Newsletter: Natural Juice, Less Sugar + Fast Food Drones

Republished By Plato

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Top investment opportunities
Startup of the Week: PulmOne, complete desktop lung testing
BlueTree: Natural orange juice, less sugar
Pie in the sky: Flytrex delivers pizza and more to suburbia USA
OurCrowd virtual job fair, Expert advice for job seekers
Airobotics offers aerial gunshot detection to Israeli police
SaNOtize’s anti-Covid nasal spray to reach India in early 2022
Superpedestrian launches first seated e-scooters in Baltimore
Israel’s first green hydrogen plant to run on H2Pro’s tech
TetaVi hires two former Warner Bros. executives
CytoReason CEO: AI is transforming the pharma industry
Introductions
More than 4,300 high-tech jobs

Startup of the Week:

PulmOne: Complete lung testing on desktop

How well are your lungs working? Until now, doctors have needed a phone booth-sized cabinet known as a body box for complete pulmonary-function testing (PFT) – a device found only in hospitals. PulmOne’s MiniBox+ is the world’s first FDA-cleared, portable, desktop pulmonary-function testing device, allowing patients to be screened for respiratory diseases in the doctor’s office. The MiniBox+ is less expensive than traditional larger devices, but offers the same accuracy. PulmOne has an exclusive vendor agreement with Kaiser Permanente in the US and a distribution agreement with HTDK in China. Other customers include NYU Langone Health, University of South Florida, Catholic Health Services, and the Hospital Corporation of America. The company has been cashflow positive since Q4 2020 and its 2021 revenue is on track to grow 123% year-on-year. PulmOne has sold over 700 systems, both as replacements for old body box units, and into clinics that previously did not have a full-function PFT device. Join OurCrowd as we invest in PulmOne through a CLA capped at $58M.

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BlueTree: Natural orange juice, less sugar

Can you preserve the health benefits and delicious taste of natural orange juice without all that sugar? Our freshly squeezed startup BlueTree Technologies has figured out a way to naturally and dramatically reduce the amount of sugar in fruit juice and it still tastes great, Joy Pincus writes in the Times of Israel. The company’s patent-pending technology filtrates the juice over a naturally occurring compound that physically extracts the sugar. BlueTree has signed a key distribution deal and expects to make its first sales sometime next year.Can you preserve the health benefits and delicious taste of natural orange juice without all that sugar? Our freshly squeezed startup BlueTree Technologies has figured out a way to naturally and dramatically reduce the amount of sugar in fruit juice and it still tastes great, Joy Pincus writes in the Times of Israel. The company’s patent-pending technology filtrates the juice over a naturally occurring compound that physically extracts the sugar. BlueTree has signed a key distribution deal and expects to make its first sales sometime next year.

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Pie in the sky: Flytrex delivers pizza and more to suburbia USA

One woman in North Carolina recorded her children’s Starbucks delivery by drone on TikTok and racked up 2.3 million views. Shortly after, she filmed a McDonald’s drone delivery that took just 15 minutes. “Finally, I got to order and pay on an app for real restaurant food delivered to me by drone,” said Mark Sears, CEO of CloudFactory in Durham, North Carolina, celebrating his 15-minute Flytrex delivery on LinkedIn and labeling it a #gamechanger. “The drones fly in straight lines so you get your food a lot faster, and it’s hotter and fresher than a human courier,” Flytrex CEO Yariv Bash tells Linda Gradstein in The Times of Israel. “It’s also much greener than using vehicles. Our drone weighs about 30 pounds versus a one-ton car needed to make deliveries.”

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WSJ: OurCrowd ahead of the curve in UAE ties

“In late November, OurCrowd, Israel’s most active venture capital fund, became the first to open up offices in the UAE for direct investment in Emirati companies,” Thomas Grove notes in the Wall Street Journal, reporting on the Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s historic visit to Abu Dhabi this week. Read more here.

Expert advice for high-tech job seekers

OurCrowd’s Business Development team will host a virtual job fair on Monday, Jan. 17th, highlighting thousands of vacancies across our portfolio companies and featuring CEOs, HR experts and tips on resumes, interviews, self-marketing and better use of LinkedIn. Companies participating include Clinch, Tailor Brands, Bizzabo, TetaVi, Morphisec, Intuition Robotics, Taranis and ThetaRay. The OurCrowd Jobs page currently has more than 4,300 vacancies at more than 170 companies. If you know anyone looking for a high-tech job in Israel, please invite them to the event on Jan. 17th, which we are hosting with our partners Start-up Nation Central, Scale-Up Velocity, Tel Aviv Internationals and Nefesh B’Nefesh.

Top Tech News

Airobotics offers aerial gunshot detection system to Israeli police

Drones from our UAV pioneer Airobotics will be taking to the skies to keep the streets safer. The company is teaming up with US company ShotSpotter which produces gunshot detection technology, Inceptive Mind reports. The system will detect, locate, and alert police to gunfire incidents in Israeli urban areas. Outdoor gunfire will be located by ShotSpotter’s network of acoustic sensors with precise coordinates communicated in real-time to Airobotics UAVs that will immediately fly to the scene, providing critical visual information to first responders that are in route.

SaNOtize’s anti-Covid nasal spray to reach India in early 2022

The groundbreaking nasal spray which knocks out the coronavirus produced by our portfolio company SaNOtize will be hitting the shelves in India early next year, BusinessLine reports. The spray, sold mostly under the name Enovid, targets the virus in the upper airways, preventing it from incubating and reaching the lungs. Therapeutics giant Glenmark Pharmaceuticals, which licensed the product for India, expects it to be available within three months. Parts of the country are under severe curfews and travel restrictions as health authorities try to curb the spread of both the Delta and Omicron strains of the virus.

Superpedestrian launches first seated e-scooter fleet in Baltimore

Our micromobility enabler Superpedestrian launched its first fleet of seated LINK e-scooters in the city of Baltimore, WBAL reports. These models have adjustable seats, making them a better option for people with disabilities and for older or novice riders. The company added the 150 seated units alongside the conventional fleet of 1,000 standing scooters already deployed. Additional partner cities across the US will see these new models on their streets throughout 2022.

Israel’s first green hydrogen plant to run on H2Pro’s tech

Technology from OurCrowd portfolio company H2Pro will be the centerpiece of Israel’s first green hydrogen production facility. Renewable energy pioneer Doral Group will build the plant on Kibbutz Yotvata in the Negev desert in 2023, the Jerusalem Post reports. The project will receive funding from Israel’s Ministry of Energy of just over $1M as part of efforts to support alternative energy initiatives. Green hydrogen uses renewable energy sources to split hydrogen and oxygen from water, subsequently using the produced gas as a clean power source.

TetaVi hires two former Warner Bros. executives

TetaVi, our trendsetting 3D visual capture platform provider, hired two former Warner Bros. executives to help lead the company, Variety reports. Anuraj Goonetilleke, most recently Warner Bros. Entertainment’s VP of Emerging Technology and Innovation Strategy, has been appointed TetaVi’s Chief Strategy and Revenue Officer. Bonnka Lim, who served as VP of Content Marketing and Partnerships at Warner Bros. Games, becomes TetaVi’s Chief Marketing Officer. “We have no doubt that the vast experience of Anuraj and Bonnka will allow us to stand at the forefront of the new world of volumetric video in the metaverse and other virtual worlds,” says Gilad Talmon, TetaVi’s CEO.

CytoReason CEO: AI is transforming the pharma industry

Access to medical data is no longer a problem in the pharma industry, according to David Harel, CEO and co-founder of our portfolio company CytoReason, which works with some of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies including Merck, Sanofi and Pfizer to develop new drugs. The main issue now is how to analyze the overwhelming amount of data and turn it into real world insight, Harels tells Outsourcing Pharma. CytoReason develops computational models of diseases based on proprietary and public data. While AI bridges the data-insight gap, scientists understand that taking that information to the application phase requires a human touch, Harel says.

Introductions

Your portfolio gets stronger when the OurCrowd network gets involved. Visit our Introductions page to see which of our companies are looking for connections that you may be able to help with.