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Uri Levine

CEO & Co-founder at Waze

Uri Levine is a passionate entrepreneur and disruptor, a two-time ‘unicorn’ builder (Duocorn). He is co-founder of Waze, the world’s largest community-based driving traffic and navigation app, which was acquired by Google for $1.1 billion in 2013, and former investor and board member in Moovit, ‘Waze of public transportation’ – which was acquired by Intel for $1 Billion in 2020. Levine heads the “The Founders Kitchen”, a company-builder fund. Among Uri’s startups are Feex, FairFly, Refundit, and SeeTree and he is always working on the next one.

Levine’s vision in building startups is specifically intended to disrupt inefficient markets and improve under-functioning services, with a focus on solving “BIG problems” and saving consumers time and money, while empowering them and changing the world for the better.

Uri has been in the high-tech business for the last 30 years, half of them in the startup scene, and has seen everything ranging from failure, middle success, and big success.

He is also a world-class speaker on entrepreneurship, disruption, evolution vs. revolutions of markets, mobility and startups. Motivated to encourage the next generation of thinkers and innovators, he also leads an academic workshop entitled “How to Build a Startup”, aimed at undergraduate and graduate-level business students.

Levine is a BA graduate in Tel-Aviv University. Before attending University, he served in the Israeli army at special intelligence unit 8200. In his public activity he serves in the board of trustees at the Tel-Aviv University. He also mentors young entrepreneurs at the Zell Entrepreneurship program at IDC Herzliya.

The startups Levine is Co-Founder, Chairman or Board Member, with the agenda of ‘doing good and doing well’, include:

  • Co-Founder and Chairman at FeeX, which addresses the biggest secret in the world, $600B of financial fees that no-one knows they are paying. FeeX helps bring transparency and increase consumers’ retirement savings and long-term investment plans in hundreds of thousands of dollars.
  • Founder, Chairman and 1st Investor at FairFly, which addresses the biggest secret in the travel industry. What happened to airfare AFTER the booking? FairFly monitors the airfare of your own itinerary after you made a reservation and allows you to rebook the same flight or a better flight once price drops.
  • Co-Founder & Chairman at Refundit, an advanced fully digitized service with a simple mobile app that simplifies tax-free shopping and helps tourists obtain their VAT refund, saving them the time, paperwork, and lines at the airport.
  • Investor & Board Member at SeeTree, which responses to the particularly devastating challenges in permanent crop farming such as crop losses, epidemics etc. Seetree provides a unique intelligence platform for tree-farmers fusing AI/ML, IoT multi-sensorics data and other advanced technologies to enable them to manage their permanent crops best.
  • Co-Founder & Chairman at Fibo: All over the world, filling tax returns is either a lengthy and complex process or a costly one. Fibo has built an online service that minimizes the filing process into less than five minutes, through an online service that provides a fast and easy way for employees to complete their tax return.
  • Investor & Board Member at Dynamo: The 21st century epidemic – smartphones – in present in nearly every family with kids. The triangle of parents-kids-screen is a source of grief and many parents see the smartphone as ALL-EVIL. Dynamo tries to address that triangle by creating connection and value in this triangle.
  • Investor & Board Member at Kahun: Kahun re-invents the way medical professionals interact with evidence-based medical knowledge. Its technology enables the creation of a comprehensive medical knowledge graph and the generation of clinical insights using an inference algorithm engine.