OurCrowd and Toyota Tsusho announce strategic tech collaboration

Jon Medved, founder and CEO of OurCrowd

OurCrowd will act as a technology scout and source innovation and investments in both Israel and worldwide. The partnership combines the strength of OurCrowd’s Israeli and global network, robust deal flow pipeline and growing portfolio of 200 promising startups along with the broad reach and core values of Toyota Tsusho to seek innovative products and services in their key business sectors of Mobility, Resources & Environment, Life & Community.

The next generation startup leaders

The focus of the scouting agreement will be to seek out next-generation startup leaders in the areas of Autonomous driving with a focus on sensors, image recognition, data compression, and security.

Moreover the partnership will seek out disruptive technologies in a diverse group of other sectors such as smart cities, medtech, including cancer examination, digital health, environmental technologies, and big data in agriculture.

Minoru Murata, Executive Vice President, Regional CEO & CTO of Toyota Tsusho said, “The future belongs to the bold who are implementing game-changing technologies. Toyota Tsusho and its 58,000 employees all over the world are proud to be leaders in our focus industries, but to ensure our future leaders we must identify, invest and work with startups who are changing the world we live in. Our partnership with OurCrowd will bring us these key technologies and leaders to work together on the next generation of global challenges.”

Jon Medved, founder and CEO of OurCrowd said, “We are proud to be partnering with a general trading company such as Toyota Tsusho. Not only do they represent a 70-year tradition of excellence in global business, but they are focused on solving real global problems. Together we can help startups turn into “scaleups” by providing access to Toyota Tsusho’s unrivaled platform that can deploy new technologies and products quickly and effectively in over 120 markets around the world. This is good news for startups and good news for the world.”

OurCrowd is a unique innovation and investment platform that connects investors and startups around the world, and has already raised over $1.28B in funding commitments and has made investments in 200 diversified companies and funds. OurCrowd will help funnel Israeli and other technology startups that support the Toyota Tsusho Corporation’s core values to leverage the collective force and innovative spirit in order to further penetrate global markets in Mobility, Resources & Environment, and Life & Community.

Laly David, OurCrowd’s business development partner, will spearhead this effort along with OurCrowd’s 13 global offices, said, “We support the Toyota Tsusho Group way of “Genchi, Genbutsu, Genjitsu,” which means “On Site, Hands on, In touch.” This means a lot to OurCrowd and will guide our work and our collective mission with our partners at Toyota Tsusho and the startups in our community.”

OurCrowd continues to expand its newly launched OC Innovate program to provide multinationals with the ability to stay ahead of the latest innovation trends globally by providing access to Israel’s bustling tech startup community.

For more, go to www.ourcrowd.com/#/strategic-collaboration-program