Yifat Oron, who runs the Israel office of Blackstone Inc., the world’s second-largest private equity firm, said she’s appalled at the industry’s meager support for women. Citing the $330 billion invested by venture capital firms in technology companies last year, Oron asked at a conference last week what percentage of that sum was invested in businesses led by women.

“It’s really bad – 2%,” she told the audience at the inaugural Women’s Entrepreneurship Summit in Tel Aviv, as Linda Gradstein reports for The Circuit. “A slightly less bad number is the amount of money invested in companies that have women in the founding team – that’s 16%. It’s still really bad. Why is it bad? Because we don’t have enough women investors. So it’s a vicious cycle. We have to solve it.”

With Oron, a senior managing director at Blackstone, painting the grim investment landscape, others at the July 26 conference concentrated on how to improve the situation through networking and pushing companies to recognize the need for change. Ofra Strauss, chairperson of the Israeli foodmaker Strauss Group that was founded by her grandparents, said the company has evolved since earlier days when she was often the only woman in key business meetings. “It only took me two minutes to understand,” Strauss said. “If the room was empty of women and I didn’t see them around me, something was fundamentally wrong.”

Speakers also focused on other realms where women are not equal partners. Ruth Wasserman Lande, a member of Israel’s parliament from the Blue & White party and a former diplomat at its embassy in Egypt, said working in the Arab country was not easy. “I spent three years as a woman in Cairo and being an Israeli Jewish woman was challenging,” she told The Circuit in a phone interview. “We still have a way to go to have truly equal opportunities. We have more to deal with especially after we get married and have kids and have more to juggle. It is changing but slowly.”

Wasserman Lande, who is co-chair of the Abraham Accords Caucus in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, noted efforts by the United Arab Emirates to promote women. For example, women by law make up half the members of the Federal National Council, an unelected advisory body to the royal court. When it comes to tech, only 5% of all CEO’s in the UAE are women, according to government figures, which is just below the global figure of 6%.

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Touting low operating costs and significant labor subsidies, Bahrain is reaching out to Israeli companies and raising the idea of moving some of their operations to the tiny Gulf nation. Bahraini Ambassador Khaled Al Jalahma outlined his government’s intention to set up a regional hub that would cater to the needs of Israeli startups in a July 28 meeting in Tel Aviv with executives from more than a dozen companies. Bahrain is both “willing and flexible” to help foreign companies get set up, said Yariv Becher, vice president for “innovation diplomacy” at Start-Up Nation Central, a nonprofit organization that promotes emerging Israeli companies, which arranged the meeting.

The ambassador told the Israelis that his country “is business friendly and our work attitude is tachles,” according to several people present, scoring points with the group by using a Yiddish word that means straight talk. Israeli executives who attended the meeting said Al Jalahma made a good case for his country as a Middle East hub for sales, R&D, manufacturing and other roles.

“We want to be very active in the region and Bahrain can be a gateway,” said Rotem Arad, director of business development for H2Pro, an Israeli company that produces so-called “green hydrogen” by splitting water into its component molecules and generating cleaner, renewable energy. Among H2Pro’s investors are Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Japan’s Sumitomo Corp. and Jerusalem-based OurCrowd.

Other companies at the Tel Aviv event, which was sponsored by the Bahrain Economic Development Board, were Addionics, Aleph Farms, Beewise, C2i Genomics, Finteka,, Papaya Global, Minute Media, Monday.com, Scorpio Labs, See Tree, Set Point and Trieye.

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A rookie software engineer sits at his desk and faces a problem he’s never  encountered before, at least not in his college coding class. The wrong fix could cost his company millions, but luckily the stakes here are much lower. This engineer is honing his skills at a fantasy company on an online platform that works much like a flight simulator for aspiring pilots. 

When the Israeli startup Wilco launched its simulator platform last month, On Freund, the company’s CEO, and his founding partners were taking a page out of the playbook used by pilots, architects and race car drivers by creating a simulation experience for software engineers to gain new skills and master existing ones regardless of someone’s career opportunities or background. Engineers using Wilco complete various “quests” that allow them to practice troubleshooting problems that commonly arise in real-world situations, but in an engaging way that’s akin to a video game. 

“I quickly realized that there is a difference between the theory which they have learned in school and the actual hands-on practice that takes years to come by,” Freund told The Circuit‘s Sophie Cohen. 

The idea for Wilco (the name comes from the Roger Wilco character in the “Space Quest” movie franchise, not the alt-rock group) came to Freund about a decade ago. After he graduated from Tel Aviv University, he was managing a team of engineers at Handy, an online platform that connects users with cleaning and handyperson services, and Freund was looking for ways to let his team practice and learn new skills, outside of coding, that were not taught in university. 

Last year, Freund, Alon Carmel, Wilco’s chief products officer, and Shem Magnezi, the startup’s chief technology officer, came together to launch Wilco with $7 million in seed money; the platform is accessible to any software engineer regardless of their background or location. 

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