Thoughts after NOAH Tel Aviv 2019
It’s always refreshing and humbling to attend any NOAH conference. This year, NOAH Tel Aviv was no different. There were so many amazing companies with great teams putting their passion into really useful products. By far my favorite part about every NOAH conference is listening to a well-delivered talk from a company I’ve never heard about, just to learn that they have hundreds of millions in revenue or process billions of dollars in transactions.
This is the the experience at NOAH Tel Aviv, the numbers are just bigger. The unique thing about this show is that it’s very local — most of the speakers and attendees are from the local Israeli startup and business community. The thing that becomes very obvious is their focus on hard-core technology advancements, including patents, applications of machine learning, and other complex engineering solutions (often in chemical or mechanical engineering serving the EV sector). It becomes clear that building brands and B2C channels is second priority — what matters is insanely efficient technology that is 20 times or 400 times better than the competition. With this precise focus, happy customers include a huge number of fortune 10 and Fortune 500 companies.
To give you a feel of the tech industry in Tel Aviv:
• DropBox has its second largest office outside of US here, focusing on R&D
• Clicktale processes half a million requests to their API every second
• EarlySense can predict cardiac arrest or septic patients with high accuracy using just one sensor placed under a patient’s mattress
• Early stage startup, Chakratech, patented a way to store electric energy using kinetics instead of chemical batteries, which means 20x better efficiency and no battery wear. Their major application right now is EV fast-charges outside of high voltage infrastructure.
• Another young company, Enigmatos, is creating a digital fingerprint of an autonomous car’s hardware and software, so that tampering with it is easy to detect. It works locally on the car, even if an attacker manages to block network access.
This approach is so engraved in the local business DNA that most of the early-stage companies are starting to establish R&D department right away, separate from their engineering departments. It’s an approach that I haven’t seen anywhere else. It won’t be much of surprise to learn that Israel has the highest GDP share spent on civilian R&D.
One of the local VCs, ourCrowd, had a great talk highlighting the reasons why the Israeli community is so special: thousands of years of turning curses into blessing, obstacles into leverages. It’s not only about 6 unicorn companies, regular billion dollar exits, or 400 companies that are world-leaders in their AI segment. Israel has the highest birth rate among all OECD countries — an ultimate statement about the most important trait here, celebrating life.
