Amid war, Deloitte kicks off 7th cohort for Israel startup accelerator program
Total of 53 Israeli growth-stage startups have so far taken part in the accelerator, collectively raising more than $1 billion in venture funds since the 2020 launch in Israel
Sharon Wrobel is a tech reporter for The Times of Israel.
Ten Israeli startups have been selected to participate in the seventh cohort of consulting firm Deloitte’s mentoring program during a challenging period when many young founders and entrepreneurs are struggling to raise essential funds, as the ongoing war with the Hamas terror group has been raging for almost seven months.
“The past year has been challenging and founders are showing real resilience,” Yair Laron, partner at Deloitte Catalyst, told The Times of Israel in emailed comments.
Deloitte Launchpad is a seven-week hybrid program that provides early-growth startups with hands-on mentorship from the firm’s Israel and global experts. The 10 startups were chosen out of about 100 applicants for the growth accelerator.
The program, which includes online and in-person meetings with investors and experts, both in Israel and at Deloitte’s offices in New York, seeks to help nurture early-stage growth startups that are looking to grow their footprint and expand to the US market.
Deloitte, one of the big four accounting firms, said that the fledgling entrepreneurs of the selected Israeli startups will be guided by teams in the US and Israel to overcome three major challenges: laying the foundations for operations and physical expansion in America, establishing a solid sales infrastructure, and access to venture capital funds in the US.
To join the program, the selected startups needed to show that they have a validated product, annual revenues of more than $500,000, positive year-over-year growth, and plans to break into the US market.
“This is a very diverse group of companies from various domains,” said Laron. “We are seeing in the past few months early signs that the public market is going to be more active than the past year.”
“This should propel growth and acceleration of the private market as well,” he added.
The 10 selected startups are developing technologies in a variety of areas of interest from cybersecurity, generative AI, machine learning, gaming, computer vision, and augmented reality.
The first five candidates that participate in the program are Cyabra, the developer of a software platform that tracks fake users and accounts on social media for disinformation purposes; AI cybersecurity firm Clarity, which seeks to provide tech solutions to tackle the deepfake challenge; Juno Journey, an AI startup that has built a personalized employee development platform; LayerX, a developer of a browser security platform to protect enterprise data, applications and devices against threat risks; and video game firm Ludeo, that has developed a playable social platform to convert gaming experiences into shareable and interactive highlights.
The other five are Opmed, which has developed an AI-driven planner to optimize procedure scheduling at hospital; Prompt Security, which has built a platform to secure all uses of generative AI that are being deployed by businesses and organizations from GenAI tools to GenAI homegrown apps; cybersecurity fintech Trustmi; sales tech startup Winn, that has built a real-time AI assistant for sales teams to automate processes; and Zoog, the developer of software that allows family members to read and record stories for kids, while becoming part of the tale with augmented reality and filters.
A total of 53 Israeli early growth-stage startups in six cohorts have so far taken part in the growth accelerator and have collectively raised over $1 billion in venture funding since it was launched in 2020 in Israel.
