Source: No Camels
Israel has embarked on a number of policies meant to improve its education system, including reducing inequality among the ultra-Orthodox and Arab communities, as well as approving a 70 million shekel initiative last summer to improve English proficiency in schools.
As the “Startup Nation,” innovation also plays a key role. MindCET, an organization that brings together educators and entrepreneurs to develop groundbreaking tech in education, has been working in this space since 2012 to find education tech (EdTech) startups, tapping into gaming, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, to transform the Israeli learning environment.
MindCET, with headquarters in the southern Israeli desert town of Yeruham and a branch in Tel Aviv, runs a variety of EdTech-related programs including entrepreneurship programs and community dialogues for teachers, an R&D-based entrepreneurial program, in cooperation with Microsoft and the Hebrew University, for EdTech developers, and a “new market” program for mature startups. The organization also hosts the Global EdTech Startup Awards (GESA), an international competition for startups in the field.
But it is MindCET’s five-month accelerator program that holds the most acclaim. Each year, MindCET selects a number of early-stage EdTech startups to take part in the program, in which founders and teams meet weekly for lectures and workshops with mentors, investors, entrepreneurs, tech experts, and customers to discuss their next steps. MindCET has so far accelerated six cohorts of EdTech.
The latest group of seven startups was featured at an event called Demo Day this week at the Rise Tel Aviv complex, where representatives gave four-minute pitches to a captivated audience and a panel of tech experts, startup founders, venture capitalists, including Moshik Mor from EdTech startup entrepreneurial platform EDVantage, and KamaTech founder and CEO Moshe Friedman, as well as the Israel Innovation Authority’s VP for the Startup Division, Anya Eldan.
Eldan tells NoCamels that the education system is in dire need of transformation. “We expect to see a disruption outside the traditional learning system,” she says, “We want to do what we can to help promote this accelerator as education goes through this disruption.”
Read more about MindCET and educational innovation at No Camels.