Technion BizTEC 2018 Winners
CloudPool Wins the Technion’s BizTEC 2018 Entrepreneurship Program
The 8 finalists presented their developments to experts and investors at the program’s Demo Day
CloudPool is the winner of BizTEC 2018, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology’s nationwide entrepreneurship program. The group developed an automated artificial intelligence management platform for organizations using several cloud providers.
Prof. Boaz Golany, vice president for external relations and resource development.
BizTEC 2018 is an entrepreneurship (pre-acceleration) program run by the Technion’s Bronica Entrepreneurship Center. The program caters teams that develop deep technologies, focusing on entrepreneurs with an “unripe” idea in its early stages. Established by Technion students in 2004, BizTEC now stands out among other Israeli entrepreneurship programs due to its success in accompanying deep technology ventures. Since its inception, more than 1400 teams have benefited from BizTEC; the many companies that have been formed have raised more than $350 million.
This year, 117 teams applied for the program. 26 were selected, and 8 reached the final event yesterday – Demo Day. Each of the finalists presented their developments in the form of a business presentation (pitch). Four of the teams are focused on medicine and biomedical engineering. The other finalists deal with vehicle IoT (Internet of Things), blockchain, and cloud computing management. The program’s judges were comprised of business, law, banking and technology leaders Ruth Alon, Moshe Berkowitz, Idan Friedman, Idan Bar-Dov, Miri Ashkenazi, Noa Oz, and Michael Marciano.
First place winner CloudPool. Right to left: Yanai Tevet, Shai Haim, Yehuda Bronicki, Michael Zeisler (CloudPool), Meital Nissim, and Prof. Boaz Golany
The founders of the winning group, CloudPool, are CEO Michael Czeizler, a former member of Unit 8200, IDF’s elite technological unit (Major in res.) who led a development team at EMC until recently; and technology director Yanai Tevet, who served in Navy intelligence, completed a master’s degree in mathematics and physics, and worked as a technology leader at EMC. Cloudpool developed an automated artificial intelligence management platform for organizations using several cloud providers.
“We developed a platform that permits the automation of processes that are very complicated to perform manually,” said Czeizler. “Its main advantages are avoiding being ‘locked’ to a single cloud provider, significant cost savings, and the ability to respond in real time to events such as changing user patterns or cloud service failure.”
The Best Medical Project Award went to SpeechBeat – an innovative solution for people who stutter. Customized to a person who stutters, the device allows its user to speak fluently and at an appropriate and natural pace. The idea was born at the T2MED hackathon at the Technion’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, and currently consists of 4 members: Eshed Rabinovitch, a master’s student in medicine at the Technion under Prof. Noam Ziv; Peleg Shkolnik, a student at the Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering; Shaked Ron, a student in the joint program of the Faculties of Medicine and Biomedical Engineering; and Elias Mansour, a graduate of the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering who is beginning his doctorate under Prof. Hossam Haick of the Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering. Rabinovitch stresses that since the project was part of BizTEC’s hardware track, the group received a grant of $8,000 from the Bronica family, and assistance from the community of stutterers was also vital to the development of the project.
Honorable mention went to Agora – the future arena of real estate trading. Using the blockchain technology, the company allows, on one hand, asset owners to issue them as stocks in a specialized tokens stock exchange and, on the other hand, allows anyone to purchase a small portion as an investment in those assets. This breakthrough approach allows anyone to become a liquid investor in real estate and also allows asset owners to offer only small portions of the assets. The company’s founders are Lior Dolinsky, an undergraduate student of computer science at the Technion, and Bar Mor, a computer science student at IDC Herzliya. The company is in the process of fundraising and has already secured $300,000.
Other groups that participated in the closing event:
Lucky – The first home appliance for complete palm care, including nail gel.
SafeDrive – A smart system for vehicle fleet managers that provides continuous and real-time information on the condition of the vehicles.
NovelHand – A robotic arm that enables amputees to perform various functions without any special effort, based on signals obtained from the arm muscle.
VitaPod – A home appliance for monitoring wounds that develop on the legs of diabetics. The device enables continuous monitoring and prevents hospitalization and amputation.
AntiShock – An innovative system for the early detection of septic shock (blood infection), based on monitoring blood flow in capillaries.
BizTEC 2018 was launched about six months ago with the participation of the recipient of the 2018 Israel Prize for Industry, Yehuda Bronicki; Technion President Prof. Peretz Lavie; Vice President for External Relations and Resource Development Prof. Boaz Golany; inventor of the flash drive Dov Moran, and BizTEC alumni. The groups were mentored by leading entrepreneurship and investment experts including members of NowTecc, who won the BizTEC 2017 competition; StoreDot founder and CEO Doron Myersdorf; MeMed founder and CEO Eran Eden; SimilarWeb CEO and founder Or Offer; Reuven Sherwin of Wix; Arik Kleinstein of Glilot Capital; Lotan Levkowitz of Grove Ventures; and Irit Israeli of AfterDox.