These five companies want to clean up our state with Israeli tech

The La Kretz Innovation Campus is an open-concept, exposed-beam workspace across from an Urth Caffé and new, million-dollar condos in the rapidly gentrifying downtown Arts District.

Inside, teams of young people dressed casually in hoodies and jeans sit around conference tables and plan to launch startups aimed at a cleaner, greener city as part of the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI).

Those young people barely looked up from their laptops on July 12 as some 20 industry players and local officials gathered to hear from five Israeli energy and water conservation companies poised to enter the California market. 

Executives from the five companies, including four startups and one established company, traveled to Los Angeles for a two-week crash course on California’s existing clean-tech economy, hosted by LACI, a project of the city of L.A. and the Department of Water & Power (DWP). 

Organized by the business group Israel-California Green-Tech Partnership, the two-week program acted as “a kind of boot-camp, a 101 of the necessary background, introductions, stuff like that, to get their first foothold in the California market,” according to the group’s co-founder, Ashleigh Talberth.

The Israeli executives met with regulatory stakeholders, such as the DWP and the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development, and learned from LACI’s executives in residence — seasoned clean-tech industry leaders who offer their acumen to LACI startups.

“California, like a lot of places, is really complicated on the policy front,” Talberth said. “So having a one-stop shop where you can meet the right people can save you a lot of time and money.”

Talberth grew up in the Bay Area and spent a decade in the clean-tech industry here before moving to Israel a year ago, where she advises startups in that industry. She conceived of the Israel-California Green-Tech Partnership while in ulpan, or intensive Hebrew study, inspired by an agreement California Gov. Jerry Brown and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed in 2014 to deepen ties between the innovation nation and Silicon Valley.

At the Arts District campus, a woman paced on a treadmill desk in an office behind a glass wall across from a large projector screen. She paid no attention when the screen lit up with revenue figures and technical diagrams as one by one, the companies took the stage to pitch their products.

OptiNergy

Adam Hirsch was the first to take the stage, a lanky, bespectacled American in a salmon-colored button-up and sneakers, who made aliyah to Israel a year ago with his wife and four sons.

OptiNergy is truly a niche product — a cloud-based platform for reducing electricity use in mass refrigeration systems. But by his telling, the supermarkets that use those systems burn more energy per square foot than any other type of commercial space, so the electricity savings are potentially great.

“You can think of it as being a high-tech solution to a fairly low-tech industry,” said Hirsch, director of business development for SmartGreen, the Rehovot, Israel-based company that created the platform.

The software detects energy fluctuations and diagnoses mechanical problems. According to Hirsch, it can save companies 25 percent to 40 percent in electrical refrigeration costs.

“You could do all of this with a crew of Ph.D. mechanical engineers looking and tweaking,” he said, “but this does things automatically.”

Flowless

Some time around 3 one morning, a supply line to a water cooler in an office block in Tel Aviv burst. The pipe would likely have gushed until morning were it not for Flowless, a system designed by Israeli startup Aqua Rimat to detect and monitor leaks.

Armed with an automatic shutdown switch, the Flowless unit in this office cut off the water supply, saving about $100,000 in water damage, according to Ari Briggs, an investor representative for Aqua Rimat, who told the story at the Arts District campus.

“Every device within a water system has a water footprint,” said Briggs, a South African immigrant to Israel, as he explained the principle behind the black device in his hand.

By recognizing the water footprints of each particular device, Flowless can identify even minor leaks and track water consumption. Preventing catastrophic leaks is just an added bonus.

“Everybody knows how many steps they’ve taken since this morning, but nobody knows how much water their business has consumed,” Briggs said. “This product gives them that information.”

Chakratec

Charging an electrical vehicle (EV) is as easy as finding an outlet and plugging in. Charging it quickly is another matter.

The infrastructure required to fill an EV battery on a commercially viable timescale can be installed only near large transistors, explained Ilan Ben-David, CEO of Chakratec, hamstringing the spread of electric cars.

Chakratec hopes to solve that problem: Using kinetic energy storage (literally, a futuristic-looking white pod with a fan-like contraption inside), it draws down electricity from the grid over a period of time. Then, when a user plugs in, it quickly delivers its energy, enabling EV users to charge in their homes and businesses without overtaxing their power lines.

What’s more, Ben-David said, “It’s totally green, no chemicals, very easy to deploy and safe.”

Energo-On

You probably don’t realize it, but every time you access data on the internet, you’re using something called an uninterruptible power supply (UPS): a device that ensures power won’t go down, even momentarily, if the electrical grid fails.

A UPS acts like “a bridge from the moment you detect an outage until a standby generator kicks in,” according to Abraham Liran, the CEO of Energo-On.

Such products are already an indispensable part of crucial infrastructures like the data centers that store information for the web. But Energo-On claims to work more reliably and more efficiently than its
competitors.

“Everything was designed to live more than 30 years with no maintenance at all,” he said.

And data centers are just the beginning. Liran said he hopes to sell in California to customers that include hospitals, telecommunications companies, manufacturing concerns, airports and more.

Amiad

Each year, billions of cubic meters of water pass through filters manufactured by Amiad Water Solutions.

Amiad was the only company to participate in the LACI boot camp that in no way classifies as a startup. 

But even though it employs 700 people worldwide with $100 million in yearly revenue from 80 countries, according to Eyal Shpitzer, vice president of research and development, it has yet to enter the California market.

The company’s filtration business emerged as a solution to dirt-clogging drip irrigation systems (also an Israeli technology) on a northern kibbutz. The need for water filters runs from the industrial to the municipal and agricultural, he said.

In Southern California, where the aerospace industry is suspected of leaving a number of groundwater aquifers tainted beyond potable use, and desalination is bandied as a drought solution, Amiad sees plenty of opportunity.