Tavtech
TAVtech Ventures Global (commonly referred to as "TAVtech"), is a global nonprofit educational and entrepreneurship organization with a presence in Israel, India, and the United States. TAVtech was founded in 2015 by several college students from NYU Stern and Harvard. One of the donors to TAVtech is Onward Israel. While offering a technical education, it provides a unique platform for cross-cultural collaboration for creating social impact start-ups.
Programs
TAVtech Fellowship
Since 2015, TAVtech has been sending students to Israel over winter break to learn advanced computer science skills (such as data science, machine learning, and cybersecurity) and interact with the start-up economy of Israel. It started with 20 students in its first year (from Harvard and NYU) and has doubled ever since- it is on pace to send over 1,000 students in 2021. Some of the other schools represented on the Fellowship are: Brown, Cornell, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, MIT, and UC Berkeley.
Features of Program
- TAV Fellow Lecture Series — Several participants give lectures about areas they are experts in. Past lectures have been about: behavioral economics, high-frequency trading, and quantum mechanics.
- TAVhack — Week long social impact hackathon where teams pitch ideas to a panel of industry experts (Shark Tank style). Several startups have been created from the hackathon.
TAVtech India
Fellowship alumni Eytan Rubinstein, Karan Magu, and Phil Hayes founded an incubator-like platform in India where students from U.S. and Israeli universities collaborate with students from Indian universities (such as Indian Institutes of Technology) in creating ventures with a social impact focus. This is the only official platform that exists which facilitates venture building between Indian, American, and Israeli university students. Following an ingnition trip in 2017 which included 40 meetings across New Delhi, Bangalore, and Mumbai, the official launch is set for summer 2018.