Summary & Highlights
OurCrowd Pandemic Innovation Conference
June 22, 2020
“Thousands of top investors, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, corporate executives, and government officials from 90 countries around the world”
For more information about OurCrowd and to invest in startups visit ourcrowd.com
Investors, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and corporate executives attended the OurCrowd Pandemic Innovation Conference online, the first global event dedicated to pandemic investment. Almost 7,500 people from 108 countries registered to attend the Conference, which took place twice on June 22 to ensure access for attendees from around the globe.
Top-tier content included investing insights from some of the top investors in the world, such as Scott Bessent, CEO & Chief Investment Officer at Key Square Group, and keynotes from leading voices in the fight against the pandemic, such as Ruth Atherton, Director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Dr. Paul Rothman, CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine.
A major feature of the Conference was direct access to startup CEOs and topic experts in over a dozen live group meetings. Attendees kept a lively running chat going, as well as setting hundreds of networking connections and almost 200 one-on-one meetings, proving that in a world profoundly changed by the pandemic, the global tech ecosystem can still come together to meet, learn, invest and get business done.
“The probability is really high that by the end of this year we’re going to have an efficacious vaccine” — Prof. Joseph Jacobson, MIT Media Lab and MIT Center for Bits and Atoms
Select Attending Companies
“The disconnection between the financial markets and the economy may be unprecedented” — Jeremy Levine, Partner, Bessemer
Select Press Coverage
“The pace of change during COVID has become extraordinary… It’s a great time as investors to watch this transformation and catch this train as it is speeding out of the station” — Jon Medved, CEO, OurCrowd
Plenary Highlights
Tech on the Frontlines
An eye-opening segment with top medical experts, entrepreneurs and their breakthrough technologies, and the corporate leaders deploying them. Dr Sigal Kremer-Tal of Israeli startup MigVax provided an update on its leading oral vaccine, using a novel licensed platform technology. Dr. Gilly Regev, CEO of SaNOtize said about its product, “I know it kills the coronavirus,” as it begins Phase II clinical trials in Canada, keeping the company on track to become the world’s first approved treatment for COVID-19. Prof. Gabby Sarusi introduced Flanimus’s revolutionary technology, an electronic chip with 20,000 nano-antennas that shows the signature of coronavirus-infected people in 12 seconds, the science behind a breath test for COVID-19. See the entire segment here
Top 10 Pandemic Tech Trends
In this update of the popular Top 10 Tech Trends segment of the OurCrowd Global Investor Summit in February, senior venture investing professionals revealed what will be hot and actionable going forward in a changed world. Trends include saying goodbye to your office, the rise of telemedicine, data collaboration becoming the norm, and eating healthy becoming a life or death decision. See all the Trends here.
Investing in a Time of Crisis
Three of the most successful venture, private equity, and macro investors in the world provided valuable insights into investing during a global challenge: Scott Bessent, Founder & CIO, Key Square Group, former CIO of Soros Fund management; Jeremy Levine, Partner, Bessemer Venture Partners (LinkedIn, Pinterest, Yelp, Shopify); and Deven Parekh, Managing Director, Insight Venture Partners (Fanatics, Twitter, Chegg); moderated by Alec Ellison, Chairman of OurCrowd U.S. and former Vice Chairman of Jefferies. Key takeaways: This crisis is unprecedented, some offline industries will thrive by leveraging new technologies, and don’t panic. Hear all the insights here.
Startups Taking on the New Normal
Some of the most forward- thinking entrepreneurs explain how they’re driving a new world of working, communicating, and staying healthy. The audience heard from BioCatch, whose cybersecurity technology is used for 1 billion transactions a month; Tovala, whose high-tech oven and delivery service provides healthier lifestyles; data.world, which is leading global data collaboration, including with two-thirds of the Fortune 500 it counts as clients; Ripple Foods, which saw demand for its plant-based milk products surge during the lockdown; TechSee, whose AR-assisted remote maintenance reduces the need for in-person tech visits; and Trusona, which is providing touchless banking. Watch the full session here
“I had to go through physiotherapy to start walking again. People don’t realize. You lay down one month in a coma, you lose all your ability to walk. You have to learn to walk, eat, use the bathroom” — Eli Beer, President & Founder, United Hatzalah on surviving COVID-19
Keynote Highlights
Meeting the Virus Face-to-Face: A Personal Story
The founder of Israel’s volunteer emergency medical services organization, Eli Beer, told the riveted audience his moving near-death experience at the hands of COVID-19, his incredible welcome home, and what we can all learn from it. “We have so many reasons to be divided, but a pandemic is a good reason for the world to understand that these things can destroy the world.” Watch the session here
How the Pandemic Is Changing World Healthcare
The CEO of one of the global leaders in medicine, Dr Paul Rothman described what healthcare will look like in the future and gave his insight into how it will be thought of, delivered, and managed going forward. He said that increased investment in public health is they key to dealing with pandemics. Watch the session here
Creating Global Access to Medical Innovation
Ruth Atherton, Deputy General Counsel and Director, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave an important update on the strategy and activities the Foundation, which has been at the forefront of disease prevention for two decades. She explained how helping vulnerable populations is not just the right thing to do, but that it is essential to global health and economic success. Watch the session here
“About 30% of the visits we used to have in person will be tele in the future. It also gives us the ability to reach out way beyond where we did” — Dr. Paul Rothman, Dean of School of Medicine & CEO, Hopkins Medicine
Breakout Highlights
Topic Expert Sessions
Conference attendees were treated to an incredibly diverse program of breakout sessions including industry leaders speaking on crucial topics tackling the effects of the pandemic on healthcare, air travel and other issues facing the venture and tech world. Sessions included:
- The Race for a Vaccine (with Professor Joseph Jacobson, MIT Media Lab and MIT Center for Bits and Atoms) Watch here
- The Future Bank: Reshaping the Approach to Digitization and the Client Experience (with Debarun Roy Choudhury, Group Head, UOB BizSmart and Cathryn Carver, Executive General Manager, Client Coverage, NAB) Watch here
- Using Data to Fight COVID-19 (with Rose Hiu, VP of Global Marketing, Seagate) Watch here
- The Healthcare Inflection Point: Digital Health Post- COVID (with Allen Kamer & Yossi Bahagon, Managing & Funding Partner, Qure) Watch here
- Rethinking Innovation: The Post-COVID Corporation (with Dan Fishel, VP Business Development, OurCrowd) Watch here
- Venture Investing Moves Online (with Andy Kaye, President & CIO, OurCrowd) Watch here
- Air Travel in an Age of Pandemics (with Yakir Machluf, Director of Business Development, OurCrowd) Watch here
Meet the Startups
Attendees hear updates from the entrepreneurs behind the most exciting tech startups in OurCrowd’s portfolio, how they have been adapted as a result of the pandemic, including live Q&A. Companies included:
- Ripple – producer of healthy plant-based milk products Watch here
- Trellis – AI Driven food supply chain management platform
- Tovala – Reinventing home eating with a smart oven Watch here
- Cytoreason -turning human clinical data into clear biology in order to deliver data-driven target discovery and drug development
- Barcode Diagnostics – personalized tagging technology to mass-screen the population for people who are virus-positive Watch here
- SaNOtize – on track to be world’s first approved treatment for COVID-19 Watch here
- MeMed -support physicians in making better informed antibiotic treatment decisions and tackling antimicrobial resistance Watch here
- data.world – taking on the Pandemic with data
- Intuition Robotics– Empowering you to create digital companion agents for your products Watch here
Spotlight on the OurCrowd Pandemic Innovation Fund
Conference goers heard from the Managing Partners of this ground-breaking new fund, which is harnessing the power of a worldwide investor network to support technologies that tackle medical, business, educational and social needs triggered by global pandemics and other health emergencies. The experts behind the fund foresee a seismic, secular shift in business patterns and the emergence of a new, post-pandemic economy. Watch the session here
“We think this crisis is going to have impact on many different aspects of society as well as the economy. The overall strategy…is to put together a portfolio that includes medical as well as non-medical opportunities” — David Sokolic, Managing Partner, OurCrowd Pandemic Innovation Fund
Music Presentation: “When the World Stops Ending”
The Conference was not all business, as the audience was treated to the international debut of “When the World Stops Ending,” the latest song by award-winning songwriter and social media phenomenon Dave Carroll. Enjoyed by all who could stay until the end of the day, the powerful and moving music video inspired by the world’s shared experience of the pandemic was a big hit. Watch the video here
