Israel’s Sports Tech Industry Is on the Rise, Says LeumiTech CEO

Five years ago, there were only 60 sports-related tech companies in Israel and today there are nearly a hundred, said Yifat Oron, who is CEO of LeumiTech, an arm of Israeli bank Leumi Group. Oron was speaking at the “Tech Meets Sports” conference, which was held Tuesday by Calcalist at Labs, a co-working space at the Azrieli Sarona tower in Tel Aviv.

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“Sports, like tech, takes talent, but talent alone is not enough,” Oron said. Even promising entrepreneurs who fail to assemble a strong team would likely fail in raising money and growing their companies, she added.

The key—to sports and tech alike—is to move fast and identify opportunities, changes, and risks as they come, Oron said. Israel has the right foundations of computer vision, artificial intelligence, internet of things and big data to become a leader in sports tech, said another speaker at the conference—Yossi Moldawsky, who is co-founder and active chairman at Ramat Gan, Israel-based venture capital firm Plus Ventures.

To be successful in sports tech you have to create game-changers and not just features addressing a specific problem, Moldawsky said. “It also takes time. As Lionel Messi put it, ‘It took me 17 years and 114 days to become an overnight success.’”