Reliance Industries to invest in start-up incubator in Israel

MUMBAI: Reliance Industries plans to set up a technology incubator in Israel with an initial investment of $ 25 million, the Mukesh Ambani-led conglomerate said in a statement Thursday.
The incubator, namely Jerusalem Innovation Incubator, will be set up in partnership with Israel-based start-up crowd funding platform OurCrowd, Motorola Solutions, and Yissum, a technology transfer company of Hebrew University of Jerusalem.RIL will hold 20% in the incubator which will invest in early stage start-ups.
“The proposed investment in JII would help pool significant amount of capital which is essential and foundational to fund the cutting-edge innovation required by early stage start-ups in partnership with IIA. This will also give early access to innovation, technologies and products from one of the world’s largest start-up and technology innovation ecosystems,” RIL said in a statement.
The incubator will focus on areas such as big data, analytics, artificial intelligence, fintech, storage, internet of things and computer vision. “Most of these domains align with our business and strategic domains,” RIL said.
Israel has emerged the hub of start-ups, producing more of these companies than Japan, China, India, Korea, and the United Kingdom. In India, Reliance Industries has entered the start-up ecosystem by providing a platform called the GenNext Hub which helps entrepreneurs set up companies and build scale.