Every year, Fast Company magazine ranks the world’s 50 most innovative companies. This year, six companies from Israel made the list, and ISRAEL21c has featured all of them.

Vayyar Imaging came in No. 2 in the “Middle East” category. The company’s low-cost 3D imaging technology is used in cars, smart homes, agriculture, robotics, medicine and more. Vayyar’s sensors can see through materials, differentiate between objects and people, and map environments in real time. Vayyar technology can be of value in everything from elder care to home improvement (its Walabot device reveals any pipes or wires behind the wall before you drill.)

Innoviz makes smart LiDAR systems – the “eyes” in next-generation autonomous vehicles. Innoviz’s LiDAR sends out pulsed laser beams to measure and monitor a car’s surroundings. The company, which won an award at the 2019 CES show in Las Vegas, is now being integrated into BMW autonomous vehicles to be launched by 2021 and is opening a 4,000-square-meter production facility in China.

SpacePharma helps pharmaceutical companies conduct tests in zero gravity, a great environment for bacteria to grow faster and often stronger than on Earth. “On Earth, a petri dish allows you to grow a culture in two dimensions,” SpacePharma’s chairman Yossi Yamin told ISRAEL21c. “But with low gravity in orbit, you get a third dimension.” One of SpacePharma minilabs is integrated with the International Space Station.

Where the ocean meets human settlement there is often a concrete wall, but traditional gray concrete damages the ocean’s ecosystem and leads to increased nuisance and invasive species. ECOncrete developed a blue-green concrete that enhances the ecological value of urban and coastal infrastructure, increasing its strength and boosting the plant canopy. The Israeli company has worked on projects in New York, Georgia, Florida and London.

Sight Diagnostics developed an AI-driven platform for blood analysis and the diagnosis of infectious diseases. The company’s OLO device, currently undergoing clinical trials in the United States, offers complete blood count (CBC) tests from finger-prick samples at the point-of-care, providing results in minutes. Sight also makes a malaria detection kit now used to diagnose malaria in 25 countries.

Waze, the Israeli-founded, Google-owned crowdsourced traffic app (whose R&D still operates out of Israel, while headquarters is in Silicon Valley) was cited by Fast Company for its newer work with local government agencies (such as the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey) to manage traffic and upgrade transportation infrastructure.

Fast Company was also impressed by Waze’s carpool matching service, which launched across the US in 2018, and a new alert system designed to prevent adults from accidentally leaving children behind in cars.

(via Israel21c)

[Photo: Israel21c ]