Green Israel

Sagi Rubin from Gemini participated in writing this post by Danny Cohen.

Israel is already known to be a very active place for tech startups. These days, you have everything in Israel: Security (Checkpoint!), Pharmaceutical (Teva!), Communications (Comverse!), Software (Amdocs!), and even Internet (ICQ, Yedda, Answers.com). But what about Green tech?

The green/clean craze has definitely landed in Israel. First of all, Israel has all the great reasons to be very active in this market. Here are 3 key reasons:

1. Political: Needless to say, Israel will benefit if the world moves away from Oil.
2. Natural Resources: Israel is a great place. Beautiful. Unfortunately, we have no oil, not enough water, and too much Sun. Perfect for a “solar-operated, water purifying, electric cars” society.
3. Open market: Unlike other areas of high-tech, there is no leading hub for green tech. Israel has an opportunity to be a geographical leader in that space.

Based on that, we have seen increased activity in the green tech field. Here are some of the key local trends that relate to the Israeli green activity:

• The shift of experienced management: With the increased interest in the area, more high-tech executives are looking to enter the clean tech market. The most notable example is Shai Agassi, who left the Software space to start a green related activity – Project Better Place.
• Increase of green tech investment vehicles: In the past 6 months, dedicated clean tech activities have emerged. Beyond angels, mainstream VCs, and incubators, focused funds have started to operate, including Israel Cleantech, Terra Venture, and Aqua Agro fund.
• Increased investments. Some examples include: (Metrolight, Xjet, Atlantium, Solar Edge, Aqwise, etc). With the increased demand from VCs, valuations have gone up dramatically.
• The world is looking at (Green) Israel. Last month’s Watech (Water technology) conference was packed with delegations from all over the world (Germany, China, Singapore, Spain, Greece, Poland, Czech Republic)
• The government is becoming more and more active, as demonstrated by the electric car project.

It seems Israel is an attractive place for green related investments. The initial activity is strong. It will be interesting to evaluate the activity in the market during the next 6-12 months and see how some of the new ventures progress.