Last Wednesday TechCrunch hosted the TechCrunch Meetup + Pitch-Off in Tel Aviv, and a good time was had by all! Over 700 people packed into the Trask venue to see on-stage interviews and 10 companies pitching to win tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt.
The startups had only one minute to pitch their product (with no slides) to a panel of local VC judges and TechCrunch editors.
The winner of the evening was OlfaGuard which has created an extremely accurate “electronic nose” that can literally sniff out pathogens in an industrial food production setting. They will get a table in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco or Berlin.
In second place was Brodmann17 which has come up with a new kind of superior deep-learning architecture which could well be applied to, say, autonomous cars. The audience choice was HiGrade – Cannabis Analysis which has a computer vision smartphone app for detecting THC levels in Cannabis just by taking a photograph on the phone. Both will get two tickets and one ticket for Disrupt Berlin.
We were joined on stage by our illustrious jusdges, Ilana Golan, of Golan Ventures;
Kira Radinsky, of eBay; and Yifat Oron, the CEO of LeumiTech.
In addition, I interviewed Uri Levine, co-founder of Waze. We also discussed Israel and its diverse ecosystem with Amir Ounallah (CEO, Batuta), Ryan Sturgill (Gaza Sky Geeks) and Chemi Peres (Pitango Venture Capital co-founder and Managing General Partner), on a panel moderated by TechCrunch News Editor Ingrid Lunden.
We also covered Drone security with Gilad Sahar (Co-founder and CEO of Convexum) and Yonatan Zur (Co-founder and CEO of Regulus), with a panel moderated by TechCrunch Managing Editor Matt Burns.
Lastly, we held a computer vision panel with Inon Beracha (former CEO, PrimeSense), Yonatan Wexler (EVP of R&D, OrCam) and Gadi Tirosh (Managing Partner, Jerusalem Venture Partners), moderated by TC writer Romain Dillet.
The other startups that pitched were:
In addition our video editor/presenter Tito shot three amazing video blogs which we present for you here:
Vlog 1
Vlog 2
Vlog 3