THE ARAB START UP NATION

In recent years Arab entrepreneurs have making their mark on the start- up scene in Israel.

In the last week of November 2018, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange witnessed an exciting event in which six start-ups run by successful Arab entrepreneurs staged demonstrations of their innovations. These included technologies ranging from real estate, crowd funding, selenium coders and beauty. 

ValueHut, using Artificial Intelligence, Geo-statistics and Big Data, provides accurate and detailed valuations of residential real estate properties. Its technology considers thousands of parameters, both internal and external (spatial) to the property, and produces timely, accurate and non biased valuations, coupled with detailed analyses of the main factors affecting the price. The company’s technology was proven by analyzing 40,000 real estate transactions in Tel Aviv and Haifa.

Mirrori, run by Mira Awwad-Khreish, founder and CEO, is an AI-based virtual beauty assistant provides advice to women based on their facial features and their own inventory of beauty products. How it works: the user takes a selfie, shares her existing beauty collection and indicates her desired look. Mirrori then extracts the user’s facial features from her selfie and identifies her beauty inventory using computer vision technologies. Finally Mirrori generates personalized advice and how-to tutorials for achieving the desired look using deep learning algorithms and augmented reality.  Mira teamed up with the owner of the largest make-up school in Israel to assist in designing the product and providing the know-how and training data. 

The program, known as Hybrid, is an acceleration program, the most far-reaching, in-depth program for early-stage ventures led by Arab, Druze and Bedouin entrepreneurs in Israel. This is the go-to program for Israel’s most promising startups, acting as their gateway to the core of the Israeli hi-tech sector.

Hybrid is the brain child of Fadi Swidan, who runs the Maof Nazareth Business Center and Hybrid accelerator. For the past six years the center has been the home to 90 start ups assisted by the Israel government’s Ministry of Economy and Industry.

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