Israeli entrepreneur and investor Erel Margalit is wrapping up yet another fruitful year in 2021.
The founder and executive chairman of Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP), one of the oldest and most established venture capital companies in Israel with 160 portfolio firms, launched two innovation hubs — a food tech center in the Galilee and a digital health center in Haifa just this week — and is in advanced talks to bring his distinct innovation model, Startup City, to Paris and Dubai.
The format rests on the idea of connecting prominent tech and business players with social and cultural entrepreneurship, while drawing on local talents in a given city with the support of municipal or national governments. The model creates public-private partnerships for regional, tech-driven ecosystems and is based on a vision conceived by the nonprofit organization Israel Initiative 2020 (ii2020), set up by Margalit in 2013, to launch “centers of excellence” that aim to attract young professionals and families, raise the standards of living, and reduce socioeconomic gaps.
Margalit, a former MK with the Labor party (2015-2017), brings a strong social component to entrepreneurship and investing. In 2002, he established Bakehila (“In the Community” in Hebrew), a community organization for disadvantaged youth in Jerusalem that served as a precursor to ii2020 and shaped the belief that regional development stems from strengthening community support and empowering people from a young age toward social entrepreneurship. He later set up a tech incubator in the city that became the Margalit Startup City Jerusalem, which hosts a number of Israeli startups, multinational companies, an investment center and research and development centers on a 50,000 square meter campus in the center of the capital.
Bakehila became the Margalit Startup City Community and continues to promote social projects, oversee national volunteering initiatives, and work with lower socioeconomic neighborhoods to advance entrepreneurship.
This week, Margalit inaugurated a new innovation accelerator, focused on digital health, in Haifa together with the Israel Innovation Authority, chip multinational Nvidia, Dutch medical equipment conglomerate Philips and Israeli HMO Clalit, among others. Called the Startup City Haifa – Digital Health Accelerator, it will host eight startups that will work with regional hospitals, international corporations, and universities including the Technion to develop innovative medical and healthcare technologies.
The launch came three months after Margalit launched a food tech innovation center in the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona, dubbed Margalit Startup City Galil, in September.
He said the center will position Israel as an international hub for food tech and create thousands of jobs in the area over the next few years while addressing growing concerns over global warming, threats to food supplies like droughts, and the planet’s limited resources. Strategic partners for Margalit Startup City Galil include Cisco, Deloitte, the Tel Hai Academic College, and the Migal Research Institute, the Israeli Science and Technology Ministry’s regional R&D center in the Galilee region.
source:timesofisrael.com
