Nissan Elimelech, CEO of Ogmedics, excitedly tells about the company he founded in June 2014, which today led him to first place in the BizTEC competition. "I left my job at Medtronics to found Augmedics."
"The BizTEC competition equipped us with practical tools for formulating the business plan and with practical help from the mentors, and first and foremost gave us a framework and introduced us to a work routine. All this helped us in developing the technology and planning the future directions in the development of our product, ARGUS."
Nissan Elimelech, CEO of Augmedics, excitedly talks about the company he founded in June 2014, which today led him to first place in the BizTEC competition. "I left my job at Medtronics to found Augmedics."
ARGUS, Ogmedix's product, is a system that guides the surgeon during the operation, with the aim of increasing the efficiency and safety of the operation. The system works using augmented reality glasses, which present simulated XNUMXD objects to the surgeon projected onto the actual patient.
The last stage of the annual BizTEC entrepreneurship competition took place on the eve of the holiday (7/7/14) at the Technion campus in Sharon, Tel Aviv. About 150 venture capital funds, private investors and owners of leading companies in the Israeli economy were present at the event. The BizTEC competition was founded at the Technion in 2004, with the aim of promoting entrepreneurship among Israeli students. The Technion provides the competing groups with extended training, which includes work with mentors, lecturers and businessmen as part of the "accelerator" at the Technion. Every year, 40 companies start the process, about half of them continue to the practical stage, and eight of them advance to the final stages and receive close training and exposure to potential investors. The competition is currently open to all students in Israel, but the bulk of the teams come from the Technion.
"Startup companies rise and fall on the quality of the team," says Tomer Ahronovich, the director of the accelerator, "and our job is to help students realize their ideas towards the establishment of a successful company." Sasson Yona, the main mentor, noted that "the uniqueness of BizTEC is in the serious professional support, by leading mentors, and we already have receipts - teams from BizTEC who have achieved global success."
"What caught my eye is that all the teams that participated in the competition presented a real problem," said Rafi Neve, the new director of the Technion Entrepreneurship Center. "That's why they have a good chance to succeed from a business point of view."
First place (and a prize of 10,000 dollars) was won by Ogmadik, led by CEO Nissan Elimelech. The director of technology is Dr. Nesi Benishti - an outstanding physicist with a PhD from Oxford University in London. The medical director is Dr. Raphael Lotan, a senior spine surgeon from the Wolfson Hospital in Holon. Ogmedic was recently one of nine teams (out of 4,000 ventures) that advanced to the finals of the Intel Business Challenge Europe competition.
The second place in the competition went to the company Synairgy, which was founded by Air Force veterans and develops an advanced automation system for managing the flight areas of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). According to Tzachi Tzadaki, the company's founder and director, the idea is to realize the existing potential of unmanned aerial vehicles for business applications.
Third place went to the TIGR company, which developed a pneumatic tourniquet. The company was founded by four medical students at the Technion - two of them reservists and two after military service. According to the company's CEO, Uri Eidelsberg, the artery block developed by the company can be operated by unskilled people.
