Five companies with Israeli headquarters, origins or founders have been named to Fast Company’s fourth annual Next Big Things in Tech list honoring more than 130 emerging technologies making a profound impact in sectors from education and sustainability to robotics and artificial intelligence. 

Epic Cleantec was cited in the building and real estate tech category for its OneWater system that enables buildings (such as the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills and Salesforce Tower in San Francisco) to recycle up to 95 percent of their own wastewater onsite for reuse in non-potable applications such as toilet flushing, cooling towers and laundry. This independent California-based company, originally founded as an affiliate of an Israeli firm, was previously recognized by Fast Company as the Most Innovative Company in the United States (under 100 employees). Today, Epic Cleantec announced the close of its $12 million Series B funding round.

Houzz (founded in California in 2009 by Israeli expat couple Adi Tatarko and Alon Cohen, with an R&D center in Tel Aviv) was cited in the building and real estate tech category for its Houzz Pro  AI-powered, cloud-based, comprehensive project management and design software for one-stop collaboration among builders, contractors and designers.

Pangea Biomed of Tel Aviv was cited in the health category for improving the precision of precision cancer treatments. It recently added a tool called DeepPT to its Enlight AI-powered tumor intelligence platform that uses tumor biopsy slides and insights from its library of cancer genetics to predict patients’ treatment responses. The company claims an 80% success rate in identifying the best treatment for, so far, more than 2,300 patients across 40 types of cancer treated by 25 drugs.

Verbit, headquartered in Givatayim, was cited in the “bringing fresh thinking to quietly important jobs” category for “getting all of the nuances.” Verbit offers several products including its new Captivate platform bringing human-level accuracy to AI-generated transcripts. It’s built on a continuous learning model that adapts over time to specific domains as more content is captured, powering transcripts in a range of fields.

“The next big thing in the AI productivity revolution will come from how we capture, understand and apply speech,” said Michael Rosman, Verbit’s VP Marketing and Corporate Strategy. “What Captivate does differently from other automatic speech recognition tools is put the customer and their unique needs at the center of the offering. It is based on a continuous learning model that adapts over time to the content it captures. Its training set is comprised of thousands of audio hours and is supervised by professional human captioners.” 

WSC Sports, headquartered in Ramat Gan, was cited in the established excellence category for its pioneering and ever-expanding technology solutions enabling clients to create AI-tailored sports clips aimed to deepen sports fans’ engagement. Its media partners include the NBA, ESPN, YouTube, Snap, and hundreds of other organizations across 40 sports.

 “The ‘Next Big Things in Tech’ provides a fascinating glimpse at near- and long-term technological breakthroughs across a variety of sectors,” said Brendan Vaughan, editor-in-chief of Fast Company. “Spanning everything from semiconductors to agricultural gene editing, the companies featured in this year’s list are tackling some of the world’s most pressing and vexing problems.”