Meet The Managment
Ayla Matalon, Chairperson
As executive director Ayla led the of the MIT Enterprise Forum throughout the critical years of the establishment of the startup nation, focusing on the development of entrepreneurial management skills. Ayla pioneered action learning and taught 50+ entrepreneurship courses in a variety of MBA and undergrad tech related academic programs.
Co-founded Entrepreneurship-on-Tap, which developed into a strong brand with events taking place in Dimona, Nazareth and selected the kibbutzim in the north of Israel.
Co-founded and managed TRIO-Tech entrepreneurship hub for the Israeli Arab minority at Kfar Kassem with local and global partners, including a school of tech entrepreneurship and an accelerator.
Previously an analyst at Steps Investments in Technology and managing director of the US-Israel Science and Technology Center (part of a $30m fund). Earlier positions as a software engineer at Technion Research & Development Foundation, Christian Rovsing (DK), Daisy Systems (NASDAQ: DaisySy) and Indigo (HP). Sporadic investor.
Ayla holds BA and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science (Technion) and an MBA (INSEAD).
Martin Gerstel
Martin Gerstel is Chairman of Compugen Ltd., a publicly owned drug and diagnostic discovery company, Evogene Ltd., a publicly owned agbio company, of Keddem Bioscience, a privately owned drug discovery company and Co-Chairman of Itamar Medical, a publicly owned medical device company, all of which are headquartered in Israel. Prior to relocating to Israel in 1994, Mr. Gerstel was the Co-Chairman and CEO of ALZA Corporation, a pharmaceutical company based on advanced drug delivery. In addition, Mr. Gerstel currently serves as a director of YEDA Technology Transfer, Yissum Technologies and the Foundation for the US National Medals of Science and Technology. He is a member of the Board of Governors and the Executive Committee of the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Board of Governors of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is an advisor to the Burrill Life Science Funds and to the Board of the Israel-U.S. BiNational Industrial Research and Development (“BIRD”) Foundation. Mr. Gerstel is a graduate of Yale University and the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Yaniv Corem, Vice Chairman
Yaniv Corem is the Co-Founder of NUKADIMA, a corporate catalyst focused on helping organizations build, test and deploy new ventures. Yaniv is also an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Fung Academy where he supports various innovation projects like Explorium, AI in Action and GBG TechLinks. Yaniv was a visiting researcher in the Changing Places Group at the MIT Media Lab where he worked on Lego-based urban design tools. Prior to joining the Media Lab, Yaniv led the Crowd Computing work in the Social Technologies Group at IBM Research Haifa.
Yaniv holds a Bachelor degree in Architecture and Urban Planning from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology - and two Master’s degree in Architecture and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Yaniv is married to Gila, a Product and UX designer, and a father of three - Yotam, Abigail and Ella.
Amir Milo
Amir is an investor and entrepreneur, and works with several companies as mentor and advisor, including Executive Chairman position at Celloscope, Founder & Investor at Posteq
In January 2015 Amir joined Microsoft Israel R&D Center for three years as General Manager of Engineering following the acquisition of Equivio.
Amir was a co-founder and CEO of Equivio. Equivio provides text analytics solutions for legal and compliance based on a court-approved machine learning platform for business process of e-discovery.
Prior to Equivio, Amir co-founded and was vice president of marketing and business development at Xyleme, a company specializing in XML-based content management systems. At Xyleme, Amir was responsible for product strategy, the development of sales channels, and the penetration into new markets and regions.
Before Xyleme, Amir served as a director of software development at Amdocs. In this role, Amir led billing system projects for communications companies in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East.
Amir holds bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from the Technion in Israel, and an MBA from the University of Toronto.
David Ring
For the last 20 years, David Ring founded several successful high-tech companies, including Colu & eToro, with a total fundraising of $200M. He was also part of the founding team at 888.com.
David holds B.Sc. in electronics from the Technion, M.Sc. in computer science from IDC, and an MBA in finance from Manchester business school.
David is also an angel investor, serves as board member at several companies, and chairman of MIT enterprise Israel forum.
David is deeply knowledgeable in the fin-tech industry, social platforms, blockchain technologies, and the gaming industry.
Gil Shavit
Mr. Shavit is the Chairman of GenCell’s Board of Directors.
Gil is passionate about bringing fuel cell power solutions to new businesses and industries. With more than 25 years of experience in establishing innovative Israeli technology companies, he has led joint ventures with global firms such as Phillips and G4S Brazil. Gil has a B.Sc. in Computers and Electronics from the Ben Gurion University of the Negev.
Armando Viteri
Mr. Viteri is an entrepreneur and investor, CEO and President Neublock. He has been involved with AI since his university days at MIT. Trained as a symbolic AI programmer he was involved with the early formation of such companies as Symbolics and Thinking Machines. More recently Mr. Viteri has become active in current AI projects but as CEO of Neubloc but also as an active investor and mentor in this space. Neubloc has a strong multi-national technology development team which covers a broad range of AI technologies including data analytics, predictive analytics, neural networks and machine vision. The company has implemented projects for Fortune 200 companies as well as young technology startups across a range of industries. In addition Mr. Viteri heads up the AI Special Interest Group for the Keiretsu Forum – one of the world’s largest source of early stage technology company capital.
Prior to Neubloc, Mr. Viteri was most recently President and CEO of RF Code, Inc., an emerging growth RFID solutions business where he successfully raised Tier 1 venture capital financing and delivered premier RFID hardware and software products to market. Prior to RF Code, Mr. Viteri co-founded and served as president of Pinpoint Corporation, the industry's first Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) company where he pioneered the use of this technology. Previous to Pinpoint, Mr. Viteri was executive vice president of TriTeal Corporation where he was responsible for creating both domestic and international sales channels and infrastructure, drove the advanced JavaTM development organization resulting in three patents, and was responsible for growing direct and OEM sales significantly over a three year period. Following three private financings, Mr. Viteri played an instrumental role in TriTeal's successful IPO in 1996 and secondary public offering in 1997.
From 1983 to 1993 Mr. Viteri held various sales, marketing, and management roles with Sun Microsystems, Inc. Joining Sun during its start-up phase he held numerous management roles for multiple disciplines during his tenure, and created, managed, and executed many initiatives that account for the success and growth of the business.
Mr. Viteri has served on several technology company boards and variety of industry standards bodies. Mr. Viteri earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
