OurCrowd Partners with Torino City Lab to Create Real-World Testing Ground of Premier Israeli Technologies

The collaboration will amplify the impact of innovative technologies and foster a center for urban innovation

Jerusalem – March 7, 2019 – OurCrowd, a leading global investment platform and Israel’s most active venture investor, announced today a partnership with Italy’s Torino City Lab. The collaboration will see the city of Torino used as a site for testing, identifying and scaling Israel’s most innovative technologies.

While technologies are being developed to overhaul many aspects of everyday life, from transportation to banking and doctor’s visits, the ability to perform and adapt in real-world environments will make or break their success. The partnership between the Torino City Lab initiative and OurCrowd will create an environment where leading Israeli technology startups will have access to the city of Torino as an “open laboratory” to further the viability of their innovations and determine the social impact of their products. The two entities will participate in joint activities fostering the development of an open ecosystem that will promote growth and innovation within the city.

“Investors are looking for more than just a great idea, they want amazing technology with a proven track record,” said Jon Medved, Founder and CEO of OurCrowd. “Partnering with Torino City Lab gives our companies not only access to an urban playground for testing and strengthening their technology, but a potential foothold into the European market as well—a win for everyone.”

The city of Torino, Italy, is transforming itself into an “open-air laboratory” on the frontier of innovation where companies can test their solutions to enhance their products, demonstrate viability and quickly reach a broad market. Torino City Lab’s program of physical, technological and municipal infrastructure provide an effective environment for innovation sharing and scaling. The partnership will provide an entry point for the diffusion of Israeli technology in Europe.

“OurCrowd’s investment team continuously singles out the cream of the technological crop in Israel to invest in and we are excited to partner together to build these startups and enable them to scale effectively,” noted Paola Pisano, Deputy Mayor of Innovation and Smart City at Turin Council. “Public-private partnerships like this one are the future of scalable innovation, and is glad to continue to be the forefront of this trend.”

This announcement was made at the 2019 OurCrowd Global Investor Summit in Jerusalem, the largest technology showcase in Israel with over 170 startups and 17,000 registered attendees.

About OurCrowd: OurCrowd is a global investment platform, bringing venture capital opportunities to accredited investors worldwide. A leader in equity crowdfunding, OurCrowd is managed by a team of seasoned investment professionals and is led by serial entrepreneur Jon Medved. OurCrowd vets and selects companies, invests its own capital, and invites its accredited membership of investors and institutional partners to invest alongside in these opportunities. OurCrowd provides support to its portfolio companies, assigns industry experts as mentors, and creates growth opportunities through its network of strategic multinational partnerships. The OurCrowd community consists of almost 30,000 accredited investors from over 150 countries. OurCrowd has raised $1 billion and invested in 170 portfolio companies and funds. To join OurCrowd as an accredited investor visit mktg.ocdvlp.com and click “Join.”

About the 2019 OurCrowd Global Investor Summit: The OurCrowd Global Investor Summit, Where the startup world gathers. The 2019 OurCrowd Global Investor Summit, taking place March 7th in Jerusalem, Israel, is one of the premier events in the tech industry, and the largest business event in Israel’s history, with 17,000 expected to register to attend. The Summit provides an interactive, front-row seat to the formerly closed world of startup venture capital, with exclusive exposure to cutting-edge technologies, the entrepreneurs behind them, and the corporate leaders deploying them. Top investors, venture capitalists, corporate partners, entrepreneurs and journalists come from around the world both for Summit day as well as a week of events that include tours of the Israeli ecosystem, corporate meetups, and cultural and historical excursions. Thousands more will participate through livestreaming. Learn more at summit.ourcrowd.com.

About Torino City Lab

Torino City Lab is a coordinated system of actions to transform the City into an “open-air” laboratory of frontier innovation (at the pre-commercial stage or at very low market penetration) where companies, testing their solutions, gain a reference of validity and quality of their project, ready to be spent in other public and private contexts, at local and extra-local level. In this perspective, the validity of innovation testing does not only concern the business aspects of private interest (business model, ability to meet needs, user experience, etc..), but also social impact aspects.

With “Torino City Lab” Torino offers the entire city for the testing of innovation, providing a system of physical, technological, relational and know-how infrastructures to experiment and then scale the proposed innovations. The city aims to strengthen the supporting activities to the effective implementation of testing in the interest of companies through its main assets:

  • the capacity to simplify administrative and bureaucratic procedures
  • knowledge of the city itself and its citizens
  • participation in international networks of cities interested in disseminating and sharing innovation

The Torino City Lab model provides this purpose a testing platform that is always open, a “unique entry point” managed by a dedicated team of the municipality and simplification tools for the authorization of testing. Learn more at www.torinocitylab.com

Press contact: Leah Stern, OurCrowd Dir. Of Communications / UK: +44 747-0196826 / E: leah@ourcrowd.com / Aaron Kliner at aaron@headline.media (IL: +972 54-8143742)