When he was a Brandeis University art major, Ari Teman built a car in his parents’ garage in Teaneck, New Jersey.

He later became a standup comic and founder of GateGuard, an intercom and AI doorman system used by hundreds of US landlords and property managers to enhance safety and catch bad actors.

During the pandemic lockdowns, Teman was running his successful business in Miami and feeling that life was short. It was time to realize his car dreams.

Now in his early 40s and living part time in Tel Aviv, Teman dipped into his pocket to found Jovari, a startup on track to produce the world’s first four-door convertible electric hypercar – in Israel. 

What’s a hypercar?

A hypercar is a limited-edition automobile featuring cutting-edge technology, materials, design and performance. It’s for serious car collectors at the level of Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld, Teman explains.

But this one will be designed as a luxury family vehicle, not merely a collectors’ item.

Jovari buyers will collaborate on their car’s design elements, down to the stitching and the digital interface. “You could customize the car like you customize a phone case,” Teman tells ISRAEL21c.

Teman plans to donate 10 percent of every purchase to the charity of the collector’s choice and work with an artist of their choosing to integrate the story of the charity into the design of the vehicle. A matching display will fold out of the trunk to encourage attendees at car shows to support the cause. 

“This is really important to me, to change the tone of many car shows from ego-driven to soul-driven,” says Teman, who in 2006 founded Jcorps, an international social volunteer network of thousands of Jewish young adults in North America and Israel.

Inception for startups

Jovari was just accepted into NVIDIA’s Inception program for startups. NVIDIA’s design and simulation technologies will power the real-time vehicle customization site, which will then communicate the design instructions to an automated production facility.

“I became obsessed with the idea of the efficiency of the manufacturing and the reproducibility,” says Teman. 

Some elements will be handmade, for example upholstery by Italian craftspeople. Most parts will be produced by CNC (computer numerical control) machinery and laser cutters. Jovari’s molds are produced with 3D printers made by Massivit in Lod.

Teman, who is also the firm’s head of design, holds six patents for his Jovari S1, planned to retail for about $2.7 million when working models become available in a year or so.

Among the hypercar’s unique features will be artificial intelligence and mechanisms that allow the electric vehicle to replicate the vibration, sound, airflow and handling of a combustion vehicle.

That’s not only a safety feature, Teman explains. The “boys with toys” customer, he says, “wants the car to sound and feel like a real car, with a loud engine and vibrations.

“They hate the way BMW and other car companies just put engine sounds on the speakers of their EVs. So I said, ‘How do you get the real vibration instead of faking it?’ And I realized that the combustion engine is basically a wind instrument. It’s moving air through exhaust,” says Teman.

“I thought we could do that with turbo fans like they have on small aircraft. Then it also becomes an aerodynamic benefit because we can adjust the way the air flows around the car. We can actually do more than an airplane wing can do in terms of moving the air, really enhancing performance.” 

Israeli engineers

This feature is one of several reasons Teman took Jovari to Israel.

“For a lot of the engineering that you need for a car, you’re better off recruiting folks who do aerospace engineering than mechanical engineering,” he says. “I can hire engineers out of the Israel Air Force and the Israeli aerospace industry, which are very advanced.”

Israeli AI expertise is another reason Jovari’s core team of five is in Israel, though he also has specialist contract workers in other countries such as Italy. 

“I always planned to have the R&D in Israel,” says Teman. “It’s not just that the skills are abundant here. It’s also the Israeli approach of ‘Let’s get it done.’ You should hire Israelis because they can’t help but put their heart and care into everything that they do.”

As Teman got more into the 3D-printing and automated manufacturing details, he realized the cars – maybe 100 per year – could be assembled in Israel with a lean team of perhaps 50 people at full production.

“The conventional wisdom is that you can’t manufacture in Israel. I think that goes out the window with modern methods,” he says. 

“You’re not doing manual labor. You’re managing the robots, and then you’re doing fine artistry and craftsmanship. I can hire 10 Bezalel [Academy] sculpture graduates to do the carbon fiber components just as well as they do in Italy. 

“Now is the time when Israel could build this, without needing to open a $100 million factory.”

Licensing cool stuff to carmakers

The R&D part of Jovari isn’t only for its own vehicles. Teman intends to license out Israeli-invented technologies to mass-market automakers. 

The patent-pending Jovari AdventureRack, for example, extends at the press of a button or a voice command to hold two bicycles. 

For the S1 owner, “the car collector who’s bragging about the specs, how fast the car goes and the paint job that he custom selected — he’s also the guy with the $15,000 bicycle with the computer on it so that he can see how many RPMs he’s doing with his feet.”

But for a Ford Bronco owner, let’s say, the AdventureRack could come in handy when “your kid is stuck in the rain with his bike 20 minutes away from home. You go get him and you don’t have to put the muddy bike in the back of your car.”

Another patent-pending invention that could go down-market is the Jovari GlideTop convertible top that, when closed, “is strong enough to hold a storage container, or additional rack, or even a tent.”

Jovari designers also have devised a new way of opening car doors that protects cyclists and pedestrians.

“The biggest challenge to the mega conglomerate car companies is union labor and staffing,” says Teman. 

“So it’s a big advantage for a Ford or a General Motors to be able to say, ‘We’ve licensed this really cool technology and we can develop a show car with just 15 people instead of 150 people.’

“Another huge advantage is the speed. One of the reasons cars today all look the same is that [carmakers] can’t take a risk. But with our technology, they could develop 10 prototype show cars in the time it previously took to produce just one. Then they can take them around the country and find out which of these 10 is most likely to sell 2 million units.”

Teman also envisions Jovari technology enabling conventional carmakers to offer unprecedented customization options.

“Through automation, we can make it cost effective and simple enough that you can walk into a dealership and say, ‘I love this pink on my sweater and I’ve always wanted seatbelts of that color,’ and you get it in a $50,000 car. And that will be their competitive advantage.” 

Raising $60m

Teman points out that a car company like Jovari wouldn’t have been possible a decade ago. 

“You would need massive clay modeling studios and a lot more manual labor and skilled labor. The cost to make models and show cars was millions, not thousands.”

But it’s still not cheap. 

“To get to production, you have to drive a dozen cars into walls and pass safety inspections,” he says.

The NVIDIA investment will help put this car on the road, and in addition Teman is looking to raise $60 million in a Series A round. “It costs $40 million just to get a car to full production,” he says.

Enterprise licensing of its patented technologies could provide a continuous revenue stream, with Jovari earning a few dollars on every mass-market vehicle that incorporates its optional capabilities. 

Teman is also building a branding and merch buzz. “Not everybody can buy a $2.7 million car. But a lot of people will buy the Jovari jacket or hat,” he says.

The name of the company is a nod to the founder’s first and last names. 

Ari is Hebrew for “lion” and Teman is Hebrew for “Yemenite.” In the Yemenite Hebrew dialect, jovari is the transliterated spelling of govari, Hebrew for “lion’s den.” The company logo is two lions’ heads.

Yes, this car company is personal. “It was always in my heart to do this car,” Teman tells ISRAEL21c.  

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