cells. 

“Those vesicles are released by corneal cells into extracellular spaces, and circulate throughout the cornea. Those vesicles can even be found in tears. When there is a mutated p53 cell, it instantly gets healthy protein from the neighboring cells.  So this is a local defense mechanism against cancer.”

In fact, says Dr. Tendler, 60 percent of cancers are associated with mutation of the gene encoding the p53 protein. 

By delivering p53 proteins through extracellular vesicles, the healthy proteins can drive the mutated cells into apoptosis and restore the body’s natural defense mechanisms against cancer.

Based in Haifa, ExoProTher is currently funded by Israeli investing giants Israel Biotech Fund and Peregrine Ventures. 

In their preclinical trials, Drs. Tendler and Volokh say they were able to significantly prolong the lives of mice with tumors and substantially reduce metastasis (the spread of cancer cells throughout the body). They were also able to show that the drug has no toxic side effects. 

Furthermore, they say, their drug will be suitable for a range of cancers. 

“We have screened a lot of different cancers,” says Dr. Tendler. “We see the ability to affect and potential to cure very different cancers. Colon cancer, brain cancer, lung cancer, ovarian cancer.” 

Cost Effective

Dr. Volokh also believes ExoProTher’s protein therapy can drastically reduce the cost of cancer treatment, highlighting the price of therapies that are tailored to the patient’s own individual genetic makeup. 

“There are many therapies today where blood is derived from the patient and the doctors engineer the drug substance to match that particular profile of that patient, which means that the drug is not applicable to anyone else,” she says. 

“That’s what makes certain therapies so expensive. But in our case, the drug will be an off-the-shelf product ready for administration, applicable to almost every type of cancer where p53 function is affected. This fact will allow large-scale manufacturing of our substance and make the therapy affordable.  The vesicles can be administered through standard injection and also through inhalation.”

A 2019 study by the Mesothelioma Center found that over 60 percent of cancer patients in the US reported financial struggles following their diagnosis. In fact, the American Association for Cancer Research says that the annual cost of cancer care in the US will likely reach around $246 billion by 2030, a 34 percent rise since 2015.

Tendler and Volokh say their protein therapy could initially be used alongside other treatments, including chemotherapy, and eventually even replace them. 

“We expect synergy between chemotherapy and our treatment,” Dr. Tendler says. 

“Our drug will be able to sensitize the tumors to chemotherapy and reduce the amount of chemo drugs that the patients will need, thus reducing chemotherapy’s side effects. This will probably be the first step before it becomes a standalone drug.” 

Dr. Volokh says their goals for the rest of 2023 are to continue lab trials and ensure higher yield and reproducibility rates for the drug substance, which are important for mass manufacturing. 

“Actually, Israel has a very strong leadership position in all that is about the p53 protein. Israel has a very rich history of discovery and characterization of p53-related mechanisms. Our ambition is to develop a p53 targeting drug here in Israel and make p53 an actionable clinical target. That’s our vision,” says Dr. Tendler. 

“There is not a single drug yet like this. It has the potential to make a huge impact.”

The post New Protein-Based Cancer Drug Does Not Affect Healthy Cells appeared first on NoCamels.

Anyone taking a stroll along Tel Aviv’s wooden promenade cannot fail to admire the overall splendid condition of the decking. 

This well-preserved state is the work of a fully automated deck maintenance robot created by RoboDeck, a Hod Hasharon-headquartered company. 

Almost like an AI Roomba for your woodwork, the RoboDeck is autonomous, following a preprogrammed plan to clean, treat and varnish the decking. 

The device, which looks like a 50-percent larger version of the ubiquitous automated floor cleaner, has multiple technological functions and uses artificial intelligence to perform its job. 

The robot is fully autonomous, RoboDeck co-founder and CPO Noam Rand says. Its navigation capabilities allows it to stay on the deck and not fall off, and it can maneuver around obstacles such as furniture or plants.

“One of the big breakthroughs is a very accurate systematic navigation,” Rand says, which is necessary as the robot is essentially painting the surface.  

The robot also uses a LiDAR camera, similar to the one used on autonomous cars, as part of its range of technological features. It works alongside RoboDeck’s proprietary sensor to provide what Rand says is “millimeter level accuracy.” 

Another feature is the cloud-connected mapping system that the robot uses to work out the area of the decking it is working on. 

This mapping system also logs any potential hazards it encounters, such as protruding nails or broken wood, which could prove dangerous to people walking on the deck. 

The information about the potential hazards is transmitted to the cloud along with their location so that they can be dealt with. The app to operate the robot and view the information in the cloud can be accessed via a smartphone. 

The inbuilt cleaning system allows the robot to move through the various steps of cleaning and treating the deck. The staining is done using recyclable cartridges that Rand says are easily replaced and can hold a variety of different materials. 

RoboDeck CEO and co-founder Gal Frenkel explains that the platform is built on the premise that continuous maintenance is more advantageous and avoids costly repairs that come when decking is left untreated for extended periods. 

He says that the manual process can take between two and five days to complete, depending on the size of the deck. First, a chemical strips off the existing oil and dirt from the wood, after which it is cleaned with a power washer and sanded. When these stages are completed, and the wood has dried, it is stained and coated with a protective layer. 

“This process has multiple steps and it’s very labor intensive – and that together equals expensive,” Frenkel says.

According to Rand, the robot performs the maintenance about 10 times more quickly than the manual process – which is vital for businesses who cannot afford to close off swathes of their outdoor spaces for cleaning. 

“We have no downtime, which is really crucial for commercial customers,” he says. 

Prevention Over Cure 

There is a massive market for deck maintenance, especially in the US, where a total of some $20 billion is spent every year on it, Rand says. 

And while that seems like an astronomical amount, he explains that there are 60 million decks in the United States – 50 million in residential homes and 10 million in commercial properties such as hotels, restaurants and public boardwalks. These include patios, front porches and, of course, poolside areas. 

Frenkel says it was his own miserable experience with maintenance of the decking around his own pool that led to the creation of the device. 

The year after his deck was installed, Frenkel called to complain about the poor state the wood was in. The decking specialist laughed and told him that the wood had to be maintained every year in order to look good and – more importantly – be safe to use.  

Rand says that deck owners generally do not abide by a maintenance program, due to the time and money involved in doing this manually. And so they leave the wood until it is in such a poor state that it needs to be fully restored. 

“Your deck looks good, and then it degrades until it either looks really bad or it’s unsafe, and you restore it again. And then it degrades. That process doesn’t really make sense, but it is a result of the high cost, downtime and the labor intensity,” Rand says.  

He explains that there are robots that perform cleaning duties outdoors, such as in parking lots and pedestrian areas, but RoboDeck is the only robot in the world that’s dedicated to deck maintenance.

Today, three years after its creation, RoboDeck also operates out of California, where it has an agreement with the largest deck maintenance company on the West Coast. 

It also has its sights set on the Australian market, with tentative plans to enter into an agreement with a “very large woodcare brand,” although Rand says this is still in the future.  

“Our mission is basically to make the maintenance of outdoor living areas easy and affordable for everyone so that they can enjoy it, whether it’s homeowners, municipalities or professionals,” he says.  

The post Little Robot Cleaner Keeps Outdoor Decking Shipshape appeared first on NoCamels.

Israeli startup CODA is aiming to make it easier for deaf people to enjoy video content by using artificial intelligence-generated avatars that can translate spoken language into sign language almost instantaneously.

Deaf people prefer sign language to subtitles or closed captioning, according to ASL service provider Languagers, because sign language has a grammatical structure and expression independent of any other language. As a result, it is much easier to engage with the content in what deaf people see as their first language. 

“It’s beyond just the alphabet. We can take a sentence and change the essence just with our voice, right? Like I can say ‘I want to go home’ very calmly or very intensely. It’s the same thing in sign language. Our approach is to make the AI understand this in creating the language,” CODA co-founder Shani Bibi tells NoCamels.

The AI-generated avatar utilizes machine learning to translate auditory signals into visible sign language. Their algorithm pulls from a large database of information on the grammar, expressions, and tones of sign language, which Bibi and Naor ensured were accurate by working with deaf sign language users.

The app is also available off-line, meaning that it will also work on videos that have previously been downloaded onto a digital device.  

Accessibility has become a regular feature for content platforms such as YouTube, which has options to generate automated captions, while videos are being subbed and dubbed in a variety of different languages. 

Roughly 70 million people around the world use sign language as a primary form of communication, with more than 300 different types of sign language being spoken worldwide, according to the United Nations. In the US alone, 500,000 people use American Sign Language (ASL).

It has become routine to see sign language interpreters at public events such as the US president’s annual State of the Union address and concerts and to have the ability to turn on subtitles for movies and videos. 

But many forms of content do not have that layer of accessibility available – and that’s where CODA comes in. 

With backgrounds in artificial intelligence and software engineering, Bibi and Shiran Naor co-founded the startup with the intent to automatically translate spoken content into sign language in real time. 

“Imagine that you are watching the news,” says Bibi. “And there’s a bubble in the corner with a sign language interpreter inside. Instead of hiring an actual person to do the sign language, we will have this avatar who would translate whatever the news reporter is saying into sign language after a few seconds of delay.”

Childhood Dream

Bibi wanted to involve the Deaf community as much as possible in the process. She says as a Child of Deaf Adults (CODA) herself, she had “dreamed about a company like this” since she was five.

“Since the first time I translated for my parents, I said I would change the world for them,” Bibi says. 

“This is why I chose the name CODA, because I am a CODA, for this community around the world. Technology like the telephone has always divided the world into those who can hear and those who can’t, which gives them different opportunities in life. But now, this technology can bring them back to the same level.”

For the avatars, the two founders worked with AI specialists to develop a male model and a female model, which can be tailored to different ethnicities and countries.

Bibi says they conducted psychological research in order to help them create the perfect avatar. 

“We were trying to understand how people think, how people react when they see an avatar that looks like them. By the figure, the hair color, the age, the eye color, the eye shape,” she says. “Everything is important because the avatar changes based on the country.”

Moreover, they worked to localize the content, adapting the sign language to the specific region’s dialect and unique mannerisms. 

CODA currently offers its services in five different languages: English, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Italian. Bibi says they are next looking to expand into the multiple different sign languages of high population countries such as India and China.

The company was recently one of nine winners in MassChallenge Israel’s 2023 Early-Stage Accelerator Program. They have also received a grant from the Israel Innovation Authority, a Jerusalem-based branch of the government that supports high-tech and industrial R&D. 

The market for tech that produces live, real-time interpreting (known as remote simultaneous interpretation) is estimated to reach $12.8 billion by 2025. 

“There’s a big demand for this,” Bibi says. 

CODA’s AI platform will be available for content-creating businesses to integrate into their videos.  

“Everyone’s under strict regulations to provide accessible content. In the US, it’s the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act]. In Israel, it’s called the Accessibility Law. The main solution is to bring in live interpreters. We aim to bring a different solution, a one-stop shop for translation,” Bibi says.

The company hopes to involve every part of the Deaf and Hearing-Impaired community in developing CODA, including sign language interpreters. In 2021, there were over 2,000 certified ASL interpreters residing in North America alone. 

“We want to work with sign language interpreters. We don’t want to delete the industry, but to make the cost of interpretation lower,” she says. 

Companies like UK-based Signapse and India’s signer.ai also offer AI-powered sign language translations. However, they only translate written text into sign language, while CODA is available for auditory content. Additionally, Signapse also has a two-day turnaround for translational services while CODA translations will be near instantaneous.

Bibi says their ability to add emotions and tones also sets them apart from competitors. 

“We focus on creating a language, not just a collection of signs,” she says.

The post AI Avatar Turns Speech Into Sign Language In Real Time appeared first on NoCamels.

Chest pain is a common problem with dozens of causes that range from harmless bruised muscles from coughing to potentially fatal pulmonary embolisms. But for the person involved, the experience can be a frightening one – even when the cause turns out to be relatively minor.

Now an Israeli startup has developed an AI-based platform to help doctors diagnose patients with chest issues, accurately and in real time. 

Quai.MD seamlessly connects to a hospital’s Electronic Health Records (EHR) – the digital version of a patient’s medical history – and uses this data, along with triage assessments and expert opinions drawn from medical research, to propose the most likely diagnosis and best courses of action.

For although there are established medical guidelines to help determine and treat multiple causes of chest pain of varying degrees, ER physicians, who are often understaffed and under tight time constraints, can make mistakes in diagnoses.

A December 2022 study by the US Health Department found that more than five percent of patients experience misdiagnosis in American emergency departments.

But Shlomi Uziel, co-founder and CEO of Quai.MD, tells NoCamels that the platform gives doctors a clear set of steps to follow during the examination period.

“The application sits inside the EHR, and helps the physician determine what the next step is for each of those potential diagnoses until they reach the decision to ultimately admit or discharge the patient,” he says.  

“What we’re trying to do is help [physicians] align more with the best practices and protocols.”  

Uziel explains that every hospital has a list of the best practices that derive from general medical knowledge and research. And the failure of an ER physician to follow protocol, he says, can lead to one of two outcomes:

In the first instance, the physician suspects that the patient has a serious illness and admits them to the hospital, where they can potentially spend several days undergoing various tests only to discover that there is nothing wrong.

This phenomenon costs the US economy an annual $750 billion, according to private healthcare firm PinnacleCare.

The other situation, says Uziel, is that the patient is sent home from the emergency room without realizing that they have a potentially fatal ailment, which could have disastrous results.

Deep Learning Diagnosis

Quai.MD accesses and analyzes the patient’s initial ER assessment and their medical history, even as they are being seen by a physician.

The AI platform then generates several diagnoses, ranging from most likely to least likely, as well as the steps the doctor should take in order to eliminate each possibility.

Uziel gives the example of acute coronary syndrome – a range of conditions related to sudden, reduced blood flow to the heart, including a heart attack. In order to rule this out, he says, the doctor must order a blood test to check for troponin, a protein that is released into the bloodstream during a heart attack.

The Quai.MD platform, he says, can be used to order specific blood tests with just one click.

Should the doctor decide to admit a patient, Quai.MD would then generate a report of all the care the complete process of patient care – saving the doctor time and making it easier for the medical billing team to determine the patient’s insurance coverage for the services they received. 

Quai.MD is currently focused on diagnosing the various causes of chest pain, which Uziel says has around 60 potential diagnoses – including a handful that are among the riskiest of health conditions. 

Beyond possibly saving lives and preventing unnecessary healthcare costs, Quai.MD’s CPO Marcelle Kaspi explains that the technology may also eliminate the biases that some healthcare providers have towards certain groups among their patients. 

“We know that there’s a lot of sex-based, race-based, and socioeconomic-based biases in the healthcare system in general,” she says.

Research has shown, for example, that white medical students and residents were more likely to believe that black patients feel less pain and do not need the same levels of pain medication as white patients – even as recently as 2016.

Because Quai.MD’s artificial intelligence learns solely from medical journals and studies, as well as the patient’s medical history and treatments, it doesn’t hold the same implicit biases as doctors. This, Kapsi believes, could potentially solve this issue. 

The Ramat Gan-based company expects the platform to become operational in the emergency room at the Medical University of South Carolina at the start of 2024. The startup is currently collaborating with doctors from this hospital and from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota in order to finish developing the app. It is also due to receive medical records from 10,000 patients to further train the AI. 

The Doctor Will See You Now

Quai.MD is not the only Israeli startup trying to improve doctors’ performances. Kahun allows patients to discuss their symptoms with generative AI, and provides their doctor with a summary of their condition and possible diagnoses before their real life consultation. And Navina uses AI to produce summaries of a patient’s medical history for doctors via a smartphone app. 

But Uziel says that what sets Quai.MD apart is that it is the only one that automates the entire clinical process, from initial diagnosis through to suggesting care and treatment options. 

Quai.MD, which was founded in 2020, has raised around $2 million thus far from venture capital firm Random Forest and seed-stage fund Labs/02. It is now announcing a new $2.5 million financing round led by Good Company, with the participation of two healthcare systems from the US as well as new and existing investors. 

Most recently, the startup was one of five finalists in the Asper Prize competition, which recognizes startups using innovative technology to create a global positive impact.  

Quai.MD was founded by Uziel, a former VP at multinational computational software company Cadence Design Systems; Prof. Chen Shapira, the former CEO of Carmel Hospital in northern Israel; and Dr. Golan Yona, a machine learning expert and former Cornell Professor at the Department of Computer Science. 

“We just wanted to do something that makes this world slightly better,” says Uziel.

The post AI Platform Helps Diagnose Chest Pain Swiftly And Accurately appeared first on NoCamels.

Imagine learning about Mars from the Martian, leadership from the Lion King and inspiration from Inside Out. 

For some students this could be a reality, thanks to an innovative learning platform devised in Israel that uses blockbuster movies to teach multiple subjects to school and higher education students. 

 AcadeMe+ creates educational lessons for colleges and K-12 classrooms using movies made by major film studios, including Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, Disney and Sony. 

For the younger generations who were born into a digital world, screens are a part of normal life. And AcadeMe+ says its interactive, media-based approach is helping classrooms adapt to a digitally integrated learning style. 

“We came up with AcadeMe+ to really bring the availability and the access for the teacher to use movies for educational lessons,” founder and CEO Yuval Kalati tells NoCamels. 

The company has partnered with US-based educational nonprofit Journeys in Film to create the lesson plans based on movie resources.

Journeys in Film describes itself as an organization that transforms entertainment media into educational media, in order to help the younger generations become “globally competent and socially active.” 

The AcadeMe+ platform has an AI search facility, that allows teachers to locate lesson plans that align with their curricula and helps them search the database to locate resources while preparing their own lessons.

For example, teachers planning a lesson on environmental sustainability can find suggestions based on the animated Pixar movie Elemental, in which characters based on the four elements – fire, water, earth and air – learn about one another as they strive to unite their different communities. 

Similarly, the platform proposes using the movie Hidden Figures, based on the true story of female African-American researchers at NASA in the 1960s, to teach about prejudice and racism. 

“You can tell the story or the subject of the lesson in a very engaging way. This is the purpose of AcadeMe+,” says Kalati.

The company also allows teachers to monitor and record their students’ progress and provides a social media platform for educators to talk to and support one another.

AcadeMe+ was a finalist in the Start-Up Company of the Year competition at last year’s Gess Education Awards, which recognize excellence, quality, and diversity of resources and people in the education community. 

It was honored for providing teachers with a wide range of lesson plans based on its extensive library of short clips and full movies. 

While other companies also produce educational material using popular culture, such as the American website Teach With Movies and FilmDoo Academy from the UK, Kalati says these competitors rely more on documentaries and open source material from YouTube. 

AcadeMe+, he says, has the most extensive library of media resources and covers the greatest range of subjects, not to mention a unique and strong partnership with the major studios.

“We work very closely with the studios, and they love us because we are taking their content and making it into something that they never thought to do,” he says. 

Kalati spent two decades in digital entertainment and media before he began working closely with Israel’s Ministry of Education in 2018 to create an accessible learning platform for Israeli schools, based on the AcadeMe+ digital movie library. 

The following year,  the company was licensed by the Education Ministry and is now used for free by 154,000 teachers in over 4,100 Israeli schools and colleges. 

But while there is no cost for Israeli schools, Kalati says the company is likely to charge a fee for use in other countries as it expands. 

In September, AcadeMe+ will launch in schools in 10 nations, including Turkey, India, Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, Germany and the United Kingdom, catering to an estimated 2 million students. 

The platform’s user interface, film subtitles, and film dubbing is fully customizable to many languages, including Spanish and Arabic.

According to Kalati, AcadeMe+ will also soon feature an immersive English learning component, which will feature Disney TV shows to help students learn English. 

Furthermore, AcadeMe+ has announced an upcoming partnership with Microsoft Education that will use AI technology to make the lessons more customizable, helping to meet the needs of students with a range of academic abilities.   

Kalati says the company is also working on expanding its curriculums to more socially aware topics, such as climate change and gender equality.  

“By infusing learning with the magic of film, we create an engaging and immersive learning experience that resonates with today’s screen-focused generation,” he says. 

The post Israeli Startup Using Movie Magic To Teach Classroom Lessons appeared first on NoCamels.

Israeli scientists have developed a new drug to treat Alzheimer’s disease following a recent discovery about how people lose their memories. 

The creators of the drug, which is currently undergoing preclinical trials, say it could potentially be life-changing for people living with Alzheimer’s. 

The disease – the most common type of dementia, which affected up to 40 million sufferers worldwide in 2023- is known to have no cure. Furthermore, there are still no agreed-upon causes of the disease, even though it was first diagnosed in 1906.

The ailment breaks down the neural synapses – the channels through which neurons (nerve cells that send messages to the whole body) communicate in the brain. This atrophies key areas of the brain and ultimately causes a significant loss of brain functionality.   

The new drug from Herzliya-based startup MemoryPlus blocks two proteins in the brain from interacting and causing the breakdown of neural synapses, something which exacerbates memory loss. 

The development came after the researchers discovered high levels of PTEN, one of the two proteins, in the brains of late Alzheimer’s sufferers. 

A different protein, amyloid beta, is believed to be one the primary causes of Alzheimer’s, as it causes what is called amyloid plaque to build up in the brains of people with the disease. The plaque forms in the spaces between the nerve cells, which disrupts cell function in memory – and most treatments for Alzheimer’s focus on this plaque. 

MemoryPlus, however, focuses on disrupting the interaction between PTEN and another protein called PSD-95. 

The company was founded in 2018 by Dr. Shira Knafo of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; Prof. Gal Ifergane, director of the neurology department at Soroka Medical Center in Be’er Sheva; and Ben-Gurion University business school alum Ehud Netta. 

Two years earlier, Knafo’s Molecular Cognition Lab discovered that as well as causing cancer when it mutates, the PTEN protein also impairs brain functioning both when there is a surplus of it and when it interacts with PSD-95 in the synapses. 

“Until now, the PTEN protein was only known in relation to cancer. We found out it’s also doing something unrelated. It’s doing something to the brain function and plasticity and learning and memory,” says Knafo.

Knafo’s lab had examined the postmortem brains of people who had had Alzheimer’s disease and found high levels of the PTEN protein in the neural synapses. 

“When there’s too much of the PTEN protein, it becomes toxic to the synapses. What we saw is that in Alzheimer’s disease, the [surplus] PTEN protein enters the synapses and causes them to be much weaker. When they become weak, they can’t pass information that well, and then you see loss of brain function and memory because the synapses are considered to be the place of information storage.”

Furthermore, PTEN often interacts in the synapse with PSD-95, which is a scaffolding protein that helps relay information between the cell membrane and nucleus more quickly. 

Both proteins are important when functioning independently, but when they interact with each other, they can cause synaptic depression that leads to more memory loss. 

Knafo’s lab developed a peptide (the building blocks of proteins) that would interact with PSD-95 and thereby prevent PTEN from doing so. 

The peptide not only blocks the harmful interaction between PTEN and PSD-95, Knafo says, but it can also prevent the toxic buildup of PTEN and preserve the neural synapses and cognitive function. 

Drugs (such as memantine and cholinesterase inhibitors) are given to Alzheimer’s patients to boost messenger chemicals in the brain crucial to memory and learning, which helps reduce symptoms of the disease. However, Knafo says that unlike MemoryPlus’ treatment, these drugs cannot prevent the destruction of further nerve cells.  

Major pharma companies such as US-based Biogen and Eli Lilly are also developing new drugs for Alzheimer’s, but these treatments target amyloid beta and Knafo does not see them as competitors.

“It’s true that they got rid of amyloid beta, but they didn’t improve memory,” she says. 

“We are working on completely different aspects of Alzheimer’s. Amyloid beta can stay in the brain as long as we can bypass it. We are working on the synapses.” 

The peptide is administered orally and is currently undergoing preclinical trials in the UK, China, Hong Kong, and Israel. 

Knafo explains that peptides have the advantage of being able to target very specific proteins, which means that they tend to have less side effects. However, she says that peptides can be less stable and more easily degraded by enzymes in the blood.

The company is also looking at small molecules as a new way of delivering the treatment, after screening thousands of synthetic small molecules in a five-year long study with the University of Hong Kong. 

“Small molecules can enter the brain more easily, but they may have some side effects. We currently have five different synthetic small molecules that do the same thing as a peptide. Once we test them and find the right one, we will take it all the way to clinical testing.”

Both the peptide and small molecules would work in the same way, by binding to PSD-95. This would prevent PTEN from binding to it and damaging the neural synapses as a result.

“We’re not trying to cure Alzheimer’s yet, but improve the symptoms,” says Knafo. 

The post Protein-Busting Drug Could be New Era For Alzheimer’s Therapy appeared first on NoCamels.

The Japanese government has tapped an Israeli tech company to install its advanced imaging computer chips on buses used to transport children, to avoid a potentially fatal case of a child being accidentally left inside an extremely hot vehicle.

This phenomenon, known as “forgotten baby syndrome,” has claimed hundreds of young lives around the world in the past two decades. 

In April, Tokyo made it mandatory for kindergartens and other daycare facilities to install safety devices onto their buses to prevent children from being forgotten inside – which amounts to around 80,000 vehicles nationwide. 

The decision came after a three-year-old died in central Japan last September, when she was left for five hours inside a daycare bus on a sweltering day.

Vayyar Imaging is one of a number of companies involved in the program. Its chip uses radio waves to create consistent, high-resolution 3D images of objects and people, regardless of light or weather conditions. 

Every chip contains dozens of antennas that transmit and receive radio waves. The transmitters emit these radio waves, which hit objects and bounce back, and the receptors capture these reflected signals. 

The chips’ built-in algorithms, designed to identify any child left in an unattended vehicle, measure the distance between the source of the radio waves and the object they hit to determine what it is. 

And because each chip has many antennas that transmit frequencies in many directions, it can generate the image almost instantly.

Ian Podkamien, head of automotive at Vayyar, explains to NoCamels that this method of detecting objects results in a very high-resolution silhouette.

“The more antennas you have, the better resolution the image,” he says. 

The chips activate once the doors on an empty vehicle have been locked. They scan the interior for any children that have been left behind and if someone is identified, the system will automatically send an alert to the daycare staff responsible. 

As time passes, says Podkamien, the alerts escalate – from having the car sound its horn repeatedly to calling the driver and even alerting emergency services.

Podkamien says that companies can use the radar imaging as if it were a camera – but one with the added advantage of privacy, as the chips do not render faces but rather a detailed silhouette created by pixels. 

Vayyar is partnering on the project with Japanese corporation Aisin, one of the largest suppliers of automotive components and systems, such as navigation, brakes and engine-related parts. 

The Israeli company will embed its chips into the Aisin sensors that are to be integrated into the new buses. Vehicles already in use that are equipped with Aisin sensors will also be retrofitted with the Israeli tech. 

The number of chips required depends on the size of the vehicle. A seven-seater minibus, for example, only needs a single chip. 

Processing powerhouse 

There are multiple radar-imaging companies for the automotive industry on the market. 

These include US-based Ambarella and Ainstein, which both use radio waves to create four-dimensional imaging, and Israeli tech leader Mobileye, which is developing a four-dimensional imaging radar with a Taiwanese firm. 

Podkamien, however, says that what sets Vayyar apart is that its patented chip has 24 transmitter and 24 receiver antennas, while others tend to only have three of each. 

“We are the only company in the world that has so many antennas in a single chip,” he says. 

“The whole idea is to minimize this technology, and create a powerful solution at a very low cost.”  

Furthermore, Vayyar says it is the only chip maker in the field to also provide the algorithms that generate images from the radio waves. This allows automotive companies to use the chips for a range of purposes, such as detecting pedestrians or parking assistance. 

Vayyar did not start out in the automotive field. Founded in 2011, the company originally developed its sensors as a novel application for breast cancer screening. 

This original device was capable of identifying anomalies and tumors within breast tissue in seconds, and functioning as a portable, non-ionizing device that cost a fraction of the price of a mammography unit – especially in the developing world.

“This portable solution could be used and passed around in villages that aren’t close enough to a big medical center,” says Podkamien. 

The Yehud-headquartered company has since developed its sensors for a range of purposes, including monitoring the elderly in residential homes, managing stock in retail stores and detecting small, concealed objects in security scans.

Vayyar has raised a total of $296 million thus far, most recently securing $108 million in a Series E funding round led by investment firm Koch Disruptive Technologies in June 2022. 

Podkamien says that while the child-safety regulations adopted by Japan are not yet mandatory worldwide, initiatives in the US and across Europe are pushing car manufacturers to make it so – and it’s only a matter of time until they are. 

The European New Car Assessment Programme, a voluntary vehicle safety rating system, added child presence detection systems in 2023 as a prerequisite for vehicles to achieve a five-star safety rating.

And in the US, the Association of Global Automakers and the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers – the two groups that cover almost all carmakers in the American market – have reached an agreement that every vehicle carrying passengers will have alerts for rear-seat occupants by 2025. 

There is existing technology to remind drivers to remove their children from their vehicles with them. These include a notification that sounds on the Israeli-developed Waze navigation app when the drive is over, and a device that turns on when a rear door of the car is opened and then sounds an alarm if the door remains closed once the car stops. 

None of these solutions, however, are integrated into the actual vehicle and can require professional installation or depend on the app always being used while driving.

Vayyar intends for its technology to ultimately be integrated in many of these vehicles. This includes imports to Israel – where between 2010 and 2020 there were 34 fatalities due to children being left in overheated, locked cars. 

“Hopefully, this will put an end to these really unnecessary tragedies,” says Podkamien 

The post Israeli Tech Is Helping To Prevent Kids Being Left In Hot Cars appeared first on NoCamels.

Practical Innovation is an idea factory, a one-off organization based in Israel that comes up with one-off ways for businesses with a sense of adventure to expand their operations.

And in a world where the term “game changer” is routinely used to hype even the most modest improvement to a product, Practical Innovation is, quite literally, changing games.

The company was approached by the Israeli makers of Rummikub, one of the world’s best-selling board games, to help increase their sales.

Rummikub was invented by toothbrush salesman Ephraim Hertzano. He introduced numbered tiles after the communist government in Romania outlawed card games. The game had remained virtually unchanged since he emigrated to Israel and launched it in 1949.

Practical Innovation took a long, hard look at it and, despite the makers’ initial reluctance, they re-wrote the rules to includes extra jokers, making it a faster game, and increasing sales.

That’s just one example of how the company has become a literal game changer.

In the decade since it was founded, Practical Innovation has launched over 80 new products across a whole range of manufacturing industries, in plastics, construction, waste, print, automotive, medical, retail, textile, service, municipalities, steel, energy, food, cosmetics and beyond.

Here are just a few:

• It came up with an entirely new range of products for the automotive filter company A.L. Filter Group – the Zence filter that releases essential oils into the car to suit the mood of the driver and their passengers.

• It was approached by a municipality in Israel to find a new use for the branches it cut from all its trees. Practical Innovation developed a way to turn them into sound-insulating walls.

• Caniel, an Israeli canning company wanted a breakthrough to increase sales. Practical Innovation invented, on its behalf, the world’s first spurt-free tuna can, which allows users to gently the base of the tin to neatly drain the oil.

• A company that disposes of tonnes of waste bread decided there must be a better, and more profitable, solution than turning it into animal feed. Practical Innovation found a way to turn it into a recyclable version of Play-Doh.

• One of the world’s largest producers of cellulose for the paper industry wanted to do something useful with the industrial waste products from the tens of millions trees it felled every year. Practical Innovation invented a process to turn it into bio-compostable plastic.

• Practical Innovation invented the world’s first wireless outdoor air conditioner, with cryogenic technology – the use of liquid nitrogen as a coolant.

• Practical Innovation invented the all-new tortilla – gluten-free, low in carbohydrates, high in protein and made from sprouted orange lentils.

• A leading olive oil manufacturer wanted a worthwhile use for the nearly 5,000 tons of skins, pits and leaves it produced every year.  Practical Innovation developed the world’s first flour made from olives.

Businesses approach Practical Innovation because they’re seeking a profitable way to stand out from their competitors.

They need fresh eyes to add a surprise ingredient into the mix and redefine what they do.

“The fact that they are very, very good in their fields is their weakness,” Tal Leizer, the company’s CEO.

“They’re used to thinking the same way about their category. They know they need to re-invent themselves, but they don’t know how.

“We work across a lot of categories. So we can mix and match. We work with a lot of experts, who have a lot of knowledge. We can pick and mix.”

Clients seek its help because they sense they should be on a different trajectory, but they don’t know what it is.

Leizer and her team gather info on a new client, tour their factory and interview key people.

They then spend the next three months brainstorming, researching, seeking input from their pool of 400 experts in a whole range of disciplines.

And they create a new product that, as the company’s name suggests, is practical and innovative. And profitable.

What comes next is the big reveal. The client doesn’t know what to expect, just that they’ve been promised a great idea.

They sit down to an “oven-ready” proof-of-concept proposal, ready to be tried and tested in their factory, and ready to be patented for their protection.

It’s typically a moment of high excitement – a game-changer for the company – but also one of apprehension, says Leizer.

“We start every presentation by saying that we all live in the comfort zone,” she says. “When we think about the innovation zone we all think about new opportunities, the big world that is waiting for us.

“But I tell them this is not how you’re going to feel in this presentation. The innovation zone is uncomfortable. It’s not pleasant, your stomach aches, you ask yourself if it’s possible or not and you have a lot of doubts. It’s really not a very pleasant place to be.

“It’s going to be difficult, it’s going to be challenging, we are going to get frustrated, but we have to work through it and we have to be strong.”

She and her team of 10, based in Shefayim in central Israel, pride themselves on finding solutions for companies in what they call the real-tech world – making the things rather than software that people need for their day-to-day lives.

Leizer is adamant that she and her team can find a solution for any business – from a small family firm to a huge multinational.

“Our job is to be the game changer. That’s why companies approach us. We look for the growth engines that will bring new sales and new profitability. Traditional industry always deals with low profitability.”

There’s often inertia in industry. Factories have production lines churning out whatever they churn out, and even if profits are falling, there’s an urge to carry on, because stopping to change direction is risky.

Not every CEO is prepared to invest in the service she offers, and to venture beyond their comfort zone.

“There are those who don’t want to take the risk,” she says. “I know what I’m doing, they say. OK, It’s not very profitable, but it’s safe.

“And then there are CEOs who say we have to change, we have to do something different.

“People ask me what sort of companies are right for this process. And I always say, it’s not the company, it’s the person.  I can sometimes tell in the first 10 minutes of a meeting if this is the right person.”

The post Israeli Idea Factory That’s Literally A Game Changer appeared first on NoCamels.

On Tuesday, July 25, 2023, a day after the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) passed legislation reducing the influence of the judiciary over the decisions of the political echelon, the major newspapers in Israel all sported the same cover: a page of solid black broken only by a small slogan in white at the bottom that read “A black day for Israeli democracy.” 

The cover was actually an advert paid for by the “High-Tech Protest” – a group of hundreds of people working in Israel’s high-tech sector, from entry-level employees to CEOs and venture capitalists. 

The group’s members have taken to the streets on a regular basis to protest the judicial overhaul, out of what they say is a sense of “mission and responsibility for the future of the State of Israel.”

The controversial “reasonableness” legislation limits the ability of the High Court (which in Israel also functions when necessary as the Supreme Court) to review government actions, preventing the judiciary from striking down any government decision that it believes is not a reasonable measure. 

Supporters of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition say the law is needed to curb an activist court trying to govern from the bench; its critics decry it as anti-democratic and a power grab by the government – and one that has only just begun. 

The legislation has been met with fierce opposition in Israel for the past six months, with tens of thousands taking to the streets across the country every week in protest. 

A survey carried out by state broadcaster Kan earlier this month found that 43 percent of Israelis opposed the new law, while just 31 percent backed it and 25 percent were unsure.

The protests by the high-tech industry have been a prominent feature in the ongoing dissent. 

“There’s a clear distinction between the current government, which is extreme and right wing, and the warriors of democracy, which include the high-tech sector, the doctors, the soldiers, the pilots, the teachers and many people around the country, who are saying no to the change in the judicial system and yes to democracy,” Erel Margalit, one of Israel’s most prominent high-tech entrepreneurs, tells NoCamels. 

There is no central leadership to the high-tech protest, but rather it was an organic emergence of concerned individuals, industry veteran Erez Shachar and one of the first people in the movement tells NoCamels. 

“The high-tech sector is very sensitive to political stability, to liberal democratic values,” says Shachar, who is managing partner at Qumra Capital in Tel Aviv. 

“We don’t have any physical assets – our assets are intellectual property and the talent of people, and these people are, by definition, extremely mobile.” 

The high-tech protests have not remained within Israel’s borders, and Margalit has been at the forefront of demonstrations in the United States. On Monday, he led a march across Brooklyn Bridge against the judicial overhaul. 

“We say no to dictatorship, no to anti-pluralism and no to a non-independent judicial system!” he told the protest. 

The protesters have been very visible in New York, which is home to many Israeli companies as they move to expand. Among those companies is Israeli Mapped in NY, a platform created to shine a light on Israeli innovation and help startups make their mark in the city. 

On Wednesday, Israeli Mapped in NY CEO Guy Franklin joined New York Stock Exchange President Lynn Martin and leading lights in the Israeli high-tech industry, including Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport and Taboola boss Adam Singolda, to ring the opening bell at the NYSE to honor his company. Many of the Israelis present donned black t-shirts emblazoned with “Save our democracy” in white letters. 

Brain Drain

Erez Shachar warns that the economic impact on the Israeli innovation ecosystem is tremendous and potentially long lasting. He explains that while in recent years, 80 percent of Israeli startups have registered in the country and only 20 percent have registered abroad, since the start of 2023 those figures have effectively reversed. 

And he says this is due to foreign investors – who account for 90 percent of the funds received by Israeli startups – telling those companies that they must register outside of Israel due to the political instability in the country. 

“These institutional investors have very strict ESG [environmental, social and governance] standards, are very concerned about political instability, are definitely very concerned about human rights and all of this is at risk from this current government,” he says. 

So while those companies still physically operate to some degree inside Israel, their taxes go to the country – primarily the United States – in which they are registered. 

“The high-tech sector is dependent on foreign investors and foreign investments and these are affected by the [legislation],” explains Jonathan Saacks, the managing partner of Tel Aviv-based F2 Venture Capital. 

“We believe the high-tech sector is extremely important to Israel’s stability, strength and success as a country and nation,” he tells NoCamels.  

And Shachar does not believe that the sector will remain as stable as it has over the past decade or so. 

“When [a country] becomes less stable and more at risk of losing some of the liberal democratic values, it’s really, really easy to reallocate funds – even people – to different geographic locations,” Shachar says. 

Ultimately, he warns, the people who will suffer due to this relocation are not the ones working in the high-tech sector, but rather weaker members of Israeli society who rely on government stipends to get by and who will likely see those stipends shrink as tax revenues to the state shrink. 

“The government will have a diminished tax base in the next few years as a result of what’s currently going on – and this is already happening,” he says. 

Saacks is less than sanguine about Israel’s future, in the face of a potentially massive departure of talent in the tech sector. 

“The most important factor and key success factor is the human capital and strength of the Israeli entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers and operators,” he says. 

“If these professionals decide to relocate out of Israel this will be extremely negative and probably irreversible to the success of the high-tech sector.” 

Shachar stresses, however, that while the situation currently looks bleak from an industry perspective, he remains optimistic that the sector will ultimately flourish once again fully within a democratic, thriving Israel, even if an entire generation of startups – from seed to exit – has been lost. 

Margalit agrees that the sector’s funding will rebound. 

“I think that investors are looking for direction. And once they understand that the Israeli companies are continuing to build great ideas, I think the investments will continue,” he says. 

“Thanks to many of the people that are protesting and are raising their voice… I think the world will understand that there’s a big enough group in Israel that will continue to build this country in a way that’s innovative, in a way that’s open, in a way that democracy is an integral part of everything that we’re doing.”

This positive perspective is not shared by Amir Mizroch, communications advisor for several leading Israeli tech companies and the former director of communications for Startup Nation Central. 

“I don’t see any real positives for Israeli tech in the current political configuration and especially with the future legislative plans the government has,” he tells NoCamels.

“This government and its growing political base prioritize Torah over technology,” he says.  

“My assessment is that it will be much harder for Israeli startups to raise funding if they are based here – there’s too much risk, too much volatility, and Israel‘s external image, which is already complicated, is becoming increasingly murky in the eyes of global institutional investors.”  

Despite the scattered hopefulness, the numbers bear out the financial concerns. 

Diminishing Returns

The high-tech industry was the largest contributor to the national GDP in 2022, accounting for just over 18 percent or 290 billion shekels ($78B), according to the Israel Innovation Authority, the branch of the government dedicated to promoting the sector on the global stage. It was also responsible for 50 percent of the country’s foreign exports. 

And despite predictions that the sector was on track to keep expanding in the coming years, the events of the past six months have shown that is not the case. 

With the caveat that the rest of the world has experienced a slowdown in their tech sectors (although the US is beginning to show signs of recovery that are not echoed in Israel), the country has seen a massive downturn in investment in high-tech.  

The Israel Innovation Authority reports that Israeli high-tech companies raised $3.7 billion in funding in the first half of 2023, the lowest amount for that period in five years. And, according to the independent Start-Up Nation Policy Institute, this is a 31 percent drop from the second half of 2022 and a 68 percent decrease compared to the same period last year. 

This dramatic downturn was even cited by US-based Moody’s Investors Service – one of the “big three” global credit ratings agencies – when it issued a warning after the law passed that there are “signs that Israel is decoupling from global trends.” 

The agency also cautioned that the legislation bore “negative consequences for Israel’s economy and security situation.” Spotting the trend back in April, when it expressed concern over a “deterioration of Israel’s governance,” Moody’s lowered Israel’s credit rating from “positive” to “stable.”   

And even though Netanyahu this week was quick to dismiss Moody’s warning as a “momentary reaction,” insisting that “Israel’s economy is very strong,” it was not the only global financial institution to sound the alarm over the legislation. 

American multinational investment bank and financial services company Morgan Stanley also reacted negatively to the legislation, downgrading Israel’s sovereign credit to a “dislike stance.” 

“The recent events point to continued uncertainty and thus the potential for an increased risk premium that would lead to weakening FX [foreign exchange] and higher borrowing costs,” the financial institution said.

“Such economic shocks tend to lead to weaker GDP growth due to lower business investment and private consumption growth.”

US investment bank Citi also entered the fray, on Tuesday putting out its own commentary on the potential fiscal fallout of the legislation.

“Now that the government has empowered itself to ignore Supreme Court decisions on its actions, it gets much more tricky and dangerous,” the bank’s analysts wrote in a response titled “Reasonableness Test bill has passed without a compromise – now what? – Nobody knows.”

On the impact on Israel’s credit rating, the analysis warned that “local media speculation is growing that [the credit rating agencies] might give a negative outlook given the reforms have pushed forward with no agreements. Up next is Fitch in early August and while from a fiscal perspective, Israel is in a very strong place, they noted in their previous rating that they assumed agreements would be reached on the Judicial Reforms.”

Despite the financial fallout and the protests, Netanyahu and his government are determined to stay the course. After the victory in Monday’s vote, offers were extended to negotiate with the opposition over the continuation of the overhaul. 

But with efforts to find a compromise failing to reach a successful conclusion in the months leading up to the vote, the opposition parties are mistrustful of the government and skeptical that it genuinely intends to search for a middle ground. 

The future of the legislation, the protests and even the entire high tech sector hangs in the balance. 

As Margalit puts it: “The world is looking to see where Israel’s going from here.” 

The post How Israel’s High-Tech Sector Went To War Over Court Reforms appeared first on NoCamels.

We’re all used to freshly brewed coffee within seconds, thanks to the wonder of little capsules. Now picture that same near-instantaneous service, but for moisturizer, hair mousse, and even perfume, without any potentially irritating preservatives. 

Israeli startup Capsulab has created a machine that freshly prepares and dispenses small amounts of beauty products in just 60 seconds. 

The company’s patented capsules (which are about the size of a large egg), include an internal mixer and piston, which blend separate ingredients prepackaged inside the pod in tiny sealed vials. 

When needed, the machine mixes the contents of the vials into a freshly made, preservative-free product.  

Beauty products use a number of preservatives and stabilizers to ensure a long shelf-life and prevent the growth of harmful bacteria and mold, but these ingredients are believed to cause skin irritation or even be potential carcinogens.

Cosmetics In A Capsule 

The machine reads a unique code on each capsule to determine how quickly and intensively to mix the ingredients inside the vials. It can even check whether the ingredients have expired or not. 

Once the vials have been emptied and the mixing stage completed, the machine dispenses the product into a container under the capsule with no mess and no cleanup required. Like with a coffee capsule, all you do is pop it into the machine and press a button.

The possibilities are endless, says Capsulab VP of Business Development Dr. Zakhar Nudelman – from blending cosmetics to producing food supplements and even mixing medicines. 

“The process is universal for many, many different industries,” he explains.

The Capsulab team has even used the machine to whip up a small batch of fresh tahini.

Nudelman says that there are several advantages to using his company’s machine, for both consumers and businesses. 

For the consumer, no chemicals are used as the active ingredients in each capsule are separate and hermetically sealed, and only combined on the spot in small quantities. 

Furthermore, he says, using the machine is more sustainable than purchasing packaged cosmetics as it uses almost every last drop of ingredients. 

“For example, when you throw away the tube [of moisturizer], you will inevitably throw away some of the material inside,” explains Nudelman. “We can squeeze 99.9 percent of the material out of any capsule we use.” 

A solution like this could also save companies money. Beauty brands overproduce their cosmetics, meaning that they create more than demanded. This means that more than 10 percent of products – worth an estimated $4.8 billion – go to waste as they move through the supply chain, according to a study from materials science company Avery Dennison.

In contrast to plastic-packaged products, the capsules can be returned and reused up to 100 times. 

Like a Nespresso machine, businesses pay a subscription fee to Capsulab to lease its machines to consumers, with couriers delivering capsules and collecting the used ones on a regular basis.

And each time a consumer uses a capsule, Capsulab collects information about which was used and sends it to the businesses with which it is partnered. This allows the businesses to gain greater insight into their consumers’ preferences and use that to determine which products to develop next.

The company is planning to develop an app for the machine, which will allow consumers to create their own individually tailored capsules for skincare, haircare and more.

Capsulab is already collaborating with personal care brands in Germany and South Korea, as well as hair salons in Germany. The Tel Aviv-based startup has launched pilots with these companies, where its machines are dispensing their products in retail stores for a limited time.

CEO Gal Saar, a veteran mechanical engineer at state-run defense company ELTA Systems, founded the company in 2018 after pondering which products other than coffee could be created from a capsule in less than a minute. 

He says he realized that in order to enjoy this kind of instant preparation, the products had to be created on an individual basis.  

It took around four years to develop the machine and the specially designed capsules, which can fit as many as 18 different ingredients and dispense up to 200 ml of product.

Capsulab has raised $2 million thus far from private investors, including angels and Israeli and German firms. 

This year, the company won the title of Israel’s most innovative packaging solution, in a competition organized by the Manufacturers Association of Israel. 

That said, Capsulab does have a handful of competitors. L’Oreal’s Perso machine creates individualized skincare and cosmetic formulas, dispensing them through pods, and uses AI to optimize customer personalization over time as it gathers more data. Other competitors include Leiselle of Spain, and Japan’s Shiseido, which have both created machines that send personalized skincare capsules to consumers through a subscription.

But Saar says that Capsulab supports thousands of different ingredients with no setup and zero maintenance, unlike its competitors, which use only a handful of ingredients for ultra-specific use cases, and require cleanup.

“It’s much easier than making an espresso,” he says.

The post Preservative-Free, Fresh Beauty Products At The Push Of A Button appeared first on NoCamels.

If a water pipe bursts at home, you know what to do. Find the shut-off valve and limit the damage. But if the same thing happens at a huge industrial complex, it’s quite possible that nobody actually knows how to switch off the supply.

Visit any factory producing chemicals, medicines, cleaning products or toiletries, for example, and you’ll see a dizzying maze of pipes, pumps, tanks, vessels, valves, motors, vents, compressors and a hundred other devices. Many are inaccessible or hidden from view.

You’ll begin to understand why finding that valve may not be so straightforward.

The factory may well have been built decades ago. Over time the building has been extended, bits have been added, removed or replaced, parts have been patched. The patches have been patched.

Paperwork that may once have been neatly filed has been lost, damaged or eaten by mice, maintenance records have gone missing, and the guy who headed the department for 30 years and had everything in his head is in hospital, gone on vacation, or retired.

The bottom line is that nobody has a clue . . . and the water (or worse, we’re talking about a chemical factory) is still gushing out.

Breakdowns like a burst pipe are a fact of industrial life. They typically get fixed quite quickly and production resumes.

But in extreme cases it can take many hours to locate and repair the fault. And the full-scale shutdown that results is very bad news for any manufacturer and their bottom line.

A startup in Israel is addressing the problem with technology that identifies every valve – in fact every last nut and bolt – in even the biggest and most advanced industrial complexes. Not just where it is, but how it fits into the grand scheme of things.

Metabim combines information from two key sources to give engineers the full, clear and up-to-date understanding they need of exactly what’s going on.

The first source of information is a new-tech “digital twin” created by 3D laser scanners.

It’s a super-accurate 360-degree images of a site – or a BIM (Building Information Model) – that is now standard across the architecture, engineering and construction worlds.

The second source is decidedly old tech – the filing cabinets full of flow charts known as piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs) that show how everything connects with everything else.

Putting the two together is a bit like solving a million-piece jigsaw puzzle, with some critical parts missing, and no picture on the lid to help.

But Metabim says its revolutionary software brings order and organization to a potentially chaotic workplace.

It plugs any knowledge gaps, digitizes every last piece of information and tags everything to the 3D model using universally-recognized protocols.

Engineers can zoom in and out, rotate the model, and instantly identify every component.

It’s the combination of a digital twin with a flow-chart overlay that makes what Metabim does almost unique.

“Behind every product we consume are people called process engineers,” says Oved Yosef, the company’s CEO.

“But they struggle to keep up with production because the information does not reflect the current situation.”

He recalls the time somebody at a factory dug out a briefcase from 1970 with handwritten documentation. That was the best they could manage.

Another facility hadn’t been documented in 15 years. They found there were 100 gaps and misalignments between documentation and reality.

“The density of infrastructure equipment inside big facilities has made them really hard to manage,” says Yosef.

“The problem is really vast. It affects everybody. It affects planning engineers, maintenance engineers, operational engineers, chemical engineers, environmental engineers.

“Everybody is working with one purpose, to keep manufacturing. To do that you need reliable information.

“Process engineers need to be precise because we are dealing with raw materials that are expensive and also dangerous.

“We are dealing with a lot of infrastructure and different products and it takes a lot of people effort to make it right

“Until now the P&IDs that show you the infrastructure and the equipment for the process was a hard copy.”

He say they manually connect the P&ID to the digital twin, using icons that everybody understands.

“A process engineer from Japan, and a process engineer from Germany can read and understand the process,” he says.

“Our solution is specifically for engineers, to keep manufacturing going and this updated information is changing the game.

“The first priority in any factory is to keep production going. To do that, process engineers need precise information because they’re dealing with raw materials that can be expensive and dangerous.

“We are dealing with a lot of infrastructure and different products that it takes a lot of people effort to make it right.”

He established Metabim in 2020 together with Yair Malul – they both have a background in the chemical industry – and Ruti Shafi, an expert in 3D and augmented reality. They teamed up to bring high-tech benefits to a sector that is traditionally very conservative.

Among the first to adopt Metabim’s technology is the chemicals giant ICL (formerly Israel Chemicals Ltd) which produces a third of the world’s bromine – used in agriculture, sanitation fire-retardants.

Avner Kolander, head of the plant’s bromine-chlorine process engineering department at – and has been at the Dead Sea Works, said: “Thanks to Metabim, the factory stopped dealing with the various challenges that arose due to outdated information.

“Today, the information is accessible, updated in real-time, and enables the acceleration of processes in the factory.”

The post No More Lost Valves: How To Navigate An Industrial Maze appeared first on NoCamels.

There’s a reason most of us love biting into a slice of rich chocolate cake, or sinking our teeth into a mouthwatering, juicy burger. 

The high fat content in these foods intensifies their flavors and aromas, and gives them a tender and moist texture. And now an Israeli startup has developed a way to add more of this nutrient into plant-based alternatives to meat, whose fat more often than not leaks out as it is being cooked. 

“If you’ve ever tried [a plant-based meat alternative] and you were left with a dry, chewy sensation, or maybe the flavors and aroma were not quite right – this was because the product didn’t have a good alternative to fat,” Gad Harris, founder of KaYama Foods, tells NoCamels. 

The startup’s secret method uses a handful of natural substances to thicken plant-based oils and raise the temperature at which they liquify. This ensures that the meatless burger, filet or steak into which the fat is incorporated holds its intended flavors, texture, and aromas during the cooking process. 

Fats derived from animal sources such as beef or pork have a melting point that ranges from 45°C to 55°C (113°F to 131°F). Most vegetable oils, on the other hand, have a far lower melting point, causing them to leak during the cooking process, resulting in a product that is lacking in sizzle.

One exception is coconut oil, which has a melting point of 25°C (77°F), but whose dominant taste may impact the flavor of a meat-alternative meal. 

“The flavors and aromas that you smell could not develop in the cooking process without having fats and oils that are free to function and react with the other components in the meat,” explains Harris.

KaYama’s technology, however, can be used on any plant-based oil – from sunflower to rapeseed – giving food producers more options for animal-free fat sources. And the formula is the same for every plant oil. 

Harris says that the patent-pending product is natural and is “clean label,” meaning it uses only a few ingredients that are all recognizable by the consumer – although he declines to disclose any further information. 

Before founding KaYama in 2022, Harris, a vegan and foodie who studied environmental engineering at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, worked for several years as a R&D and process engineer at an alternative protein company.

He says he was always fascinated by the connection between great food, good nutrition and a healthy environment. And it was his own disappointing experience with alternative meat options that led him to try to fill an unmet need in this area.

Land Of Milk, Honey And Meat Alternatives 

KaYama Foods is one of many startups that are contributing to the alternative protein and fat sector in Israel, where the industry has boomed in recent years. Other such startups include SimpliiGood, which uses algae to create vegan schnitzel among other products; More Foods, which uses discarded pumpkin and sunflower seeds to produce high-protein strips, chunks and minute steaks; and ChickP, which develops dairy-free cheeses from chickpea protein powder. 

Israel has a ready market for meat substitute products, with around five percent of the population embracing a vegan lifestyle. A meat and dairy-free diet is so popular among young Israelis that in 2018, the Israel Defense Forces found that more than five percent of its soldiers (1 in every 18) described themselves as vegan, over four times the global average.  

The country’s alternative protein industry has attracted more than $1 billion in investment over the past two years – second only to the USA, according to the Good Food Institute Israel. 

Israel is also supporting the growth of alternative proteins, with the Israel Innovation Authority – a branch of the government – investing $12 million in alternative protein startups in 2022 alone. That same year, the Technion announced the establishment of the world’s first multidisciplinary research center for alternative proteins.

And in addition to KaYama, there are several companies that are developing ways of enhancing the sensory experience of eating a vegetarian or vegan burger.

Spain’s Cubiq Foods has created “smart fat,” a vegan source of fat that behaves like animal fat through the use of emulsifiers, an additive that stabilizes liquids that don’t normally mix, while Dutch company Bunge Loders Croklaan creates palm and shea-based fats and oils.

According to Harris, emulsions can prevent oils from leaking out by binding them in foods, but they don’t provide the functionality of oil – in other words, the texture, meatiness and aroma of meat products. 

“In my opinion, these products don’t truly mimic animal fats,” he says. “We’re replacing lipids with lipids. We’re not replacing lipids with water or other substances.”

KaYama, which is based in Yokne’am Illit, in northern Israel, is currently in touch with alternative meat companies in Israel, and aims to commence a pilot with them after further developing its prototype. 

KaYama was a finalist in this year’s MassChallenge Israel core accelerator program, a four-month intensive program that helps entrepreneurs advance their nascent companies.

“Our aim is to get these products [meat and fish alternatives] to actually become more like their animal counterparts,” says Harris.

The post Startup Making Plant-Based Food As Deliciously Greasy As Meat appeared first on NoCamels.

Up in a small northern Israeli town, a startup is growing fields of genetically engineered wheat that can withstand the challenges of climate change – but it’s not cultivating the grain for food. 

The specialized seeds yield wheat with thicker and larger stalks that are being used to create biodegradable yet durable drinking straws.

Blue Huna’s straws are made of just one ingredient – actual straw – and according to the company need just cutting and cleaning before they can be packaged and sold to customers.

But simply planting the genetically modified seeds is not enough, Blue Huna CEO Klil Benyamini Shir tells NoCamels. The company’s treatment method and knowhow are also vital to ensuring that the stalks grow thicker, stronger, and wider than the average wheat crop. 

The startup has now finished gathering its first harvest, from which it says it will be able to produce about one million straws.

Blue Huna bought the rights to the wheat strain from Dr. Roi Ben David, a winter cereals researcher at the Volcani Institute, Israel’s national agricultural research center, who developed it over the course of four years. 

Benyamini Shir and her husband, Yinon, have also developed a prototype of a new wheat combine harvester. 

These pieces of agricultural machinery normally cut the crops and beat them to shake the grains away from the unwanted stalks, which are discarded through the back of the harvester. 

This process crushes the straw stalks, which, according to Klil, aren’t really needed, let alone whole. 

The couple’s wheat combine harvester, on the other hand, will be able to harvest both the grains and the stalks in their entirety.  

“We’re aiming to use it between next March and June, which is harvest time,” she explains.

After piloting its first batch of straws, the company will start selling farmers a kit that includes their strain of wheat, the knowhow for growing it, and the machinery to harvest the grain and the straw. 

The straws will be given back to Blue Huna, which will sell them to the consumer.

“They’ll make more profit out of the same land. So ultimately, it really helps the farmers as well,” says Yinon of the plan. 

The drinking straws that are to be produced will have a diameter of six to 11 millimeters. Other biodegradable drinking straws, says Yinon, have a diameter of four millimeters at most, and are not as thick or as strong. 

The startup also says that its straws are cheaper than its competitors. A Blue Huna straw costs eight agorot (approx. 3.5 cents), while a paper or bioplastic (PLA) straw made from plant-based materials costs 10 to 12 agorot. 

The Tip Of The Plastic Mountain

Prior to founding Blue Huna in 2019, the couple worked together as part of the international sales team at a global diamond company – and while traveling for business to resort destinations such as the Bahamas and Saint Lucia, they came face-to-face with the global problem of plastic waste.

“Anywhere we were around the world, we encountered the plastic crisis – just huge volumes of plastic that I think the general public isn’t aware of,” says Yinon. “When you really live next to it, you have to ask yourself, ‘oh my god, what are we doing?’”

The pair soon discovered biodegradable straws made out of wheat stalks, which were already being manufactured in Asian countries such as Japan and China. They wondered why Israel wasn’t selling such a product, especially given that every kilometer of the country’s coastline accumulates 21kg (46lbs) of marine plastics each day, according to the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies.

Plastic waste makes up nearly half (41.1 percent) of Israel’s solid waste composition by volume – and the country only recycles six percent of that. And the problem is not just an Israeli one. 

The World Wildlife Fund warned in 2022 that as much as 23 million tons of plastic waste is washed into the world’s waterways every year, most of it from single-use products. And scientists say that at least 427 million plastic straws are polluting coastlines around the world.

Blue Huna started importing the eco-friendly straws from producers in Asia and Europe and selling it to Israeli cafes and restaurants – but customers told them that the price was too high, and that it wasn’t wide enough to hold all beverages.

The startup, which is based in Misgav, northern Israel, says its new home-grown straws will address these issues. 

Many other Israeli startups, concerned with the worsening state of the environment, have come up with innovative solutions to tackle the plastic problem as well. 

TIPA has developed compostable plastic packaging that rivals conventional plastic in elasticity and durability and is already being used by food and clothes retailers; W-Cycle creates biodegradable trays for the food industry that can compete with single-use plastics; and UBQ Materials converts unsorted household waste into a fully recyclable thermoplastic substitute, which is already being used to make hangers, shopping carts, bins, furniture, and more. 

Blue Huna has raised $500,000 in grants from the Israel Innovation Authority, the Jewish National Fund, and others, and has also received some capital from angel investors.

It is also one of 40 startups chosen by Margalit Startup City Galil, which accelerates the business development of innovative foodtech and agritech companies in northern Israel.

And according to Klil, this innovation is only the beginning of their plans for sustainable materials. Blue Huna now has set its sights on a global market, and intends to expand overseas by 2024.

“Our aim is to solve the plastic straw problem, and afterwards, we will develop more technologies and applications that will ease the single-use plastic problem,” she says.

“We do believe that we can make some sort of impact on this world.”

The post Special Strain Of Wheat Makes Durable, Eco-Friendly Straws appeared first on NoCamels.

An emerging field of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology has elevated voice dubbing to a new level—one where English-speaking acting icons can indeed appear to speak their famous lines in fluent Spanish or Greek or even Russian. 

Voice dubbing is when a new voice replaces the original voice for a role, usually to translate the content into another language and an Israeli startup is leading the way, thanks to its artificial intelligence platform. 

Traditional voice dubbing studios can take up to months to produce dubbed versions of content, with a complex duplication process that includes finding the right voice actor and recording the script reading. Studios spend up to $150K on dubbing a single film. 

However, Deepdub’s AI software can dramatically reduce the time and effort needed to dub.  By using deep learning algorithms, their AI dubbing software can be trained to quickly learn the patterns of a particular voice sample and convey the voice actor’s specific tone and emotion. 

And if the delivery isn’t quite right, the AI can understand prompts like “I want this sentence to be a little more giggly.” The software then generates a real-time dub of the content, saving thousands of dollars and working hours. 

Based in Tel Aviv, the company was co-founded in 2019 by brothers Ofir and Nir Krakowski. With backgrounds in machine learning and artificial intelligence, the two wanted to address the emerging needs of streaming television, an abundance of content that is not just about entertainment, and the lack of infrastructure for voice dubbing. 

“The realization was that there is a market here where you can create a very big impact on people around the world,” says Oz Krakowksi, chief revenue officer at Deepdub and sibling of the co-founders. 

“Large populations don’t have access to audible content right now, like television and film. And what about e-learning courses that are only in English? If they don’t speak English, they’re limited in the type of access to education that we have because we speak English. And that’s when we talk about democratizing content.” 

By enabling voice dubbing in different languages, people who struggle with reading and writing or have vision problems can have access to new types of audio content. Deepdub’s software is capable of translating content into 65  languages—including regional dialects.

Dialects are critical for properly localizing content, or adapting the speech to fit cultural nuances and subtleties. Spanish, the second most spoken native language in the world, has multiple dialects in the different regions of Latin America. There is a universal version of Spanish called “Neutral Spanish” that only exists for voice dubbing, which eliminates certain pronunciations or specific words.

However, Deepdub wants to push the boundaries of “neutral” dubbing languages and actually enable the dialects that make each region unique. 

“We help those countries to create and maintain their own self identity in terms of, this is our specific version of Spanish that we’d like to maintain and we’d like to consume content in our dialect of Spanish,” Oz Krakowksi tells NoCamels. Moreover, countries like India (which has more than 1,900 languages and dialects) could have content tailored to their specific region.

Krakowksi says that is what sets Deepdub apart–the ability to expand into a range of languages that wouldn’t be possible without their deep learning infrastructure.

Prominent AI voice dubbing companies like Lovo.ai and Synthesys also offer a range of emotions and languages for people who want their content dubbed. However, the Deepdub algorithm is able to reproduce and localize the same speaker in a variety of languages, which Krakowksi says is what allowed them to break into the Hollywood industry before other companies.

Ethics And Actors

Amid a furor over AI in the entertainment industry, Deepdub addresses the ethical challenges of its use in voice dubbing. Voice actors can find themselves uncredited and unpaid, like Canadian voice actor Bev Standing, who is currently suing the TikTok social media platform for allegedly using a synthetic version of her voice “without compensation or credit.” 

However, Deepdub has Trusted Partner Network (TPN) accreditation, which means the company has passed strict security and legal measures in order to work with the Motion Picture Association, the organization that represents major film studios like Disney, Netflix, and Universal. 

“We work in an ethical way that is controlled,” Krakowksi says. Deepdub provides the platform instead of the technology so that the voice samples remain secured. 

“That’s part of the reason why studios work with us. We don’t give people a way to start using just anyone’s voice and create those malicious defects that you can see on the web.” 

However, the growth of AI voice dubbing also means the voice acting industry will have to adapt. In 2018, there were over 500,000 voice actors employed in the United States. 

What does that mean for voice actors when generative AI can create a dubbed film in minutes? 

Oz Krakowksi believes that Deepdub’s new AI technology will create different opportunities for voice actors and content. “If we were too afraid to adopt a new technology because it might take away jobs, we would still be driving horse drawn carriages,” he says. 

Furthermore, Deepdub still works with the voice actors to ensure that the generated dubs are “Hollywood quality.”

In fact, about half of Deepdub’s staff is made up of people who come from the voice dubbing industry. The startup’s director of creative and quality control is Maya Mitelpunkt-Aldor, who actually voiced Mirabel in the Hebrew version of the 2021 Disney animation Encanto. The staff, Krakowksi says, help represent the ethical concerns of voice actors in the “creative tech” environment that Deepdub has cultivated.

In December 2021, Deepdub announced a deal with the U.S.-based streaming service Topic, which features content in more than 20 languages from 40 countries. In January 2022, the startup closed their Series A funding round with over $20 million in funding, led by New York-based VC firm Insight Partners. 

Deepdub is continuing to expand their platform. The startup recently launched Deepdub GO, which allows anyone to register online and access their voice dubbing services. From YouTubers to independent filmmakers, Oz says the new platform enables content creators to take their videos and affordably translate them into a variety of dubbed voices.

“Traditionally, dubbing a film would take 6-10 weeks. Depending on the type of film, we could be 30-50% faster, and in some cases we could also complete the entire work within 2-4 days and into multiple languages simultaneously,” he says. Additionally, it can take as little as a few weeks to integrate a new language into the platform. 

And while Krakowksi is reticent about revealing pricing, he does say that Deepdub GO is more affordable for those creators who do not have the deep pockets of movie studios. 

The company also allows an English-speaking audience to access non-English language content. 

One of Deepdub’s biggest projects has been creating an English dubbed version of  Vanda, a TV heist drama series that was originally in Portuguese. 

Earlier this year, the company partnered with the U.S. streaming giant Hulu to release the first season in English.

“You can tell that there is a lot of attention to the voices, the lip syncing, like how the background sounds with the voices. You can hear the flames, you can hear the chatter on the TV and the kids and everything as if it was originally in English.”

The post AI Dubbing Startup Makes Your Favorite Movie Stars Multilingual appeared first on NoCamels.

An Israeli startup has brought a revolutionary traffic management system to the United States, allowing American urban areas to control the ebb and flow of its vehicles on demand – turning the roads into what a NoTraffic executive calls a giant “game of chess.” 

Through the use of its smart technology and artificial intelligence system, NoTraffic says it can cut down the amount of time drivers spend stuck in jams.

The system collects data on the number and types of road users – be it cars, bikes, buses or even people on foot – from a mix of cameras, radar and chips that can communicate with autonomous vehicles. These data-collection sensors are placed at intersections and other points on the road.  

This data is then sent to a cloud-based platform, which uses algorithms to analyze the information and predict imminent traffic events in great detail. 

These events include which lane a particular car will take and how that might impact congestion at the next intersection; when a car might run a red light; and even where and when a pedestrian will step into the street without warning. 

Once the system has built up an image of the upcoming situation on the roads, it can then manage the flow of vehicles through the traffic lights connected to the platform. The chip sensors can even tell an autonomous car to slow down if it is approaching an intersection too quickly.

The platform can also present the information in a dashboard for city engineers, who can use it for big data analytics, remote monitoring of intersections and the implementation of new traffic policies. 

“It’s kind of like a game of chess, where you’re calculating all the moves ahead and deciding what the next best step is,” Matan Nir, Director of Business Development and Marketing of NoTraffic, tells NoCamels. 

Traffic lights normally run on timers that are set using certain statistics, such as the volume of traffic during weekends and at peak hours of the day, says Nir.

But even though a single intersection can have between 60 and 100 different timer settings that operators can switch between throughout the day, Nir explains that traffic engineers in the US only adjust these timers every three to five years. 

This, he says, is not an accurate representation of the traffic flow on the ground. 

“If you think a lot of changes can take place in a period of three to five years, imagine how many events can take place in a single day,” he says.

One study In Phoenix, Arizona showed that the installation of NoTraffic’s platform led to a 70 percent reduction in drivers running a red light, dramatically lowering the probability of accidents.

Up in Canada’s British Columbia, the platform resulted in a 40 percent reduction in delays for pedestrians at stop lights, without increasing congestion for other road users. 

And in Arizona, NoTraffic says it cut the time users spent on the road in half by applying its sensors to three intersections in a mile-long strip in downtown Tucson.

“We used a drone to capture the ‘before’ and ‘after’,” says Nir. “You were able to see a queue up to a mile long at one of the intersections, but after implementing NoTraffic, a mile of the queue was totally eliminated.”

A client that purchases the NoTraffic system can choose from a range of software services that the company offers, such as analytics and optimization services for police and fire departments. It essentially functions as a tool for agencies to easily implement their policies to improve their unmanaged traffic systems.

The startup is already operating in 13 US states, including Pennsylvania, Arizona, Texas, and California, and has just signed up its one hundredth local Department of Transportation in North America.

Israel Driving Car Tech

Israel has become a leader in developing advanced car-tech, and global companies have been taking note. In June 2013, Waze, the sat-nav software company, was bought by Google for $1.3 billion. In March 2017, Mobileye, the advanced driver assistance system, was bought by Intel for $15.3 billion, the biggest-ever acquisition of an Israeli tech company at the time.

Today there are more than 400 automotive startups in Israel developing an array of technologies, from collision avoidance to autonomous cars, from electric vehicle batteries to AI systems that check cars for faults – and NoTraffic is one of them.

Other Israeli automotive startups include RavinAI, which has developed an artificial intelligence-enabled vehicle inspection platform; Valens, which has introduced the first rear-view camera for trucks; and Foretellix, which uses AI to teach driverless cars how to react to any situation on the road.

As for NoTraffic, which was founded in Tel Aviv and is based both in Israel and in Palo Alto, California, Nir says that most of its competitors are “legacy competitors” that sell traffic equipment to traffic authorities. 

One direct competitor is Canada’s Miovision, which also collects traffic data to improve congestion. But Nir says that unlike Miovision, NoTraffic uses a combination of technologies that makes it capable of collecting traffic data in 99.9 percent of weather conditions, whereas Miovision has to rely on different hardware for each kind of service it offers. 

In 2022, NoTraffic was included in the TIME100 Most Influential Companies list, along with some of the most recognizable companies in the world, including Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.

Since being founded in 2017, NoTraffic has raised over $75 million in funding, including $50 million it announced last month that it had raised in a Series B round. The funding was led by M&G Investments alongside VNV Global and UMC Capital, as well as existing investors. NoTraffic plans to use these funds to aid its expansion into the UK, Japan, Italy and Germany.

“This funding is another step in our mission to revolutionize the way traffic is being managed today,” said Tal Kreisler, co-founder and CEO of NoTraffic.

The post Israeli AI System Saving US Drivers From Endless Traffic Jams appeared first on NoCamels.

Think whisky, think Scotland.

It has an abundance of vital ingredients  – water, barley and yeast. It has the perfect climate – cold, wet and miserable. And it has centuries of expertise.

Israel has none of the above. But what it lacks in tradition, it makes up for in innovation.

The Startup Nation is home to handful of “new world” distilleries, a term that also covers Japan, Taiwan, India, Belgium and Norway.

The oldest is Tel Aviv-based Milk and Honey, founded in 2013 and winner this April of the Best Single Malt Whisky in the World for its Element Sherry Cask whisky, chosen from 6,000 blind tastings.

It’s a tiny player, distilling just 250,000 liters a year (Scotland produces 400 million liters annually), but it’s been pushing the boundaries in the way it matures its whisky.

Regardless of where it’s made, all whisky starts life as fermented barley or other grain.

It’s distilled into a clear and as-yet undrinkable liquid, which gets its taste and color as it matures for three years or more (age is of many rules on what qualifies as whisky, according to Scotch Whisky Association).

The two critical factors in this maturation process are climate. And the exact type of oak cask in which the whisky is stored.

This is where Milk and Honey has been innovating, taking whisky to unlikely locations for the ageing process, and storing it in an unusual variety of barrels.

It transported a batch of 30 barrels to the rooftop of an hotel near the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth, where high temperatures (up to 50C/122F) and humidity hugely accelerate the ageing process.

They found the super-dry conditions gave the whisky what experts describe as “big, intense notes of toasty spices and powerful vanilla.”

The whisky doesn’t absorb the high salt content of the Dead Sea, but it does benefit from other minerals in the air, and it evaporates so quickly that the flavors are far more intense than usual.

The super-strong tipple – 56.2 per cent alcohol compared to a standard 40 per cent – has now been bottled and is being sold as Apex Dead Sea.

 “It’s hard to be very scientific and accurate about it,” says Dana Baran, VP marketing at Milk and Honey.

“But I would say that in three or four years, we get results here in Israel that you’d get in Scotland after of 10 to 12 years.

“In Scotland, they say the whisky rests while it’s maturing. Here we say it works, because it doesn’t have time to rest. The whisky here is impatient.”

Climate is a plus, but it’s also a minus. A barrel of whisky in Scotland will lose one or two per cent a year to natural evaporation – known as the angels’ share.

“Here in Tel Aviv it’s about 10 per cent a year,” says Baran. “And if we age the whisky at the Dead Sea, it’s 25 per cent yearly, because of the harsh climate there.

“So we can’t put the casks there for three years. We just put them there for a year, or a year and a half, and the rest of the time they sit here in our storage in Tel Aviv.”

The Dead Sea whisky is the first “aged-away” offering, but the distillery also experimenting with casks stored in the Jerusalem mountains.

The altitude there is much higher and the variations between day and night and summer and winter are more extreme. All these factors have a big effect on the final product.  

Milk and Honey has another storage facility at the Sea of Galilee, 200 meters below sea level in the north of Israel, where the climate is very humid. Both these whiskies will be released next year.

It’s also experimenting with storing whisky in Arad, on the border of the Negev and the Judean Deserts, and is considering the Upper Galilee and the Red Sea as ageing venues.

This is a far cry from Scotland, where it feels like winter for most of the year, wherever you go.

Aside from climate, it’s the oak barrels in which the whisky is stored that determine how it tastes.

Distilleries routinely buy in casks from bourbon or sherry producers, for the flavors they impart.

Milk and Honey go one better. They’ve been trying out rum casks and tequila casks, and have put their whiskies into casks used for wine made from pomegranates.

They have even used barrels from “biblical” wines, made by Israel’s Recanati winery using ancient Marawi and Bittuni varieties of grape.

“There are very strict rules to the Scottish way of making whisky, but we’re Israelis in Tel Aviv, a high tech hub, and innovation and is a way of life,” says Baran. “So we innovate.”

Milk and Honey was established by Gal Kalkshtein, a high-tech entrepreneur, innovator and investor with a keen interest in whisky.

He brought in the late Dr. Jim Swan, a world expert in hot climate maturation and a man known as “the Einstein of whisky.”

Dr. Swan used to call Israel a “wonderful playground,” says Baran, because it has four or five different climate zones in a tiny country.

“He helped us to establish the place, to build it, to choose the cask, to choose the recipe, and much more,” he says.

“There’s a lot of distilleries these days and we’re not the only one in Israel. If you want to stand out, you need to do something different, and that’s what we’re doing.”

The post Top Tipple: Israeli Distillery Ages Whisky At Lowest Point On Earth appeared first on NoCamels.

An Israeli company has developed genetically engineered versions of the ancient castor bean – and their higher yields and higher oil content are helping nations power their vehicles with greener fuel.

The castor bean – which despite looking like a bean is actually a seed from the Spurge family of flowering plants – has been used as a medicine for thousands of years, with evidence of ancient Egyptians even using it as a laxative.

Today it has many uses, including biodiesel, a blend of fuel usually made from vegetable oils or animal fats and regular diesel, which can help ease the strain on the environment by lowering the overall greenhouse gas emissions of automobiles.

Casterra engineers special varieties of castor beans that consistently produce higher yields and grow more densely, “meaning that from any hectare that you grow, you can squeeze in more yields, and generate more income,” CEO Eyal Ronen tells NoCamels.

The company’s modified seeds can produce castor beans within four months, compared with the unadapted version grown on farms, which Ronen says takes six to eight months. This means that farms growing Casterra’s engineered seeds can produce yields three times a year.

Its castor plants, which grow up to 1.4 meters (4.5ft) in height, produce 2,500 to 3,000 kg (over 6,500 lbs) of seeds per hectare. Other varieties on the market, says Casterra, grow up to three meters (nearly 10ft) in height, and produce 500 to 700 kg (just over 1,500 lbs) of seeds per hectare – making for a lower yield that takes up much more space.

And the company says that its seeds hold more oil, with a 50-percent content, while other varieties have a 30-40 percent content.

Ronen says it was a long process to create the cultivar. It started with its seed bank, which he explains is a library of 300 different varieties of the castor bean plant collected from over 40 countries.

“This gives us the capability to create all kinds of combinations, for example between one variety that was taken from Costa Rica and another variety that was taken from India,” he explains.

Better Beans

Creating a new variety of a plant normally takes a decade, because it needs to be bred over and over again to ensure that it exhibits the desired properties with each generation. 

Casterra was able to cut the process in half by using the technology of its parent company Evogene, an Israeli biotechnology firm that develops new products for human health and agriculture.

Its predictive biology platform sequences the genomes of plants so that it can determine its characteristics without needing to wait for the sample to reach maturity.

Beyond developing genetically engineered seeds, Casterra also sells specially developed equipment that addresses problems in the castor bean supply chain. 

The Rehovot-based firm provides its solutions to oil and gas companies that Ronen says knew little of cultivation and agriculture, which is why they have expanded to providing protocols of cultivation practices and its machines to those companies. 

It mainly sells its seeds and supplies its services to countries in Latin America, including Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, and now, several locations in Africa.

Casterra is just one example of the many companies that make up Israel’s advanced agri-tech sector. Other companies that are using their tech knowhow to increase agricultural yields include CarobWay, which uses precision technologies to enhance carob growth and fruitfulness; BetterSeeds, which modifies the DNA of cowpea to make it suitable for mechanized harvesting and large scale cultivation; and Saffron-Tech, which uses vertical-farming methods to grow saffron indoors and increase its cultivation to four harvests a year.

A Changing Market

The global castor oil market size was valued at $1.21 billion, according to the most recent statistics reported in 2021.

While India is the biggest grower of castor bean oil, it mostly produces the plant for soaps, lubricants, and coatings. 

But Brazil, which was expected to produce 43,700 metric tons of castor oil in the 2021/2022 crop year – up nearly 60 percent on the previous year (27,400 metric tons) – primarily cultivates it for biodiesel purposes. The major companies that produce biodiesel from castor oil, says Ronen, are also based in Latin America.  

“I think the fact that we are an Israeli company, and castor is not being cultivated on a commercial scale in Israel, gives us an advantage,” says Ronen. He believes that its location opens up market opportunities in different areas for Casterra, as major castor biodiesel firms are tied down to their regional markets in Latin America and cannot expand on the same scale. 

Indeed, Israel has always innovated for the global community. Casterra, which has been selling its genetically engineered castor beans to farms in South America for the last several years, has just announced that it secured two orders worth a total of $11.3 million to provide its seeds for biodiesel production in countries in Africa.

Countless other agri-tech companies expanded their innovation abroad, like Edete, which uses mechanical pollination to help Californian almond and pistachio growers; SeeTree, which helps the world’s largest orange farm in Brazil track the health and productivity of its trees using its intelligence platform; and Tevel, which has developed the world’s only flying autonomous robots that are now picking fruit in Chile.

The biodiesel market was worth an estimated $40.6 billion in 2021, and is expected to reach $52.7 billion by 2027. This corresponds with news on various countries rolling out new biodiesel regulations in their efforts to combat climate change. 

In 2018, European Union negotiators agreed to completely phase out the use of palm oil in transport fuels from 2030.

The most commonly used sources of biodiesel are soybean, palm, and rapeseed oil. But growing these crops for biodiesel and other uses has led to deforestation. Not to mention that these crops compete intensively with food production over already limited resources of land and water. 

Castor beans, on the other hand, can be cultivated on lands with poor soil quality or water supply that cannot support other crops. The plant is so resilient that it has even been found growing in landfills, on roadsides, and along railway tracks. 

In addition the new EU deal, the US Environmental Protection Agency in June adopted new mandates for biodiesel by reducing reliance on foreign sources of oil. 

“All of this will generate an immediate increase in demand for castor, because out of the different sources that exist today – like sunflower, canola and others – castor is the best crop,” concludes Ronen.

The post Israelis Engineer High-Yield Seed Oil For Better Biofuel Production appeared first on NoCamels.

Imagine eating chocolate that did not cause your blood sugar levels to spike.

Israeli startup SOLVEAT says it can offer just that, with its edible blend of herbal extracts that can be used in chocolate and other foods to support healthy blood sugar levels.

SOLVEAT’s clinical team observed that the chocolate that includes the startup’s formula had significant clinical efficacy in controlling blood sugar levels. 

They found that the infused chocolate actually lowered blood sugar levels by 10 to 24 percent in almost all test participants with prediabetes (when blood sugar levels are higher than normal but not high enough to signify type 2 diabetes). 

The startup says that its aim is to deliver the benefits of traditional herbal remedies by adding them into everyday foods without having to actually taste the herbs.

“A major problem with herbal medicine is its taste, which, let’s say, is unpleasant,” Dr. Zakhar Nudelman, co-founder and Chief Business Officer of SOLVEAT, tells NoCamels. 

Apart from the need to mask their flavors, companies producing herbal-infused foods also face the challenge of ensuring that the quality and benefits of the extracts do not wane. 

Nudelman says that not many of these companies have conducted clinical trials of their products to verify whether the herbs’ benefits remain after being infused into foods and supplements. This, he explains, is why SOLVEAT is planning to launch a larger clinical study of its formula with a leading Israeli healthcare institution. 

According to Nudelman, SOLVEAT has a holistic solution to the issues of taste and quality maintenance. 

First, it uses a smart analytics platform to determine whether each herb that it imports (mainly from China) contains the active ingredients it needs for its formula.

The startup then uses proprietary methods to extract the highest amount of active ingredients from each individual herb, before blending measured amounts of each to create its patent-pending formula. Once the blending stage is completed, it again analyzes the final formula to ensure that the quality of each ingredient was not compromised during the combining process.

“This is how we control the quality of the composition, and ensure that it is reproducible,” Nudelman explains. 

Making Foods Functional

SOLVEAT then turns the herbal extracts into a powder using an existing, advanced method of food processing known as microencapsulation. This encases the extract in miniscule capsules the size of 15-20 microns (each micron is one thousandth of a millimeter).

This not only disguises the flavor of the herbs, but also maintains the shelf life of the product and guarantees that the contents of each final product are consistent, explains Nudelman. 

“We want to make it very easy for food manufacturers to integrate [the blend] into their products,” he explains, pointing out that companies tend to drop a product that creates issues with integration. 

The first blend, which is now patent-pending after the team proved its efficacy, is made from eight different herbs, including goldthread (Coptis chinensis) and Chinese foxglove (Rehmannia glutinosa). Nudelman won’t disclose the rest, but says each is essential to the success of the formula.

“We’ve seen from our pharmacological screenings that combining any four of these herbs, for example, is not effective. It only works when we combine all eight together,” he says. 

Foodtech is a growing industry that was worth $247 billion worldwide in 2022. Israel in particular has a blooming foodtech sector, ranking second in the world in terms of investment. 

One element of this sector is the functional foods market, where food is fortified with herbal or plant extracts or other vitamins, minerals and probiotics, which was valued at $186 million in 2023.

Among the companies entering this market is global food giant Nestlé, which in 2020 signed a partnership with French biotech company Valbiotis on a product containing a plant extract that aims to reduce the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. 

Other Israeli startups are also incorporating functional ingredients into their products, such as Yofix, which develops plant-based prebiotic and probiotic dairy alternatives.

Personal Practices

Nudelman says that the difference between SOLVEAT and these companies is that it alone creates herbal compositions. He says the use of multiple herbs together “is more holistic” as different active ingredients are beneficial for different organs in the body.  

“There’s synergy between the herbs, so we believe it is more effective and safer,” he says. 

Beyond that, he says that unlike its competitors, SOLVEAT makes compositions that are “plug and play” – so that food manufacturers only need to minimally tweak their formulas before incorporating it into their products. 

“Today there are many companies selling probiotic products like yogurts, but many of them do not conduct clinical trials on their products to prove their benefits,” says Nudelman. In this industry, he says, companies producing functional foods tend to make a lot of theoretical claims. 

Udi Peretz, CEO and co-founder of SOLVEAT, was managing an herbal biotech company in China when he was diagnosed with prediabetes. He was advised by his local partners, professor of Chinese medicine Xia Long and herbalist professor He Yuxin to take herbal medicine, and while this method brought his condition under control, he found the herbs to be incredibly bitter and too much work to prepare. 

So in 2019, he founded the startup along with Nudelman and Chinese medicine practitioner Tal Naveh, determined to mask the taste of the herbs but keep their health benefits. The company’s team today also includes Long and Yuxin, and Executive Chairwoman Ilanit Kabessa Cohen.

It took them 18 months to develop the technological platform and integrate the first formula. “In the beginning, the taste was terrible,” Nudelman admits. “But today we have completely overcome this challenge.”

Since then, the company has been awarded $1 million from the Israel Innovation Authority and the Trendlines Group of accelerators in Israel’s Galilee region, where SOLVEAT is based. 

SOLVEAT has thus far partnered with Israeli chocolatier Ornat, which infuses its herbal powder into its chocolates. It expects to launch a pilot to sell the chocolates in the coming months. 

The startup has also recently started to develop a new formula, which Nudelman says will boost the immune system through a combination of different herbs and fungi. 

“We want to combine the experience of eating tasty food with receiving health benefits from these ingredients,” says Nudelman. 

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An Israeli startup has developed a wearable device that can predict the likelihood of an imminent stroke through changes in the carotid artery’s blood flow, potentially helping early intervention and preventing disablity. 

Strokes are most commonly caused by a clot blocking the essential supply of blood to the brain, and according to the World Health Organization are the second leading cause of death and the leading cause of disability across the globe. 

Over 100 million people have experienced a stroke worldwide, with one in four adults experiencing one in their lifetime. And for 50 percent of them, that means some form of lasting disability. 

Avertto says its StrokeAlert device is the first of its kind, using cutting-edge pulse wave analysis technology to monitor changes in the blood flow to the brain and alert for a potential stroke. 

The company says it is about prevention, shifting from care to cure. Treatment is effective if given in time. But, for the vast majority of people it arrives too late. 

Preemptive steps and timely action is essential for recovery, and the current main clinical treatment for strokes is only provided after the event. This includes blood thinners and invasive surgical procedures to remove blood clots from your arteries.  

“All the current treatments are based on clinical signs,” Avertto’s Chief Business Development Officer Limor Prigan tells NoCamels. These signs include facial drooping, arm weakness on one side and speech difficulties.

“You have to understand that once you have a clinical sign, it’s already too late. And then we’re running against time,” says Prigan. 

Avertto’s device uses sensors placed over the carotid arteries, the two major blood vessels on either side of your neck that provide the blood supply to your brain.

A lower blood flow level indicates potential blockages in the carotid arteries. The device’s AI-based alert system detects these changes and within seconds notifies the wearer, first responders and healthcare providers. 

Instant Alerts

According to the company, this is the first system to monitor blood flow, detect a change and issue a timely alert via continuous monitoring sensors linked to SaaS (software as a service)-based solutions.

The pulse wave analysis technology features sensors that first measure a user’s baseline blood flow levels. The sensors measure your levels every 2.6 milliseconds, and the data is transmitted to a smart phone app that will display one of three colors to the user. 

Green means healthy levels; yellow means that the data is still being assessed; and red means high risk of a stroke. When the app turns red, the alert is sent out within seconds. 

“The unique value proposition of Avertto is the combination between sensors, algorithms, user interface, and clinical management,” says Prigan. “And of course, [this is an] untapped business opportunity because there is no solution tackling a pre-stroke situation rather than post-stroke clinical signs.” 

The race against time was the reality that Prigan faced when her mother suffered her first stroke at the age of 62.  

Prigan was sitting for her final exams at The Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa when she received the news about her mother..  

“And from this moment on, I changed her diaper for the next 10 years. And the next one after 10 years was devastating,” she says of the stroke that led to her mother’s death. “I realized that there is no proper solution for early detection or prevention.”

Prigan strongly believes that Avertto’s early stroke detection and rapid stroke treatment could save the lives of millions of people who had similar experiences to her mother. 

Next Steps

Avertto was recently named rising startup of the year and won the first place prize of 100,000 shekels (approx. $28,000) in Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Asper Prize competition. 

The Aviram Awards – a competition to reward startups and entrepreneurs changing the day-to-day reality in the Middle East and North Africa – also placed Avertto in the top five finalists out of 780 competitors from the region. 

“The treatment is good if you get it in time. That’s exactly what Avertto is trying to bring, our unique value proposition and what we do today, always dealing with the preventive rather than looking at the clinical signs,” says Prigan. “Early intervention, that’s the future of preventive care.”

The company, which was founded in 2019 and is headquartered in Aderet in central Israel, has finished the proof of concept stage. It is now conducting a double blind study to obtain proof of validation in order to be used in the ER and during surgery. 

Eventually, Avertto plans to move into the home arena and is working on a smaller, insertable prototype of the device. 

“We know that the new standard of care will be the insertable,” says Prigan. “Nobody will be sent home without Avertto.”

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