These acceleration programs help young ventures, not just financially, but also from a more practical approach by connecting them with industry experts and an impressive network. One such acceleration program is Intel Ignite, which leverages Intel’s vast resources to help early-stage startups.

Often, these accelerations programs hold applications for startups looking to join. In this cohort, Intel Ignite received 200 applications, and selected 10 startups, in various industries including AI, digital health, robotics, sensors, hardware, developer tools, and cyber security. With Intel Ignite, each startup is working together with leading mentors and industry experts and receives a tailor-made program to meet its specific business needs. The program covers a wide range of fields including founders’ dynamics, go-to-market strategy, marketing and sales, product development and management, recruitment, and more.

Let’s explore some of the up-and-coming startups that Intel has spotted and chosen to mentor.

Kahoona

Apple’s IDFA changes followed by Google’s pledge to remove third-party cookies from Chrome and identities from Android Devices are forcing businesses to adapt or face financial losses. A recent McKinsey report estimated that 80% of publishers’ ad revenue is 3rd Party Cookie dependent. With a mission of promoting digital responsibility, Kahoona helps digital publishers, e-commerce merchants, and brands generate accurate, scalable, actionable, and privacy-preserving user data. As a first-party data generation and activation platform for the open web, Kahoona helps digital-native businesses secure revenue and protect their users' privacy, in a cookieless and identity-less digital ecosystem. Kahoona's AI-driven solution generates user profiles by analyzing interactions with websites or apps and transforms insights into actionable audience segments. With its proprietary technology, Kahoona’s engine can offer real-time personalization to increase user monetization, optimize ROI, and improve conversion KPIs.

Kahoona was founded in 2021 by Gal Rapoport (CEO), Alon Ashkenasi (CPO), and Ohad Tzur (COO). Kahoona completed a $4.5 million seed round in February 2022 backed by Global Founders Capital, Cardumen Capital, Plug and Play, FourthRealm, and Adler Chomsk. They employ 16 people and currently work with Facotry54, IDX, and the largest news outlets in Israel. The name Kahoona represents the wise person of a Hawaiian tribe, who guides the people. Kahoona believes that they are navigating businesses in a digital ecosystem to a more sustainable future.

Xyte

The proliferation of the subscription economy, cloud technology, and connected devices created a significant shift in customer expectations, forcing hardware manufacturers and system integrators to rethink the services they provide. Manufacturers that will successfully navigate this transition, are likely to be in a powerful position as cloud technology creates tremendous new growth opportunities in the decades ahead. To do that, they need the right set of tools. Xyte is the first of its kind Connected Device Management Platform (CDMP) - an integrated cloud platform that allows hardware manufacturers to manage, service, and commercialize their connected devices – all in one place. It is an enablement platform that unlocks innovative subscription and Hardware-as-a-Service business models. Manufacturers leverage Xyte’s platform to cloudify their products, collaborate with their channel partners, and manage their customers’ journey end-to-end.

Xyte was founded by Omer Brookstein (CEO) and Boris Dinkevich (CTO), in 2022. To date, $6.4 million, led by SCapital and employs 17 people in Tel Aviv and New York.

Verobotics

The way in which high-rise buildings are maintained hasn’t changed since the 1950s. Anywhere in the world, maintaining buildings clean and energy-efficient remains incredibly expensive, labour-intensive, and hazardous. In addition, two major market shifts are expediting the need for technology in space. Firstly, governments and cities are desperately looking for solutions that make their cities greener, their buildings cleaner, and more energy efficient. Secondly, there is a major workforce shortage for labour-intensive high-risk jobs such as building exterior upkeep or inspection. Verbonics’ device is changing that. Their autonomous robotic device is designed to fit a wide range of buildings, from smaller residential blocks to the biggest building towers. The technology enables Verobotics to operate without the need for a BMU (building management unit), crane, or railing system - their robot can be deployed from any roof. With Verobotics, building owners and residents can now have autonomous robotic maintenance that optimizes building aesthetics, energy, and inspection. Moreover, robots can operate around the clock under any weather condition autonomously so building owners will be able to have more frequent maintenance cycles.

Verobotics was founded in 2021 by Ido Genosar (CEO) and Itay Levytan (CTO). They raised $1 million in pre-seed funding led by TAU Ventures along with other angel investors and are closing a second round soon.

PxE

PxE is looking to solve perception challenges. As accurate perception requires multiple sensory inputs, such as vision, depth measurement, and IR for working in the dark, there is a need for the complex integration of several modules. This leads systems to consume more power and are much larger and costlier than the ubiquitous 2D camera. PxE however, has developed a single-camera sensor capable of providing depth, full-colour + IR images from a single snapshot. Their full-stack perception solution, which combines HW and SW, is deployable to any platform. It consists of a diffractive micro-optics element that replaces the traditional Bayer-filter in a standard camera. PxE’s camera sees more information (RGB-IR-Depth) that is fed into PxE’s lightning-fast algo for building an accurate model of the world. The key difference between a standard 2D camera and a PxE camera is in the way they process light. In traditional photography, light is described by rays that are focused onto a pixel array using a lens. Light, however, is also a wave phenomenon, and the wave-like nature of light contains much more information than what a 2D camera can see. The PxE camera can access this hidden wave-like information to extract RGB-IR-Depth from a single lens.

PxE was founded in 2019 by Yoav Berlatzky (CEO) and Yanir Hainick, CTO and Guinness World Record holder. The company is currently performing paid POCs with several leading players in the consumer, semiconductor, and long-range imaging application spaces. PxE currently has 3 employees and plans to expand to 10-15 employees (system engineers, physics / image-processing algorithm experts, backend developers) in the near future.

Predicta

Fifty million Americans suffer from an autoimmune disease. Unfortunately, on average, it takes patients four years and four different doctors to get a diagnosis. As a result, while these patients go through a frustrating journey, their disease sometimes deteriorates which leads to more than $100 billion being spent in the U.S. healthcare system annually. PredictAITM, Predicta’s product, is the first AI-based decision support platform for the early detection of autoimmune diseases. Their platform aggregates data from sources such as EMR and Claims, PredictAITM runs on the data, detects patients with a high probability of an undiagnosed autoimmune disease, and notifies the primary care physician so he can initiate the diagnostic workup.

Predicta Med was founded in 2020 by Shlomit Steinberg-Koch (CEO), and Benny Getz (CTO). To date, they have raised over $2 million from ICI Fund, Prof. Moshe Shoham (founder of Mazor Robotics) Prof. Yossi Matias (VP Research and Engineering at Google), Jack Friedman (Former CEO of Providence Health plan), Dr. Nwando Olayiwola (Chief Equity Officer at Humana), Assia Healthcare Services, IcnoNYC, and Natalie Levy. They currently employ 8 people.

Volumez

In the modern era, there is no greater source of competitive advantage than the ability to deliver new products and features quickly and efficiently to customers. Every enterprise is in a global digital transformation race to innovate in pursuit of this goal because market leadership depends on it. There has been tremendous innovation over the past 15 years to improve agility and reduce friction in the compute layer. Technologies such as Kubernetes, VMWare, and Linux are global standards that allow engineers to develop and deploy new code quickly to any cloud or data center. With standardization comes intense competition between cloud and IT service providers to provide the most compute value at the lowest cost to enterprise customers. In the data layer, the opposite is true as vendor strategies are largely unchanged for the past 40 years. Instead of global standards, there are dozens of proprietary data platforms that lack a common control plane and do not interoperate. Consequently, it is becoming increasingly complex and expensive for enterprises to switch data providers or even pursue hybrid and multi-cloud strategies to unlock true data mobility. As a result, data bottlenecks abound while storage OpEx consumes an ever-increasing percentage of technology budgets.

Volumez makes the enterprise data layer as agile, efficient, and competitive as the compute layer. Their technology is a cloud data orchestrator that composes data paths targeting Kubernetes and instance-based workloads where incumbent cloud storage is the bottleneck. Volumez provides a single control plane for enterprise data that can reside in any cloud, data center, and on any server that supports Linux. Customers maintain control of their data and understand where their data resides at any time.

Volumez was founded in 2020 by Jonathan Amit (President and CEO). They have 25 employees and are based in Tel Aviv.