10 Israeli innovations that changed the world
Israel is an investment market not to be overlooked
Gabi Dishi and Sagi Ben Yosef, Alpha LTI
Alpha LTI, the investment team behind the Pengana Alpha Israel Fund, is Israel’s premium boutique equity manager behind a Fund which offers Australian investors a vehicle that will open up access to invest in Israel’s business sector.
10 noteworthy Israeli innovations that have, and are, changing the future:
1) Imagine a navigation device that alerts you to traffic congestion, construction and any car-crash areas to avoid. That’s Waze. It was sold to Google for USD$1.1billion in 2013, and today provides real-time traffic information to more than 50 million users.
2) What if you could discover disease simply by exhaling? SniffPhone is a diagnostic tool that can detect the symptomatic odour caused by some cancerous tumours, Parkinson’s, dementia, multiple sclerosis and many more diseases to an 86% to 93% degree of accuracy.
3) In place of a colonoscopy, you can ingest a miniature camera about one inch long that is fashioned to look and feel like an oversized pill. PillCam takes around 60,000 photos of the intestinal tract as it travels through the body and transmits them back to a data recorder.
4) 5.5 million businesses in 160 countries use the world’s largest freelance services marketplace, Fiverr, for copywriting, website design, video editing and graphic design. It’s now listed on the NASDAQ
5) The world’s first dynamic electric road system was made possible by ElectReon whose steady electricity flow will supply power so that vehicles can be recharged as they are driven.
6) The first software to protect data from dangerous cyber activity was Firewall, and it is one of the cornerstones of computer security. The first-ever fully viable commercial firewall was built in 1993, today the company partners with the likes of Nokia.
7) Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway made their first-ever investment outside the United States in 2010 for $6 billion. It was for ISCAR– a low tech company specialising in metal cutting tools.
8) The first global instant messenger was a free-to-download app developed in 1996 by ICQ. The company was sold to AOL for USD$407 million in 1998 – an impressive feat at a time when mega-mergers were not commonplace.
9) It’s not easy to reliably grow crops in drought and desert. Netafim is a desert-friendly irrigation system that allows farmers in Israel to leverage micro-irrigation. In Israel it improved crop yields by 70% and reduced water usage by 5%. Today, this technology is used around the globe.
10) Life-saving AI car technology allows a tiny camera placed in cars to alert drivers of potential hazards, such as pedestrians or steering out of the lane. It was developed by Mobileye in 1999 and is today valued at USD$10 billion thanks to 25 global automakers and over 15 million vehicles using the technology worldwide.
11) The Flexible Stent – preventative medical tech. Millions of people owe their lives to the flexible stent – a tube-shaped device used to open up arteries to treat coronary heart disease and blockages, preventing the need for open-heart surgery. Known in the medical world as the NIR stent or EluNIR™ it was developed by Medinol.
The Pengana Alpha Israel Fund invests principally in listed Israeli companies that produce cutting edge – both high and low tech – technologies. These Israeli companies have developed solid intellectual property coupled with strong global distribution.
The Fund offers Australian Wholesale investors diversification into a unique and promising market that is very much skewed to industries and technology sectors which are either limited, or do not exist, in the Australian market place, such as the semiconductor industry, solar and water treatment technology, aerospace and electronic defence industries, and cybersecurity technologies.
Read more about the Pengana ALPHA Israel Fund HERE.
Daniel Fine
Distribution Manager, Head of Direct Clients
Want to learn more about this fund, click here to book a call with Daniel Fine
