Doubling down on unlikely success story, Arab-Israeli couple takes med-tech giant to Jenin
Short on cash but long on grit, Reem and Imad Younis co-founded their company Alpha Omega in 1993 to make a ‘brain Waze’; now they’re taking a risk, in line with their vision
Reporter at The Times of Israel
NAZARETH — The oldest and leading Arab-owned med-tech company in Israel started in a city in the Israeli periphery known more as Jesus’s hometown than a high-tech hub. But for Reem Younis, 59, who grew up in a working-class Christian family in Nazareth, there was no better location to found what has become a giant in Israel’s med-tech industry.
In 1993, alongside her husband, Imad, she established Alpha Omega, one of the world’s top manufacturers of electrodes and other medical devices that record the activity of neurons from within the brain.
Today, researchers and neurosurgeons worldwide use Alpha Omega equipment to guide them, much like the Israeli navigational system Waze, toward the best place to implant deep brain stimulation (DBS) electrodes inside the brain. These electrodes are used to treat disorders associated with neurological conditions such as epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease.
But if setting up their company in Nazareth was once considered unusual, their newest branch office is even more surprising: Recently, despite the frequent deadly clashes between Israeli troops and Palestinians in the West Bank city since Hamas invaded southern Israel on October 7, the couple opened a branch of their multinational company at the Arab American University in Jenin.
“We had our doubts that we would be able to do it. But we started the idea before the war and decided not to put it on hold. On the contrary, we felt the need to work harder,” Reem told The Times of Israel in her sunny office in Zipurit industrial park near Nazareth. There, unlike similar companies based in Tel Aviv, the view is of a valley in checkerboard greens and browns instead of high-rises.
In addition to the small Jenin office, there are 110 employees at the Nazareth site and another 70 in offices in Europe, China, and the United States. The company works with top international medical companies such as Medtronic, Boston Scientific, and Abbott Laboratories.
Office politics
Alpha Omega has a mix of Arab and Jewish employees; almost half are women. Reem’s own identity is just as multi-layered and complex.
“I’m a Palestinian, Israeli, Christian woman,” she said. “I’m a woman, mother, and entrepreneur. The definition goes on and on.”
Since the war began, some employees have been called up to IDF reserve duty, while others have relatives who were killed in Gaza.
Reem said the company employs “people from across the spectrum,” and the only thing that is required is that “employees abide by our mission and our six core values: diversity, magnanimity, prudence, leadership, courage, and honesty.”
During a walk through the office, she passed a ping-pong table used for employee tournaments and a poster on a bulletin board announcing Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Druze holidays.
“Employees can pick their religion and decide when they want to take their vacation,” Reem said, and it was the first time she appeared to be joking. “Seriously, they can choose.”
Israel’s Arab community makes up around 20 percent of the country’s population but accounts for just around 2% of workers in the tech sector, according to Tsofen, an organization that promotes tech activity in Arab cities and the integration of Arab-Israeli citizens into tech firms.
“The continued global slowdown in high-tech, and the war in Israel, [has] had a decisive effect” on those numbers, Maisam Jaljuli, CEO of Tsofen, told the Hebrew language website Mako.
Reem said that the company sponsors academic programs for students interested in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and medicine) subjects and other activities to promote diversity in Israel’s high-tech industry in the periphery.
Laila Shalabi, 40, from the nearby town of Iksal, has worked at Alpha Omega for the past six years. Before that, she “stayed at home,” and her only work experience had been a two-year stint at a bakery.
She is now the manager of the electrode room.
“The company has given me responsibility,” Shalabi said. “It’s given me life.”
The company opened the Jenin branch with the idea that “it has the potential to open doors to markets that are closed to Israeli companies,” Reem said, and also because “even during the war, business ventures still go on and there’s cooperation between people.”
She pointed out that one company employee, a Jewish Israeli, manages the Palestinian engineers in Jenin remotely, which shows that “everything is possible.”
No decent high-tech job offers for Arab Israelis
Reem said that her parents, who never finished high school, “didn’t care about anything except education.” They encouraged their two daughters and son (Reem is the middle child) to pursue university studies.
Despite not finishing high school, her mother taught first- and second-grade students in Nazareth. Her father worked in the Nazareth municipality servicing water meters until he became sick with Parkinson’s disease at a young age.
“As a little girl I learned how difficult it is to live with a patient who has a neurological disorder,” Reem said. He died before the couple started the treatment for Parkinson’s disease in Alpha Omega.
Reem studied civil engineering at the Technion where she met Imad, an electrical engineer. Today, they have three children.
Their daughter, Dima, is head of Alpha Omega’s marketing and Asia sales, and their son, Jude, a student at Tel Aviv University, works at the company in a student position. They also have another daughter, Nada.
“My children did not have a hot meal every day on the table, but they saw how hard we worked, and how much we wanted to change the reality that we’re living in,” Reem said.
The Younises founded the neuroscience company in 1993, at a time when most technology companies employed workers who had connections to the military, Reem said. The couple simply couldn’t get “any decent job offers.”
As an electrical engineer, Imad had worked with Prof. Hagai Bergman of the Department of Medical Neurobiology at The Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School, winner of the 2024 Israel Prize for Life Sciences.
Bergman was one of the first researchers to discover that stimulating certain areas of the brain could alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, and Prof. Alim Benabid of Grenoble’s Joseph Fourier University treated patients using Bergman’s foundational ideas.
Imad began working on making electrodes and other equipment that brain researchers could use.
At first, Reem and Imad thought they would work as subcontractors for the high-tech industry, doing “everything from A to Z, from alpha to omega,” Reem said.
Without financial resources, the young couple sold their car and several gold coins that Imad’s maternal grandfather had given him. With the coins they bought “a computer here, a table there,” Reem said.
“It is hard enough to start and run a new business without the additional obstacle of being an Arab in Israel,” he told The Times of Israel in 2014.
Reem explained how they had the moxie to found their own company: “Whenever I’m afraid, I remember that courage is one of the company’s values,” she said. “I should fight my fear. Courage is not that you’re not afraid. Courage is the ability to do something while you are afraid.”
For its first 15 years, Alpha Omega received no funding except for grants from the Office of the Chief Scientist at the Innovation, Science, and Technology Ministry.
In 2018, the company received $7 million from China’s Guangzhou Sino-Israel Biotech Investment Fund (GIBF), a life-sciences firm backed by the Guangzhou municipal government.
Reem works with the management team and is in charge of public relations. Imad leads the research and development of the company’s products.
As a private company, its financial information is not made public, but according to a 2021 article in the Hebrew language Calcalist, it is believed to be valued at hundreds of millions of dollars.
Today, Reem co-chairs the board of the Hand in Hand School, a network of bilingual, multicultural Jewish-Arab schools in Israel, and other organizations that promote what she calls “the 3E’s:” education, employment, and entrepreneurship.
In 2019, she and Imad co-founded Qudra, an Arab philanthropic network that supports non-profit organizations to work with influential business leaders in Israel and around the world.
The ‘brain Waze’
Reem said that as a civil engineer, she could explain what the company’s electrodes do in a “simple way.”
“If you can, imagine the map of Europe, and we need to get to Spain,” she said. “We have all these countries to go through to get to Spain. We begin and start hearing German, so we know we are in Germany. We advance a little bit and we start to hear French, then Spanish, and we know we’ve arrived in Spain.”
This navigation provides neurosurgeons with the best location to implant deep brain stimulation (DBS) electrodes inside the brain.
“The company’s electrodes provide real-time information during brain surgery,” said Dr. Ido Strauss of Tel Aviv University’s School of Medical and Health Sciences and the director of the Functional Neurosurgery Unit at Ichilov Hospital, who has no connection to Alpha Omega. “We can tell when we pass through the thalamus and then into the subthalamic area, and when we are in the correct place.”
DBS implantation surgery can also include an implant sometimes referred to as a “brain pacemaker” to treat neurological diseases.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 8.5 million people suffer from Parkinson’s worldwide.
“The surgery improves the motor symptoms, tremor, and rigidity of people with Parkinson’s,” Strauss said. “It improves their quality of life.”
In addition to supplying equipment for DBS treatment of Parkinson’s, Reem said that scientists are also exploring how this sort of brain stimulation could be used to treat other neural disorders.
“Ironically, we didn’t get to help my father but we get to help other people,” Reem said. “By treating these patients, bringing them a better quality life, we’re not only helping them, we’re helping the whole family.”
