Author: Techtime

Mellanox reached Agreement with the Activist Fund Starboard

Mellanox CEO Eyal Waldman
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Mellanox Technologies from Yokneam, Israel, has entered into an agreement with Starboard Value LP regarding the membership and composition of Mellanox’s Board of Directors. This issue could turn the company’s Annual Meeting to be held on July 25, 2018, into a battle ground in a power struggle over the board. Since November 2017, Starboard is the largest share holder of Mellanox with approximately 10.7% holdings. During the last months, the activist fund promoted an attempt to replace the board with its nominees, claiming the current board is incapable and not aggressive enough. The final decision had to be taken during the annual meeting.

Mellanox reported that under the terms of the newly reached agreement, Jon Olson and Greg Waters, independent directors recommended by Starboard, and Jack Lazar, an independent director mutually agreed upon by Mellanox and Starboard, have been appointed to the Mellanox Board, effective immediately. As a result, Dov Baharav, Shai Cohen and Tom Riordan have stepped down from the Board. As part of the agreement, Starboard will withdraw its slate of directors and vote all of its shares in favor of each of Mellanox’s Board nominees at the Company’s upcoming Annual Meeting and will support the Board for at list 12 months.

Power Struggle that Pushed up the Share Prices

The new directors come with experience in the Semiconductor’s Industry. Jack Lazar served as CFO at GoPro and General Manager at Qualcomm Atheros. Jon Olson held a variety of senior management positions at Xilinx and spent more than 25 years at Intel Corp. Gregory Waters was president and CEO of  Integrated Device Technology Inc., after serving in management positions in Skyworks Solutions, Agere Systems and Texas Instruments.

“We are pleased to have reached this agreement with Starboard and welcome the new directors to the Mellanox Board,” said Irwin Federman, Chairman of the Board. Eyal Waldman (photo above), President and Chief Executive Officer, said, “The announcement reflects our ongoing commitment to creating value for shareholders. Mellanox has leading positions in many of the key markets in which we operate, including InfiniBand and Ethernet.”

Mellanox Technologies (MLNX) supply InfiniBand and Ethernet smart interconnect solutions for servers and storage. It connects 43 percent of overall TOP500 supercomputer platforms (216 systems) including both InfiniBand and Ethernet. The activities of Starboard stirred the management of the company, but made a positive contribution to its shares in NASDAQ: raised from $50 price in November 2017, to approximately $83.3 today.

Foresight Raised $12.4 Million Through Private Placements

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Foresight Autonomous Holdings from Ness Ziona, Israel, has entered into private placement agreements with Israeli investors, including Meitav Dash Group and Psagot Investment House, leading Israeli institutional investors. Following the closing of the private placements, Meitav Dash Group will hold approximately 5.45% of Foresight’s issued share capital and Psagot will hold 1.85% of its share capital. The total raising is $6.9 million.

Meitav will invest approximately $4.1 million, Psagot will invest about $1.4 million (NIS 5 million) and additional investors will invest an aggregate of $1.4 million. This raising is completed only a week after the company have raised $5.5 million from the Israeli Harel Insurance. Following the investments, Harel  will hold approximately 8.15% of Foresight’s issued share capital.

Foresight Autonomous Holdings Ltd. (Nasdaq and TASE: FRSX), founded in 2015, is a developer of stereo/quad-camera vision systems and V2X cellular-based solutions for the automotive industry. Foresight’s vision systems are based on 3D video analysis, image processing, and sensor fusion. Earlier this month it made the first sale of its QuadSight quad-camera vision system targeted for the semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicle market.

The first system was ordered by a truck division of a large European vehicle manufacturer in order to evaluate the system and its performance on the manufacturer’s trucks. Revenue from the system sale is expected to total tens of thousands of dollars. QuadSight is a quad-camera vision system for obstacle detection for semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles. It uses four-camera technology that combines two pairs of stereoscopic infrared and daylight cameras in order to achieve near-100% obstacle detection under any weather or lighting conditions – including complete darkness, rain, haze, fog and glare.

Black & Decker Invests in Wireless Charging Startup

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Stanley Black & Decker  is leading the $10 million funding round for the Tel Aviv based Humavox, inventor of a new wireless charging technology. Humavox technology enables everyday objects can turn into “hidden chargers,” including anything from car cup holders and gym bags, and more. The company’s technology uses near-field radio frequency (RF) charging to transform any of such “storage instrument/device/object” into a charger, so that users can keep using their portable electronics fully powered.

With its ETERNA platform, Humavox uses near-field radio frequency (RF) technology, and provides users with a simple and intuitive charging experience (“drop & charge”). The technology can be implemented in the smallest of devices, such as hearables, wearables and IoT devices. Humavox was founded in 2010 by Omri Lachman (CEO) and Asaf Elssibony (VP Innovation), and is based in Israel.“This investment further solidifies Stanley’s partnership with Humavox to bring wireless charging capabilities to both commercial and industrial applications,” said Larry Harper, VP, Stanley Ventures, the corporate venture arm of Stanley Black & Decker.

Three Steps Technology

Through the transmission of radio frequency over a broad band of frequency waves and converting it into DC energy, Humavox’ ETERNA enables the wireless charging of the battery within the device. NEST, the ETERNA power transmitter (Tx), is the physical charging station. It generates the RF energy received by the Thunderlink, and controls the whole charging process.

Thunderlink, the ETERNA power receiver (Rx), is an element within the device under charge (DUC) and responsible for receiving the RF energy that will ultimately lead to the charging of the battery. Thunderlink combines electronic circuitry and a proprietary RF pickup element. It enables efficient reception of the RF signal resonated by the NEST transmitter, and its conversion back to DC voltage.

The entire process is controlled by Real-Time Charging Optimizer algorithm to assure the power transfer efficiency. The Charging Optimizer manages the energy transmission when one or many devices inside the NEST are power-pending.It also directs the energy outflow to the pickup element within the device, while preventing the waste of energy and stops the energy outflow as soon as the charging process is completed.

Elbit’s Beyeonics Surgical Raised $11.5 Million

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Elbit System is targeting its military technology to new markets, including the Medical Devices market. The defense giant from Haifa, Israel, announced today that it’s subsidiary, Beyeonics Surgical, concluded a first round of funding raising a $11.5 million investment from leading investment groups including an international corporation. Beyeonics develops innovative surgeon-centered visualization technologies that improves the surgeon’s efficiency.

It has developed the Clarity™ Bionic Visualization Platform, a fully integrated surgeon-centered visualization augmented reality video microscope for use in ophthalmic surgery (mainly cataract and vitreoretinal). The Clarity platform is comprised of a Transparent Head Wearable Display that utilizes Elbit Systems’ displays technology, 3D Ultra-Resolution remote sensing cameras, and a Processing Core for image processing and analytical tools to enable the integration of information from multiple digital sources.

From Fighter Jets to the Clinic

The system has been successfully tested in more than 20 ophthalmic surgeries both at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center and at Retinal Consultants of Arizona. Beyeonics Surgical began operating in 2012, led by a team of Elbit Systems senior engineers with a mission to revolutionize the visualization and information presented during surgery. Future products include visualization systems for other surgical applications as well as solutions for spine surgery, minimal invasive procedures, robotic surgery and use in cardiovascular catheterization labs.

The company is headed by Ron Schneider, former Director of Electro-Optics R&D Group at the Aerospace Division of Elbit Systems. Beyeonics integrated many technologies that had been originally developed for Elbit’s Helmet Mounted Systems (HMS) that enable pilots to view flight data, sensor and 3D location-based information within direct line-of-sight (LOS). The HMS allows the pilot to slave the aircraft’s sensors to its avionics systems and missiles simply by looking at the target. Now it will help doctors to look at a totally different kind of targets.

Mellanox boosts the Huge Summit Supercomputer

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With the introduction of its news Summit supercomputer, announced last week by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, US is taking back its position as the leader of supercomputers. With a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second (200 petaflops), Summit will be eight times more powerful than ORNL’s previous top-ranked system, Titan. For certain scientific applications, Summit will also be capable of more than three billion billion mixed precision calculations per second (3.3 exaops).

The IBM AC922 system consists of 4,608 compute servers, each containing two 22-core IBM Power9 processors and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 graphics processing unit accelerators, interconnected with dual-rail Mellanox EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand. Summit also possesses more than 10 petabytes of memory paired with fast, high-bandwidth pathways.

“The world’s top HPC and AI supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a result of a great collaboration over the last few years between Oak Ridge National Laboratory, IBM, NVIDIA and us,” said Eyal Waldman, president and CEO of Mellanox Technologies. “Our InfiniBand smart accelerations and offload technology enables organizations to maximize their data center return-on-investment.”

Summit will be open to select projects this year while ORNL and IBM work through the acceptance process for the machine. In 2019, the bulk of access to the IBM system will go to research teams selected through DOE’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment, or INCITE, program. The computer is planned to help exploring Astrophysics mysteries such as Exploding stars, Developing the next generation of materials, including compounds for energy storage, better understanding Cancer, biologial systems and more.

For more information: http://science.energy.gov.

Hailo Raised $12.5 Million to Develop AI Processor

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A newcomer to the emerging Artificial Intelligence semiconductor’s chips, Hailo from Tel Aviv, completed of a $12.5 million Series A round with the participation of investors such as Ourcrowd.com, Maniv Mobility, the Drive accelerator fund: Next Gear; as well as angel investors, Hailo Chairman Zohar Zisapel and Delek Motors CEO Gil Agmon. The company will use the funding to further develop its deep learning processor, which will deliver datacenter processing capacity to edge devices. This latest funding round brings the total raised by the company to $16 million.

Hailo plans initial samples of it deep learning processor for H1 2019. They will be able to run embedded AI applications on edge devices in autonomous vehicles, drones, personal assistants and smart home appliances such as smart cameras and smart TVs. “The 70-year old architecture of existing processors is inadequate to meet today’s deep learning and AI processing needs,” said Orr Danon, Hailo CEO. “We are revolutionizing the underlying processor’s architecture to boost deep learning processing by several orders of magnitude. We have completely redesigned the pillars of computer architecture – memory, control and compute – and the relations between them.”

Military know how goes to the Edge

The automotive industry, which is one of Hailo’s key target markets, is undergoing a major disruption, rapidly adopting deep learning methods to enable advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving applications that require continuous sensing of surroundings. According to IC Insights, Integrated Circuits used in automobiles and other vehicles are expected to generate global sales of $42.9 billion in 2021, compared to $22.9 billion in 2016. Existing general-purpose processor infrastructure cannot efficiently run compute-intensive deep learning algorithms necessary for these applications.

Hailo’s development team leaders include senior hardware and software engineers, many of whom served in top technology units in the IDF and worked for companies like Intel, Broadcom and Mellanox. The CEO Orr Danon served in a top Israel Defense Forces technology unit and is a recipient of the Israel Defense Prize. The CTO Avi Baum held senior engineering management positions at Texas Instruments, including the CTO for the Wireless Connectivity Group. The Chief Business Development Officer Hadar Zeitlin, also served in the same IDF technology unit for nine years and was awarded the Chief of Staff Prize for technological excellence.

Zebra Medical Raised $30M for Automated AI Based Radiology

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Zebra Medical Vision from Kibbutz Shefayim near Tel Aviv completed a $30M in C round funding, bringing the total investment in the company to $50M. The company also company is unveiled its latest product: A comprehensive AI Chest X-Ray Reader. The investment round was led by aMoon Ventures with the participation of strategic healthcare investors Aurum, Johnson & Johnson Innovation JJDC Inc. and Intermountain Healthcare and leading global AI scientists Professor Fei Fei Lee and Richard Socher. These new investors are joining a list of existing investors Khosla Ventures, NVIDIA, Marc Benioff, OurCrowd and Dolby Ventures who also participated in this C round.

The chest x-ray AI analytics product was trained using nearly 2 million images to identify 40 different common clinical findings. The results of the study (Textray chest x-ray research) establish a new bar for AI research in medical imaging, demonstrating high rates of agreement between the algorithm and human radiologist experts. This publication continues Zebra-Med’s mission to drive a higher standard of care across the radiology domain and collaborate with the medical community to improve patient care.

Zebra Medical Vision uses deep learning to create its Imaging Analytics Platform. The Company was founded in 2014 by Eyal Toledano, Eyal Gura, and Elad Benjamin and funded by Khosla Ventures, Marc Benioff, Intermountain Investment Fund, OurCrowd and Dolby Ventures. It has received the CE regulatory mark for seven of its products, and continues to build a strong pipeline of AI based products. It’s most recent announcements were the CE approval of CT brain bleed and mammography lesion detection algorithms. On its path to build the world’s most comprehensive visual lab, the company’s current and future arsenal of AI algorithms is bundled into a unique $1 per scan offering to hospitals, in order to meet the vision of scalable and affordable care globally.