And the Winner of the AdTech Startup Competition Is…

On June 11th, 2018, Intango hosted an AdTech startup competition, giving a platform for eight startup founders to pitch their ideas in front of a panel of five judges from Intango, Facebook, TheTime, TheMarker/Ha’aretz and Datorama, in search for the most promising disruptive technology. In the crowd, there were investors, entrepreneurs and AdTech professionals.

Overall, it was a great event, one that saw a delegation of top Grman advertising executives visit our offices, listen to presentations and experience firsthand the vibrant Israeli AdTech scene.

This competition is a natural progression of our company’s activity and fits perfectly our philosophy that views innovation as the lifeblood of a tech company. As such, we always try to preserve our startup mentality, which is the feeling that leads you to jump into the abyss believing you will land on solid ground.

We Started Accelerating

Having been in the business for quite some time and seeing our fair share of successes and failures, we have come to view ideas like seeds, who will struggle to grow and flourish without the right amount of sunlight, water and whatever plants need (good thing we’re not gardeners).

As a first step, we created the Intango AdTech Accelerator program, which provides founders with all the tools and environment they need to take their startup to the next level.

At the beginning of this year, ad gamification developer Playgorithm became the first startup to join the program.

Wanting to establish a friendly forum where AdTech professionals could learn, exchange ideas and grow, the Accelerator program started sponsoring and hosting a series of meetups, where you learn about the industry’s current state and the directions in which it is headed, as well as do the all-important task of networking.

The First AdTech Games

And what better way there is to create excitement in our field than to organize an AdTech startup competition.

So we composed a diverse panel of judges, invited an AdTech-loving crowd, and selected eight Israeli startups that we felt have breakout potential:

• Neefla – An automated bidding platform for advertisers that improves advertising budgets’ ROI and saves time/money
• Selectom – A marketplace for Marketers. Let the world’s leading marketing talents run your advertising campaigns.
• FORTVISION – An enhanced, non-intrusive way to engage with customers while simultaneously collecting valuable data to learn more about target audiences.
• shopUpz – Transform live stream videos and stories to a shopping cart.
• Inter-act – We bridge the gap between chatbots and advertising to enable conversational advertising.
• Coolix – Easily create, track and analyze user behavior over video.
• Commfident – Mapping the internet to find the real value of each site and app for advertisers.
• HeadsApp – The Last SDK your product will ever need to integrate, no more code handling & no strings attached.

And the winner was…

In the end, Coolix was the startup that most impressed the judges and the crowd, earning its founders Elyakim Drori and Michael Shapiro, a $10,000 prize. And in conclusion, we wish future success to all finalists. We hope to meet you and cooperate with you somewhere down the line.