Arab Israeli social entrepreneur Imad Telhami has seen phenomenal success from the Babcom customer-service centers he and partner Dov Lautman established to employ Arab women and men in the north, south and Jerusalem.
Babcom (“Your Door” in Arabic) now employs 5,000 people providing outsourced services, including call centers and software development, to Israeli companies. In 2018, Harvard Business School built a case study about Babcom into its curriculum.
But Telhami was increasingly troubled to note that no Babcom client companies were owned or managed by Arabs.
So in 2014, he joined forces with venture capitalists Chemi Peres of Pitango and Erel Margalit of JVP to found Takwin Ventures, the only VC firm in Israel dedicated to investing in startups with at least one Arab Israeli cofounder.
Since 2015, the Takwin 1 and Takwin 2 funds have given 10 early-stage startups monetary support, office space, research assistance, and connections to professional networks.
“After I got to the point of employing 1,000 people through Babcom, I wondered why there weren’t many Arab companies that could do the same,” Telhami tells ISRAEL21c.
“Why aren’t we part of the Israeli startup nation?”
Arabs make up 21 percent of the population and less than 2% of its high-tech workforce. Very few are founders.
Keep reading at israel21.org.
Two of the promising startups in Takwin Ventures’ portfolio have Technion connections. Feelit Technologies Co-founders CTO Meital Segev-Bar and CEO Gady Konvalina are both Technion alumni, and the third Co-founder is Professor Hossam Haick of the Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering. Imagry CTO Ilan Shaviv is a Technion alumnus.
