Intel’s startup growth program Ignite announced this week that ten new Israeli companies were selected for its latest cohort in Tel Aviv, scheduled to begin next month on November 2.
This is Intel Ignite’s third cohort since the accelerator’s launch last year to tap into high impact, data-centric technology companies. The program is set to expand to Austin in Texas and Munich in Germany, following its success in Israel. To that end, Tzahi “Zack” Weisfeld, who led the program in the past year, will take on a global role as general manager and head of Intel Ignite, while Ranny Nachmias, formerly of Alcide and Dynamic Yield (which was acquired by McDonald’s), will serve as managing director of the Tel Aviv program.
The 12-week program will be conducted entirely online, just like the previous iteration, due to pandemic restrictions. The selection process also progressed virtually with 230 initial applicants and 60 judges—30 VCs and 30 Intel executives. The ten companies selected for the program will each be matched with an industry mentor and participate in go-to-market, sales, and governance workshops, as well as mindfulness sessions on how to deal with the many stressors entrepreneurs face. The startups will also meet regularly with the Intel Ignite team and attend progress meetings.
The ten companies selected for the third cohort, each with average funding of over USD 5 million, are:
- Armo, formerly known as Cyber Armor, a Jerusalem-based company that developed a platform to empower DevOps teams to deploy automatically secured environments, and bridge the gap between DevOps and security teams.
- Bria.ai, a startup that says it generates synthetic visual data of the world, currently in stealth mode.
- Komodor, an end-to-end troubleshooting platform for DevOps and SRE (site reliability engineering) teams designed to bring back control over modern distributed systems.
- Konnecto, a consumer intelligence startup founded in 2018 that enables brands to reveal and disrupt their competitors’ consumer journeys by applying unique data science on consumers’ digital footprint.
- Lightsolver, a startup founded just this year that is building an optical solver to find quick, optimal solutions for complicated computational problems.
- Lynx, a medical tech startup founded in 2019 that enables healthcare organizations to share sensitive data at scale in a private and secure manner.
- Oolo, a Ra’anana-based startup founded in 2019 that is building the first AI-powered problem detection solution specifically for digital media companies.
- Orca AI, a Tel Aviv startup with offices in London that provides the maritime industry with intelligent navigation solutions.
- Solvo, a cloud security company founded in 2020 and based in Tel Aviv that helps developers, DevOps, and DevSecOps engineers secure their cloud applications, preventing misconfiguration hacks.
- Valerann, a smart road startup founded in 2016 that turns existing road infrastructure into a comprehensive source of information and connectivity.
“Despite the uncertain times, Ignite is continuing to grow, having had our largest applicant pool yet, and our recent expansion news,” said Weisfeld.
“There is undoubtedly a need for a startup program that tackles head-on the major challenges that startups currently face. Ignite offers the credibility and validation only a global tech brand like Intel can give. Ignite leverages the vast resources offered by Intel, as well as the larger tech ecosystem, to really bring the best and brightest to assist our startups,” he added.