As a young girl, Or Harel loved inventing stories and creating new things. Many years later, which included over a decade serving in the Israeli army, Harel still thinks that creativity is the key – to becoming a successful entrepreneur.
Harel is a co-founder of Elvy.Ai, a sleeptech company balancing between tech habits and health.
The start-up won the next-gen women entrepreneurs competition sponsored by the Luzzatto Group at the Jerusalem Post’s Women’s Entrepreneurship Summit in Tel Aviv last summer.
“Entrepreneurship for me is very similar to arts because it is about creating something out of nothing,” Harel said.
What is Elvy.Ai?
Born and raised in Be’er-Tuviya, a small moshav in the south of Israel, she described her army service as very influential.
“I served in the intelligence division for 13 years,” she said. “During the service, I attended university at the IDC in Herzliya where I studied entrepreneurship and business and I met one of my co-founders.”
“I always joke that I was an entrepreneur already in the army, because I served in R&D,” she added. “It was there that I realized how much I liked to create new ventures and find solutions for complicated problems.”
“I always joke that I was an entrepreneur already in the army, because I served in R&D. It was there that I realized how much I liked to create new ventures and find solutions for complicated problems.”
Or Harel
The idea for Elvy.ai came to one of Harel’s co-founder, Yoni Manor, who had trouble sleeping and knew that keeping a phone charging next to the bed was not healthy.
The electromagnetic radiation emitted from both phones and chargers interferes with sleep, and specifically with Alpha frequency waves, which are produced by the brain during sleep cycles and are crucial for sleep quality.
Harel, Manor and their third co-founder Oded Broshi aimed to find a solution to both allow people to keep their devices on the bedside table (“because we need them there,” Harel pointed out) and to protect sleep quality.
Their first product – which can already be pre-ordered on Indiegogo and will be delivered in December – is a Radiation-Blocking Night Charger, which blocks 95% of electromagnetic radiation.
“Now we have started to work on sleep hygiene, which includes all the environmental factors that influence the quality of our sleep,” Harel said.
She explained that their next product, in addition to protecting users from radiation, will analyze the environment where they sleep and understand how different elements affect it.
“If you wake up several times during the night, the device will help you know why,” she said.
At the conference, Elvy.Ai defeated Feminai, whose mission is to provide women with efficient and safe means to detect early breast cancer, and Tweaks, a platform for real estate personalization.
“Female-led companies have an advantage both in terms of management and in the world of capital raising,” Esther (Eti) Luzzatto, CEO of the Luzzatto Group said. “The sky’s the limit.”