With an area covering 20,000 square kilometers and a population just shy of 9 million, Israel is a relatively small country on the southeast shore of the Mediterranean Sea.
However, there’s nothing small about its technological and entrepreneurial successes that continue to grab headlines, dubbing the country the Silicon Valley of the Middle East.
As a matter of fact, it is the leading country in the world in the number of startups per capita – boasting roughly one startup per 1,400 people.
So what’s their secret?
Many different factors are at play here. The geographical element is one of them. If it only takes you about an hour to get from one place to another, you can be certain it’ll help you get to more meetings, make connections more easily, and save time on travel.
There’s also the existence of mandatory military service. It equips young people with the skills and tools to think on their feet, find solutions to problems on the go, improvise, and think outside the box. Having a formidable and advanced military also means there’s a lot of technical experience accumulated there, along with a supportive environment for innovative ideas.
On that note – did you know that the IDF has a cyber-intelligence unit that trains recruits to code, hack, gather cyber intelligence, and develop smartphone apps? This very unit has cultivated several successful CEOs.
Also, many CEOs don’t think in terms of building a successful company and selling it on to Google or something. They prefer to keep things close to home and strategize. They also like to share knowledge and experience with each other – something that isn’t very common in other nations.
Israel also has an established culture of innovation and promoting startups that inspire and motivates people to create more. Or maybe it’s not one thing but the perfect combination of all the above. Whatever it is, it’s obviously working.
People driving the progress
An example from the tech scene is Mati Kochavi – a serial entrepreneur and pioneer of innovative technologies. He’s been making an impact across different branches over the past 20 years, including in AI, IoT, and smart city deployments.
Kochavi has founded a network of companies currently employing over 2,000 people all over the world and pooling sales of more than $7 billion. All of these companies are excelling in what they do and often find themselves on the front pages of the international media.
One of these companies is AGT International, founded in 2007. It provides organizations with IoTA-based tools to understand the potential challenges of complex environments and save billions of dollars.
Vocativ, which Kochavi established in 2013, is an award-winning video-based news site that relies on its proprietary data-mining solution to find the most interesting stories from around the world.
Another one of his companies, Coach.AI, received huge media attention in 2020 when it partnered with an English football club Chelsea. The result of this cooperation was the development of an AI-based football training app.
The successes just keep racking up, with Kochavi also making headlines for his innovations in film-making especially the success of Eva Stories.
Although Israel is a small country, it has many innovators like Mati Kochavi. Together, they are driving the technological progress in Israel, and with it – the world. We’re excited to see what else they have in store to usher the world into the (even more) technologically advanced future.
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