After several decades of experience both as an educator and in the high-tech world, it was distressing for Bayan Farhat, from the Golan Heights Druze village of Buq’ata, to watch as his youngest son struggled to stay engaged with his studies after the distance learning of the COVID-19 pandemic and then more recently as a result of the war with Hezbollah along the Lebanese border as the village has not been evacuated and students study from home.

“I’m very passionate about education and I worked in high tech for 20 years. I saw that the education system has not changed with the years,” Farhat told eJewishPhilanthropy. “When a learner has troubles or struggles to learn something, the instructors don’t know how to help and support him. I know how difficult it is for the teachers to know each student [with distance learning] and where the students have difficulties and how to support them.”

Sometimes he said, with the extended distance learning, the support needed is not only academic but also emotional support.

“I have my three kids and I see how difficult it has been for them,” Farhat said. “My youngest is in sixth grade and he is a good kid, very clever, very smart. But he doesn’t enjoy doing homework and he doesn’t have any motivation to go to school sometimes. Sometimes his mind is somewhere else. On the other hand, he spends a lot of time with screens and with games.”

Now, the education technology startup AIBRID, founded by Farhat with his two partners — Majd Thabit and Seif Ibrahim, who are also Druze — has received NIS 300,000 ($84,300) in initial investment funding to continue developing and testing its AI-powered product as part of a partnership initiative between Sheba Medical Center’s Sheba Impact program, the hospital’s entrepreneurship and commercialization arm, ARC Innovation, Sheba’s center for digital innovation, and the nonprofit Ofakim LaAtid (Future Horizons), which supports social change and entrepreneurship in the Druze communities.

The new startup is developing an artificial intelligence platform to enhance remote and hybrid learning.

“After 20 years in high tech, I [needed] to do something meaningful for myself. I knew it might take time and that I would need the support from people around me and from friends from all over my career,” Farhat said.

The startup-funding initiative was created one month before the Oct. 7 attacks last year, following meetings between the Sheba Medical Center leadership and the leaders of the Druze community with the goal of developing a new relationship between the two. It is similar to the hospital’s innovation centers in the Arab Israeli town of Kfar Kasem and Arab-majority East Jerusalem, as well as a new innovation center they began to develop in Sderot post-Oct. 7, said Sheba Impact CEO Avner Halperin.   

“We are very strong believers that innovation in general and innovation in health care is an excellent way to create bridges, and to allow for diversity and inclusion,” Halperin told eJP. “Naturally our expertise and our unique added value is in the health-care field, but we can also help in general entrepreneurship because we’ve gone through creating a whole ecosystem of innovation around Sheba.” 

The new program, which aims to support young Druze entrepreneurs and address the critical challenge of securing funding, invited promising entrepreneurs from the Druze community to submit their innovations. They received 20 submissions. AIBRID was selected the winner by a panel of Sheba representatives and private investors from a group of five finalists who presented their projects in a “pitch-off” event in November, with a total of one million shekels in prizes awarded. 

The AIBRID platform will be a tool for self-assessment as well for the teacher to gauge the progress of students in class and will be able to suggest to the teacher which students need extra support, Farhat said. 

“She will be able to support them immediately and will have personal communication with the learner,” he said. “This will help her to exactly understand the reasons of the difficulties and to support the student in a meaningful and professional way.”

AIBRID will also receive ongoing mentorship from Sheba’s innovation network that includes an  ecosystem of 100 start-ups — valued at more than $4 billion — 50 that they built, 50 that came from the outside to partner with the hospital, three venture capital arms, the Angel Club and an accelerator-and-incubator, as well as 30 international hospitals. All five finalists will receive guidance and mentorship to help them build strong business models and clear go-to-market plans, connecting them with experienced professionals in the hospital’s network.

“We do this both to advance health care, but also as an economic growth engine for our region and really for the country,” said Halperin. “We are very strategic and have a long-term vision on innovation as a growth engine and as a way to change how health care is done. We are doing living, breathing innovation every day on a very large scale, and we also believe in our responsibility and the opportunity to push that into the periphery geographically and on a societal level.”

Amir Hassoun, director of administration at Sheba’s Rehabilitation Hospital and a member of the Druze community, is leading the initiative.

Most of Israel’s 150,000 member Druze community lives in the country’s north, including along the Lebanese and Syrian border in the country’s geographic periphery, far from the high-tech center hub in the Tel Aviv area. In the past year, the community has been at the forefront of the war between Hezbollah and Israel, leading to major disruptions to daily life. Like Jewish Israelis, Druze men in Israel also do compulsory military service, and several have been killed while serving in the wars in Lebanon and Gaza.

“As a minority, and also as a people who live in the countryside, we need such support to be a part of the ecosystem, with the heart of this high-tech ecosystem in Israel in the center,” said Farhat. “We need more support from government and also from individuals like the investors for this competition. This was a great opportunity because investors want to support the Druze community and it was great for me and for our community to see that some start-ups, some ideas, have investment now. More and more people in the Druze community would like to be a part of the high-tech ecosystem.”

The runner-up of the competition was a father-daughter team whose company, Swift, created an innovative water heating solution that saves energy. Other finalists included PreIn, an AI-powered thermal scanning company specializing in sports medicine; AgriEye, an AI-based solution for early detection and disease prediction in apple trees; and MultiKol, a company developing voice analytics for security and identification purposes.

“We’ve found that there are some outstandingly talented entrepreneurs. On a more general level, when you look at entrepreneurs from the periphery, they have a bigger challenge in getting access to funding and access to any kind of a network,” said Halperin. “Startups are always challenged by getting access to the international market, and since we have a very strong international network, we think we can help with that.”

Private Israeli investor participants in the program who raised NIS 1.2 million ($337,000) for the initiative include Israeli businessman and philanthropist Ofer Kerzner; tech entrepreneur Ron Zukerman, managing partner of ARYO Ventures; Ami Lidor, managing director of Lidor Elements; Moti Kirshenbaum, entrepreneur and owner of the assisted living network Mediterranean Towers; and Eran Gorev, partner and president of Israel at Francisco Partners.

“It’s not just the event, it’s not just the money. It’s really the involvement long term in making them the successful role models for the community and then continuing and expanding that year over year,” said Halperin.