Meet the Israeli Venture Capitalist Who’s Not Afraid of Aging – Interview with Dr. Yael Benvenisti – Mediterranean Towers Ventures

Last week I sat down to talk with Dr. Yael Benvenisti, a gerontologist and CEO of Mediterranean Towers Ventures, the first and only VC in Israel that focuses on Age Tech investments. The following text is an edited transcript of the recorded interview.

What is the story behind Mediterranean Towers Ventures? What made the leading retirement community chain in Israel decide to invest in startups?

Mediterranean Towers is a group that has senior living homes. They were looking at the market like everybody else and they saw that the market all over the world is getting older. They also noticed three factors that are very important. 

The first one is that the segment of the population that is growing very rapidly is the people who are aged 85 years and above, they are the ones that consume most of the services.

The second factor is that the ratio between the ones that are giving the services and the ones that are consuming the services is getting lower and lower. So if we as a society want to continue and provide services to a growing population, there’s no other solution than to develop technologies that will give solutions with a very broad variety, with a good quality and with no geographical barriers.

The third factor they noticed is that the population is richer than it was before, that they can afford to adopt technologies or new services.

So all of this together, made them take the decision that they want to open a new service and this service should be based on technology. They understood that they have to search for technologies and they opened a fund that will not only search for technologies but also invest in the technologies and be part of the development because we’re looking to be a strategic partner of the startup and help develop the products, so it would really fit the market’s needs.

That sounds like a good motive and the second factor that you talked about is called the “caregiver support ratio,” right?

Yeah.

What types of companies are you looking to invest in?

We’re looking to invest in everything in elderly people’s lives, surround their lives, everything except pharma because pharma is very expensive and the regulation is very hard. So we invest in technologies for Ageing Well; medical devices,engagement in the community, financial aspects, traveling for the elderly population. Everything that surrounds one’s life.

Can you give us an example for a portfolio company and why you invested in it?

We launched in July 2017. We invested in three companies up to now. The first one is called Uniper Technologies. It’s a platform based on the television at the elderly’s home. They operate like daycare centers, an interactive day care center in the home. So you can open a channel and be active in social groups, in physical groups, exercise.

Family members can send photos. videos or messages to the television of their loved one and connect through the TV. There’s also live content, so seniors can and be active in the community and stay in their home. What we saw in the pilot that was very nice is that women especially, when they stay home, they start to neglect themselves and neglect the home. It’s not so tight and they don’t put makeup and they don’t dress so well.

When they start joining this live broadcast, they start putting makeup and they start dressing nicely because everybody can see them. So the families gave us some good feedback about this live broadcast and it really upgraded their lifestyle and their quality of life.

What do you think makes the Israeli age tech ecosystem unique?

I think Israelis in general love innovation – if you tell them to sit and do what they are told, they’re not used to it. So we’re very inventive, we see someone that needs something and suddenly there is a solution.

We are very fast in innovation. We are very good in innovation but not so good at implementing. We are a very small market. So we develop things and we – very rapidly we have to go out. We have to search for new markets and then we have to expand ourselves to outside of Israel. 

So do you only invest in Israeli companies?

For now yes. But my plan is to open our fund to international investments. I think Israel is a very innovative country. But we also have to see what’s happening outside of Israel and I think that in the minute we will start investing in technologies from other countries, it will be easier for us to launch the Israeli startups outside of Israel because we’ll have connections to investors in other places, and to potential clients for Israeli technologies out there.

So international startups in age tech, you can contact Yael! 

What made you do the transition from being a gerontologist – I should also mention that Yael used to be a physical therapist. What made you do the transition from “classical” gerontology to Age Tech?

Well, I started as a physical therapist in Maccabi. It’s a big health provider in Israel, and I was working with people who had orthopedic problems and with children. Back then, my grandma was a resident in one of the nursing homes in Haifa, my hometown, and the staff were not careful enough to close the barriers of the bed every night, so she rolled over and she hit her head in the wheelchair that was standing near her bed and she got a brain hemorrhage and she died from it.

That’s horrible.

And then I decided to leave the space of orthopedics and children and start working in rehabilitation of the elderly, started working in nursing homes and I loved it from the beginning. I was always looking for innovation, for new projects to implement into our service.

So I won some prizes for doing these projects and one day came an offer from the Israeli Gerontology Society to apply to be a board member. I looked at the board members list and everybody was a professor or a doctor, and I only had a B.A. in physical therapy. I said (to myself) “Why not? I will go,” and I applied for the board member and I was elected and I started my role in the society. Then came a request from the Israeli Society of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, they opened a group for Ageing Well Technologies and they were looking for someone to represent the gerontology world. Nobody wanted to go in and I love innovation, so I applied and I went. There were about 20 people in that group and every meeting was around seven people who sat at a round table in one of the meetings rooms. We decided to do an international conference and I was the youngest one so I was the chairman because I had a lot of time, free time.

It was a very successful conference, we had 18 guests from all over the world and it was really a success. The person who established that group decided to open his new startup and wanted to quit. So I applied to be the chairperson and I was elected.

So since back then, I’m the chairperson of technologies for Ageing Well group. Every two years, the Society of Gerontology in Israel is hosting a big conference. It’s an academic conference and they were looking for two persons to be the chairpersons. I was elected to that role (after I did the successful conference for the Society of Electrical and Electronic Engineering), with some new doctor and she said that she doesn’t want them to appoint me because I only have a B.A. and I’m not working in academia.

We’re not going to name names.

No and the chairman of the society called me and said, “OK, look, this is the situation. Drop yourself out. I’m asking you to leave because I don’t want to do it. So I prefer that you will go by your own and one day you will understand,” and until now, I will never understand something that I was so offended but it made me realize that I had to go back to university. I applied for an MBA in gerontology, I wanted to do my thesis on discrimination in health departments and my advisor said, “Well, it’s a PhD thesis, so go do a PhD”

So I did it and I finished my PhD, I’m still working with the Gerontology Society and the  Society of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. Then I met my partner Dov Sugarman, that was the ambassador of Aging 2.0 in Israel and we realised there was no room for two groups. 

So they joined forces and I told you we started with 20 persons and then when I met Dov, we were almost 1000 members and we opened Aging 2.0 in Israel and we represent them together in Israel. Now we have more than 1500 members. We’re doing meet-ups, conferences. It’s very successful. Then came the offer to open the fund. Someone from Mediterranean Towers Group came to one of our conferences and said, “Do you want to work with us, to establish a fund that will invest in technologies for aging?” Of course we said yes, and recently Dov decided that he was going to his own startup. He left the fund and I stayed as the CEO.

I’ve known Yael for several years but I’ve never heard the whole story and I think it’s quite remarkable and very inspiring for gerontologists out there listening to us. I’m not sure you can follow Yael’s exact career path, but we can definitely all learn from her about daring to dream if you will and…

Do the change.

Yeah, to make changes and not necessarily follow the regular career path that has been laid out for us.

So if we’re looking at the aging market or the age tech market, what are the gaps that you see that startups are still not addressing?

I think startups still don’t know how to segmentize the elderly population. They think that everybody above – 65 years of age is the same, more of the same, and they’re not.

There are special needs within this group we call the elderly population. There are special needs for special age groups and they need to know these needs. They need to know how to segment the population because they have to know who is the customer and who is the payer, and when we’re speaking about payers, every country has a different system. 

So they also have to know what system of payers they are dealing with because in the United States, there are insurance companies. In other states, they maybe the municipality or the government, so it’s very difficult to know and it changes your whole market plan. I think this is the space that we have to learn a little bit more.

Design is a weak point. I don’t know why. But there are a lot of colors in the world and most of the products are all white or black or green. “Hospital green”. There is a lot of colors and products should be joyful. It should be a nice experience to use it and sometimes, they forget the experience. If I have diabetics, I know I have diabetics. You don’t have to remind me every day by using an ugly product. This has to be fun and so design and knowing your customer and payer. So these are the main barriers.

Where do you see the space in five or ten years?

I think the big companies will realize that this is good market and we will see more and more retail companies or big companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple trying to reach this market and developing a product. 

Apple already is trying to reach this market.

Yes, of course with the Apple Watch. I think that we will see them innovate the hardware and open the hardware for startups to implement their software. So I think that if there is a startup that is working on hardware, take care because the big companies are working on hardware and they have the resources. They will do a better job and they have the market to do it, the resources for marketing. I think that you should really put your effort in adding another layer on existing hardware, and adapt it to the elderly population’s needs.

Can you elaborate on that point?

Let’s take Alexa for example. Alexa is getting nicer. It looks good. You have a lot of companies that are trying to compete with it. If you are trying to build another smart speaker, it will take you time. But the design will always look better on Samsung or another big company’s device. So don’t spend your money on hardware. Take Alexa or every other smart speaker and try to add another layer on this speaker to address some challenges in the elderly population.

That is good advice. If you could give entrepreneurs in aging one piece of advice, what would it be?

Learn how to segmentize the population. Learn who is your customer, who is your payer and search for competition. Search for your competition because there are a lot of companies around the world. If you are the only one, it’s not good. It’s not always good to be the first one because it will be very hard and maybe there’s no market – and this is why nobody is approaching this space.

What impact do you hope that your investments will make on the lives of older adults?

Oh, we’re looking for disruptive solutions. So we really hope that one of our solutions will be in every house, almost every house. I really want to see the elderly population engaged in the community, I want to see people that are not afraid to get old. I want for myself other solutions than what we have today, I deserve a better future. Everybody deserves a better future. So I’m working on it and it’s very exciting.

It is exciting. It is actually a very optimistic note to end our interview with. Is there anything else you would like to add besides asking international entrepreneurs to …?

Apply for us?

Yeah.

We also opened our homes for pilots. Mediterranean Towers is a group with eight facilities. We have more than 1500 residents. So if someone wants to do a pilot, even if it’s a short one for a few days, if it’s a delegation from abroad, we open our homes.

There are a lot of people that are waiting to test technology. You can get real feedback and sometimes getting feedback from someone who is not from your country and doesn’t know the nuances that built your product on, it’s very important, especially if you want to launch your product internationally. You have to get international feedback. So even if you are not looking for investments and you’re only looking for some feedback, approach us.

Excellent. Yael, thank you so much.

Thank you.