JERUSALEM--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cutting edge technologies saving the planet and saving individual lives were spotlighted in the OurCrowd Global Investor Summit which concluded today. Business leaders, government officials, entrepreneurs and dozens of startups came together to discuss how technology is helping people around the world.
With the goal of helping Mother Nature recover from the devastation of climate change, Cameron Jones, Co-founder & COO of Flash Forest, Canada’s largest drone reforestation company, aims to replenish the world’s forests. “Over the next two months, Flash Forest will plant over one million trees in remote forests in North America. We are actually going to be breaking some world records for the largest number of trees ever planted by drone and we are going to redefine how reforestation is done over the next century,” he said.
According to Eyal Harel, CEO of BlueGreen Water Technologies, its water-based carbon removal technology has not only succeeded in removing 3.3M tons of carbon to date, but “has been able to rehabilitate entire aquatic systems, reintroduce biodiversity to lakes and oceans and, equally important, support the lives and livelihoods of people who relied on contaminated water bodies.”
There was a whiff of Hollywood in Jerusalem, when Fauda star Lior Raz and his co-creator Avi Issacharoff were interviewed in a packed auditorium by Yossi Medved, Founder & CEO of Tale Runners, about the bright future of Israeli content in light of Fauda's international unprecedented success.
OurCrowd MedTech startups play an important role in many people’s lives but no more so than in that of Surgical Theater’s Alon Zuckerman who used his company’s technology, which adapts flight simulator technology to complex medical procedures, to save his son’s life. Itai Zuckerman, who joined his father on stage, fell victim to Ewing sarcoma, a type of tumor that forms from a kind of cell in bone or soft tissue. “Yes, I’m the President of Surgical Theater. But this is not just a job I do, it’s saving lives, my son’s included,” he said.
Speaking on the ability of even a FinTech company to save individual lives, Mark Gazit, CEO of ThetaRay, related how his company’s cross-border transaction-monitoring system helped to uncover a human trafficking crime ring in Europe and said this is “one example of how AI monitoring of financial transactions can save lives of hundreds of thousands of underaged girls.”
UBQ Materials presented its sustainable plastic substitute that is used across industries, including automotive, as part of the Honda Xcelerator booth as one of three innovative solutions bringing automotive manufacturing into a sustainable future.
US Ambassador to Israel, Thomas Nides who gave a fireside chat to the thousands of participants in the main hall said, “The Abraham Accords made Israel a stronger democratic Jewish state. The early adopters created an unbelievable message to the world. It just makes the region stronger and just makes Israel stronger.”
Summit concluded with the presentation of the OurCrowd Maimonides Award. This year’s recipient was Morris Kahn, a pioneering entrepreneur whose big thinking and diversified businesses such as Amdocs helped build Israel into Startup Nation, who now serves as the President of SpaceIL which piloted the first Israeli mission to the moon.
OurCrowd CEO Jonathan Medved said at the conclusion of Summit, “Despite some thoughts that the current economic and political situation might somehow dampen the OurCrowd Global Investor Summit, the Summit that we just completed broke all prior records for attendance, for the quality of the attendees and the compelling and inspiring content. The ability to go from one session where startups are really taking a big bite out of greenhouse gases to another session where an Abu Dhabi senior official talked about his personal journey to Jerusalem, and finally ending with a real live example of a person on stage whose life was saved from one of our startups - it doesn’t get better than that. I think that the investors who came to us from 81 countries will be back again soon.”
The 2023 Global Investor Summit is being broadcast on the event website.
About OurCrowd:
OurCrowd is the online global venture investing platform that empowers institutions and individual accredited investors to invest and engage in emerging technology companies at an early stage. Acclaimed by PitchBook* and Startup Nation Central as the most active venture investor in Israel, OurCrowd vets and selects companies across all sectors and stages, invests its own capital, and provides its global platform of over 220,000 registered members from 195 countries with unparalleled access and freedom to co-invest from as little as $10,000 in the companies and funds of their choice.
Founded by CEO Jon Medved in 2013 with the vision of democratizing world-class venture capital investing, OurCrowd has grown rapidly into one of the world’s leading online venture investing platform and as of 2023 has over $2.1B in commitments, and deployed capital into 380 portfolio companies and 42 funds across five continents. To date, OurCrowd’s startups have recorded 61 exits including several public market listings.
*Every year since 2013
For Press Materials:
Photos from the OurCrowd Global Investor Summit here.
Photography Credit: Tomer Foltyn
Production Company: Think - Orly Rachamim
Media toolkit: https://summit.ourcrowd.com/media-toolkit/
Summit website: https://summit.ourcrowd.com/