Seeing through walls: the startup company Vera won a competition organized by the Information Technology Organization, and will receive a free booth at CES

About a hundred CEOs of high-tech companies from around the world came to Israel for a conference organized by the CTA organization, they watched the presentations of seven startup companies and scored them according to various criteria, and finally chose the company Vira, which develops XNUMXD sensors capable of penetrating through various materials, including walls

Gary Shapiro - CTA President (right) presents the award to Ofer Familiar, business development manager at Vira
About a hundred CEOs of high-tech companies from around the world came to Israel for a conference held by the CTA organization, they watched the presentations of seven startup companies and scored them according to various criteria, and finally chose the company Vira, which develops XNUMXD sensors capable of penetrating through various materials, including walls.

"It was important for us to show the CEOs who came to Israel for the first time the best startups, so that if they want they can do business with them," said CTA President Gary Shapiro, at a press conference held yesterday in Tel Aviv, where he also announced the trends for the CES 2017 exhibition that will be held January in Las Vegas.

The conference of CEOs has been held for 20 years and this time, according to Shapiro, it was decided to bring it to Israel "because Israel is a center of technological innovation and it also has a flourishing startup community. And its position in the exhibition stands out in relation to the size of its population and also absolute."

"It was impressive to see the wide variety of innovation that Israeli startup companies bring to the stage, and to provide the opportunity to meet with C-LEVEL managers.

The guest CEOs rated the companies they presented to them according to the business model, the product's chance of success, the assessment of market needs and the aesthetics of the design and engineering.

Vayyar develops XNUMXD sensors for application in portable and inexpensive imaging systems. The sensors look into the objects in a way that penetrates through barriers and brings high imaging capabilities to the user. The sensors can be used in a wide variety of applications from breast cancer detection to computer vision enhancement, food safety monitoring and many more." Shapiro said.

Ofer Familiar, business development manager at "Vira" who also received the award on behalf of the company, says in a conversation with CHIPORTAL that the company also participated in CES last year following the previous recruitment round, and also presented a number of announcements there. "In addition to the Israeli pavilion, we also had a booth in Samsung's innovation suite and this year we plan to present our developments in different directions, also in the context of looking inside walls, a smart home, robotics."

Briefly describe the technology

Familiar: "Vira's core technology is an RF chip which is a radio-based XNUMXD sensor that allows it to be able to look into materials or through materials and build XNUMXD images of what is happening inside the material or beyond the material. With this chip we build different antenna arrays according to the application's requirements, thus supporting a very wide set of applications with different capabilities."

"The first application we started and still central to us is a device for the early detection of breast cancer. We are currently conducting clinical trials in Israel, we already have a mobile system with which we perform the trials and are expanding the tests to more centers, also in Israel and next year in the world, the next destination - India. The biggest lack in the field of medical equipment is in developing countries and there our system has very big advantages both in terms of price, portability and ease of use, so we will start in developing countries.

In developed countries the scanning systems are very expensive and therefore not available in rural areas. Because of this, the mortality rates are significantly higher because the cancerous tumor is discovered in much later stages. Assuming that everything will progress, we are opening an opening for these countries to have the ability to scan and identify tumors in earlier stages and save human lives.

Apart from this application, we have expanded the application space, mainly in collaboration with large companies. One of the applications is looking into walls and getting an X-ray image of what is happening behind the wall, another application is tracking the location of people in a smart home and monitoring their breathing rate and heart rate, it is possible to diagnose breathing problems during sleep in adults or turn off the lights if the sensor detects that all The house went to sleep."

There are also other applications - also in the context of identifying the level of fat, protein and lactose in milk without touching the milk - for example during milking, identifying the rate of progress of water in the soil and giving an update when the water reaches the roots in order to save water. and more.

With the expansion of the number of applications and our understanding that a lot of things can be done with technology, we announced a system designed for makers, WALABOT. We provide a basic product, we simplified its API and the makers can build applications on top of it, using a relatively wide set of capabilities that our system can provide. It is already sold on the website, we have presented it at exhibitions. In fact, this is how we entered the world of consumerism.

"The guest CEOs discovered that there was a general enthusiasm for the technology, as well as for the breadth of the fields in which the technology supports and also for the specific issue of early detection of breast cancer that may solve a major problem in the world. From my impressions from conversations with them, they liked the combination of the potential of contributing to the world together with the commercial potential and technological innovation."