Cloud technology company wins Israel's most lucrative start-up contest

The $250,000 prize will be invested in env0 by TAU Ventures, Israel's first academic-based venture capital fund.

By EYTAN HALON
(From left) env0 CEO Ohad Maislish, CTO Omry Hay and Roni Frantchi (photo credit: EYTAN HALON)
(From left) env0 CEO Ohad Maislish, CTO Omry Hay and Roni Frantchi
(photo credit: EYTAN HALON)
An on-demand cloud technology company was crowned winner of Israel’s most lucrative start-up prize, taking home $250,000 at TMTI Summit’s “The Challenge” competition on Wednesday.
Env0, based in Givatayim, emerged victorious among an impressive lineup of hundreds of Israeli start-ups from a wide range of sectors.
Backed by TheMarker and Tel Aviv University’s TAU Innovation, the $250,000 prize will be invested in env0 by TAU Ventures, Israel’s first academic-based venture capital fund.
“We’re very happy to be here today and to win this prize,” said env0 CEO Ohad Maislish. “We’re looking forward to working together with TAU Innovation and TAU Ventures, and we want to help people using the cloud to better manage it and enjoy the product of env0.”
Founded by Maislish and CTO Omry Hay, env0 is the developer of a cloudbased automatic multi-environment management platform for developers and quality assurance engineers. Built on artificial intelligence, env0 continuously generates and maintains infrastructure as code, eliminating the manual and often error-prone process of deploying and managing multiple cloud native environments.
“Here at TMTI, TAU Ventures gets to see the best start-ups around, and together with the other judges, we chose the winning start-up, and we believe they have the best chance of success,” Nimrod Cohen, TAU Ventures managing partner, told The Jerusalem Post.
“It was very hard to select the winner, because there were some great companies,” Cohen added. “We expect the winner to become as big as possible, and we’ll do everything we can to help them with that.”
Two weeks before the summit, competing start-ups participated in “Demo Day,” pitching their initiatives in a short pitch before an audience of hi-tech and business professionals, accountants, lawyers and body language experts. Seventy start-ups progressed to the semifinal at the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange on Tuesday, before the top 10 companies battled it out on Wednesday for the ultimate prize.
Intelligent Traffic Control, developer of an adaptive AI-based traffic light real-time management system, was awarded second prize by the judges, receiving six months of free membership to Tel Aviv’s WeWork Shoken workspace and access to the Merage Institute Leadership program, worth $30,000.
The third prize was awarded to Avenews-GT, an online agricultural trade platform powered by blockchain technology, which will receive three months of free membership to WeWork Labs at Tel Aviv’s London Ministore.